Bastards of the Party was inspired by a book by Mike Davis called City of Quartz. This book helped to explain the rise of the Bloods/Crips and what circumstances existed in Los Angeles that had such gangs get created.
For your morning assignment before we finish the movie (we have about 20 minutes left so need to start around 8:40), read the following excerpt -
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African Americans' pursuit of equality and opportunity in Los Angeles has been shaped by at least three distinctive features of the city's history: its diverse racial composition, its dynamic economic growth, and its dispersive spatial arrangement.
First, Los Angeles's magnetic appeal to successive waves of Latin American, Asian, and European immigrants ensured that the black freedom struggle would develop in a strikingly multiracial context. Thanks to a growing body of rich scholarship by Kevin Leonard, Douglas Monroy, George Sánchez, Mark Wild, and others, we have a much clearer understanding of the contours of Los Angeles's diverse population, including its largest minority group, Mexicans.18 Yet the extent to which the multiracial character of the city affected opportunity for African Americans is generally less understood.
The effect of this racial diversity on blacks in Los Angeles has not been static; rather, it has changed through both time and space. Before World War II, most African Americans in Los Angeles lived among and interacted with Mexicans, Japanese, Italians, Jews, and the city's small Chinese population. This arrangement, coupled with the vast size and low population density of the city, mitigated the harshest social and psychological effects of racial segregation by diffusing the racial animosity usually reserved exclusively for blacks in other cities. Economically, however, the multiracial character of the city worked against blacks by generating increased competition for the menial labor and manufacturing jobs that would have gone to them easily in a city like Chicago or Detroit. After World War II, the vast influx of blacks and the changing social status of other racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles created a situation where black isolation, rather than the multiracial integration of the prewar era, became more common. As industrial employment opportunities for nonwhites expanded in the two decades after the war, African Americans increasingly understood Mexicans to be competitors for coveted jobs. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, the multiracial character of Los Angeles moved from being a qualified blessing to a qualified curse for blacks, particularly those in blue-collar occupations.
Second, while histories of the rust belt north emphasize the crucial role of deindustrialization and overall urban economic decline in perpetuating racial inequality, the story in Los Angeles is far more complicated. In striking contrast to the steady decline in manufacturing jobs that began in the 1950s in Chicago and Detroit, Los Angeles gained thousands of new manufacturing jobs through the 1970s, thanks in large part to the crucial aerospace industry. Like its northern counterparts, however, Los Angeles did lose many of its automobile, steel, and rubber tire plants during and shortly after the recession of the mid-1970s. Beginning during World War II, African Americans in Los Angeles had fought for complete integration into these jobs, and by the 1970s they had achieved a measure of success. More important, these jobs had created the economic foundations for a rising class of homeowning, blue-collar black workers. Thus, the swift disappearance of those jobs was traumatic for an important element of black Los Angeles.
But the decline in these older smokestack industries cannot alone sufficiently explain persistent racial inequality; in fact, even as Los Angeles was suffering this selective deindustrialization, it was also experiencing a dynamic wave of reindustrialization.19 Starting in the 1960s, a new wave of both very high-skill and very low-skill manufacturing industries, along with the expansion of retail and service industries, created thousands of new jobs in Los Angeles and Southern California in general, allowing both the city and the region to weather the recession better than most American cities. But, again, blacks found that they did not share equally in Southern California's continuing economic boom. That such inequality persisted despite the creation of new jobs suggests that just as African Americans were challenging and conquering relics of historic discrimination, new barriers emerged. Although race "declined in significance," to use William Julius Wilson's oft-quoted phrase, blackness continued to be a significant handicap long after legal segregation ended.20
Finally, the dispersive spatiality of Los Angeles greatly influenced the opportunities available to African Americans, sometimes concretely and other times perceptually. Before World War II, the vast geographic size and relatively low population density of Los Angeles distinguished it from other major American metropolises. This dispersion, combined with the proportionally small size of the black population, the rigid racial segregation of the workplace, and the city's heavy dependence on private rather than public transportation, created an atmosphere in which compulsory social interaction between blacks and whites was minimized, thereby allowing black residents in prewar Los Angeles to avert many of the racially degrading or violent encounters typical in other cities. For blacks in Los Angeles, and their friends and families who visited, this distinction was palpable and lent some credence to their glowing characterizations of opportunity in the city.
Paradoxically, however, it also allowed civic leaders and whites in general to completely ignore the rising cost of racial segregation. African Americans remained essentially out of sight and out of mind until World War II, when the sheer volume of black migration finally forced white Los Angeles to recognize the consequences of housing segregation in the overcrowded slums of Little Tokyo. But even as civic leaders grappled with the problems of segregation, many white residents and homeowners responded to the flood of black migrants by more aggressively defending racial segregation in both public and private spaces. Thus, whatever benefits blacks accrued from the city's special arrangement prior to World War II quickly disappeared in the postwar years.
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In your blogs, complete the following assignment:
Blog Title: City of Quartz summary
Assignment:
There are three reasons listed as to the why the disenfranchisment of African Americans occurred. Summarize each reason in two sentences per reason.
Reason 1 - Diverse racial composition
Reason 2 - Dynamic economic growth
Reason 3 - Dispersive spatial arrangement
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