Final Blog Post

Coming into this class I had a very negative and monolithic perception of Los Angeles. Growing up in San Francisco as a Giants fan I was taught to hate the Dodgers (and also Los Angeles). I considered San Francisco to be more cultured, cosmopolitan, socially conscious, and hip in its aesthetic. As for Los Angeles, I associated the region with extreme excess, image-consciousness, materialism, and consumerism. Shows like Entourage and the OC encouraged this characterization (not that I watched them all too often!). I never really thought about how cultural representations of Los Angeles privileged a very narrow—often a white—subjectivity. Nor did I fully grasp the diversity of experiences contained within LA, especially the experiences of individuals and communities that are either negated or distorted in popular images and media.

Through this class my old issues with Los Angeles have given way to a new set of issues (and also some new appreciations). I am no longer merely repulsed by the superficiality of Los Angeles’ popular culture, so much as I am concerned with the condition of places within Los Angeles that are far less glamorous and superficial. I no longer spend my time thinking about the cars that people buy in Beverly Hills or in Orange County, because I realize that these examples of excess materialism never exist in isolation; they are part and parcel of a deep inequality that has been racialized and spatially entrenched through historical processes. LA’s enclaves of materialism reinforce LA’s enclaves of environmental degradation and immiseration.

Through this course I have come to understand the significance of racial formation; indeed the relationship between race and class is more concrete and graspable now. Los Angeles’ geographic and material inequality cannot be understood without grappling with the centrality of racial formation. Surbanization and decentralized urban expansion during the postwar period altered peoples’ social consciousness and sense of racial identity. The process by which certain people became white, and others racialized, took place alongside the regidification of materially unequal spaces.

Alongside my growing consciousness of Los Angeles’ inequalities, I have also come to appreciate the unique and powerful forms of activism and resistance that this region has harbored. More specifically, the ascendance of multiracial and multiethnic organizations around environmental justice—such as the Bus Riders Union and the South Central Farm—is encouraging because it addresses the reality of unequal geographies (spaces, regions, neighborhoods, that have been discriminated against, neglected, or exploited). Identity politics in Los Angeles has in some ways been reinforced by, and in other ways overcome by, the centrality of space. More so than any other factor, it seems opportunity in Los Angeles is circumscribed by where one lives or grows up (though race, class and gender are spatialized). Given that injustice in LA operates in very spatialized ways, I believe that environmental justice has emerged as the most successful form of resistance; it foregrounds geography and space to unite people in the fight for justice.