“Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities” (New York University Press, 2010)

What’s it like to be black and living in Los Angeles? Mainstream media professes to know, according to Darnell Hunt, sociology professor and director of the Ralph G. Bunche Center for African American Studies. Take the TV "reality" show “Baldwin Hills,” for example. The Black Entertainment Television show purports to chronicle “the everyday lives of a group of African-American teens from that "very real and very exclusive enclave” in L.A., as well as how these teens “interconnect with the young hard-working strivers from South Central Los Angeles just a few miles, and a few degrees of separation away.”

 

But the community of Baldwin Hills has a unsavory past that the show’s producers manage to sidestep, Hunt points out in his introduction to “Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities.” The community, which happens to be where Hunt and his wife bought their first home in 1994, was created in the 1940s for whites-only. The original deed to the Hunts' home, in fact, put into writing the prohibition that it never be “sold, conveyed, leased or rented to any person not of the white or Caucasian race.” On top of that, the “South Central Los Angeles” of the TV show is not and has never been an actual community but, rather, was invented by storytellers as a place to plant stereotypes about African Americans.

 

Obfuscations like these harm all of us, Hunt said. These images “not only shape how other people around the nation have come to view Los Angeles and the people who live there,” said Hunt, “but it’s also shaped the views the people who live there have about their own communities.”

 

“Black Los Angeles” strives to portray the truth about the history and contemporary life of African Americans in L.A. The book is the culmination of a wide-ranging inquiry that began eight years ago when Hunt took the helm of the Bunche Center, and he and other scholars found a “dearth of scholarship about the big-picture questions confronting Black Los Angeles.” To correct this, he recalled, “We decided to get out of the Ivory Tower and connect … with people in the community.”

 

The book, co-edited by Hunt and Bunche Center Assistant Director Ana-Christina Ramón, brings together 16 chapters by the editors and 23 other scholars. Chapter topics covers a wide expanse, including the shifting geography of black communities since the city’s 1781 founding; the lure of rap and hip-hop celebrity for young black men; the challenges of street gangs and inequitable incarceration rates; and the role of women leaders like California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass in the evolution of black political action.

 

Hunt authored two chapters: a chronicling of the rise and fall of King Drew Medical Center and a reflection on the black enrollment crisis at UCLA that emerged in 2006 and its connection to woeful conditions in L.A.’s K-12 public schools.

 

“By bringing all of these studies together, we begin to see patterns, opportunities and missed opportunities for progressive change,” Hunt said. “The thing that most pleases me about the book is that I believe that the African American community in L.A. will be able to use it to empower itself by learning from the lessons that are recounted.”

 

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Other faculty authors who will be participating in the Festival of Books include: