The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930

Graaf, Lawrence B. de

doi:10.2307/3637655

Cited by 72 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…As whites moved outward, Chicanos, African Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans and the remnant Indian population were relegated to San Pedro, Watts, and the central city (including downtown and the eastside) (Anderson 1996:342-46;Horne 1995:27;Sanchez 1993;Romo 1983;Warren 1986Warren -1987. Beginning in the 1920s, residential segregation was violently enforced (Massey and Denton 1993;De Graff 1970). As a result, for thousands of "Mexicans, Japanese, and Negroes who lived amidst commerce and industry in the small ghettos of central Los Angeles and San Pedro [,] there were a million white Americans who resided in the suburbs sprawling north to Hollywood, east to Pasadena, south to Long Beach, and west to Santa Monica" (Fogelson 1993:147).…”

Section: The Historical Geography Of White Privilege and Environmentamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Pulido¹

2017

Environment

184

255

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Geographic studies of environmental racism have focused on the spatial relationships between environmental hazards and community demographics in order to determine if inequity exists. Conspicuously absent within this literature, however, is any substantive discussion of racism. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming in two ways. I first investigate how racism is understood and expressed in the literature. I argue that although racism is rarely explicitly discussed, a normative conceptualization of racism informs the research. Not only is this prevailing conception overly narrow and restrictive, it also denies the spatiality of racism. Consequently, my second goal is to demonstrate how various forms of racism contribute to environmental racism. In addition to conventional understandings of racism, I emphasize white privilege, a highly structural and spatial form of racism. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I examine how whites have secured relatively cleaner environments by moving away from older industrial cores via suburbanization. I suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege and have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism. Thus, in addition to interpreting racism as discriminatory facility siting and malicious intent, I also examine a less conscious but hegemonic form of racism, white privilege. Such an approach not only allows us to appreciate the range of racisms that shape the urban landscape, but also illuminates the functional relationships between places-in particular between industrial zones and residential suburbs, and how their development reflects and reproduces a particular racist formation.

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Section: The Historical Geography Of White Privilege and Environmentamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Pulido¹

2017

Environment

184

255

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show abstract

“…Both blacks and Latinos are disproportionately exposed, but for somewhat different reasons. As the most segregated population, black Angelenos were confined to south Los Angeles beginning in the 1920s (De Graff, 1970). While many blacks have left, south Los Angeles is still heavily black (Allen and Turner, 1997, 62), and contains portions of an old industrial corridor.…”

Section: Residential and Industrial Expansion In The World War II Eramentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beginning in the 1920s, residential segregation was violently enforced (De Graff, 1970;Massey and Denton, 1993). As a result, for thousands of Mexicans, Japanese, and Negroes who lived amidst commerce and industry in the small ghettos of central Los Angeles and San Pedro{,} there were a million white Americans who resided in the suburbs sprawling north to Hollywood, east to Pasadena, south to Long Beach, and west to Santa Monica (Fogelson, 1993, 147).…”

Section: The Historical Geography Of White Privilege and Environmentamentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Pulido

2000

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

1,130

329

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Geographic studies of environmental racism have focused on the spatial relationships between environmental hazards and community demographics in order to determine if inequity exists. Conspicuously absent within this literature, however, is any substantive discussion of racism. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming in two ways. I first investigate how racism is understood and expressed in the literature. I argue that although racism is rarely explicitly discussed, a normative conceptualization of racism informs the research. Not only is this prevailing conception overly narrow and restrictive, it also denies the spatiality of racism. Consequently, my second goal is to demonstrate how various forms of racism contribute to environmental racism. In addition to conventional understandings of racism, I emphasize white privilege, a highly structural and spatial form of racism. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I examine how whites have secured relatively cleaner environments by moving away from older industrial cores via suburbanization. I suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege and have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism. Thus, in addition to interpreting racism as discriminatory facility siting and malicious intent, I also examine a less conscious but hegemonic form of racism, white privilege. Such an approach not only allows us to appreciate the range of racisms that shape the urban landscape, but also illuminates the functional relationships between places—in particular between industrial zones and residential suburbs, and how their development reflects and reproduces a particular racist formation.

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“…The evolution of the civil rights campaign into the struggle for black identity and black power, the growing use of the university as a platform for resistance to federal policies in both domestic and foreign affairs and subsequently, an increasing pressure for recognition of the integrity of minority cultures in America, all served to force a refocusing of historical inquiry away from what is now labeled mainstream history to the many histories of America's ordinary people. It should not be surprising, therefore, that much of the urban history of the last decade has a decidely black focus (Osofky, 1966;Rudwick, 1972;Waskow, 1966;Spear, 1967;Tuttle, 1970;Degraaf, 1970;Pleck, 1972). Although it has proved a lesser theme, the vissitudes of the federal government's urban renewal program fostered research into the physical plants of American cities as well as the response of planners and managers to changes in the urban [224] scene (Warner, 1962;Lubove, 1967b;Reps, 1965;Scott, 1969;Condit, 1973Condit, , 1974.…”

Section: Searching For a Family Treementioning

confidence: 97%

Urban History

Sharpless¹,

Warner

1977

American Behavioral Scientist

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Despite its intermittent reliance on social-science terminology and the increasingly frequent use of statistical materials in the course of its narratives, the new urban history is only incidentally social scientific in its content. Moreover, over the past 20 years the preponderance of the American urban history literature has not been concerned with urbanresearch questions at all. To be sure, what we generally call urban history deals with events which took place in cities, but these events may or may not have taken place in other cities or, for that matter, in rural America. This lack of a consistent focus is all the more intriguing given the singular introspective character of the field. No subdiscipline has been more self-conscious of its promise, its progress, and its ommissions. This essay is only the most recent (surely not last) in a long line of prolegomena (Schlesinger

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The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930

Cited by 72 publications

References 4 publications

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Urban History

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