Blacks in the City of Angels Dust
AUTOR(ES)
João H. Costa Vargas
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
1999
RESUMO
This study connects Los Angeles recent economic, social, and spatial transformations to the experiences of its black inner-city population. Since the 1980s, intensifying a process that can be traced back to at least the 1940s, L. A.s social classes and ethnic groups have been increasingly divided by wealth, income, and place of residence, making it one of the most unequal cities in the U.S. Among blacks, such divides have reached unprecedented magnitudes. Based on intensive fieldwork, I examine several social groups of black Americans in South Central Los Angeles: poor women, gangsters, Muslims, amateur jazz musicians, and grass-roots political organizations concerned with police abuse and with maintaining the 1992 gang truce established between Crips and Bloods. For each, I analyze their specific worldviews, sociabilities, gender and generational relations, and conceptions of race as perspectives and practices that reveal their positions in the historical structures of discrimination. Each groups experiences also elucidate aspects that bind and separate blacks of different cultural and social backgrounds. My main focus is on the seemingly insurmountable obstacles hampering meaningful explanations, effective strategies, and powerful social movements capable of appealing to the varied hearts and minds of blacks and other aggrieved minorities. Structural and systematic discrimination, embodied in a plethora of policies, institutional and everyday practices, are not the only adversaries racial minorities need to overcome in their plight for social justice. If there exist hopes for a better future amid the ghettos routinized chaos, these hopes must be understood vis-à-vis both historically actualized structural inequalities and persistent tensions emerging out of varied experiences and outlooks among those enduring the inner city. I thus locate, describe, and critically assess explanations, strategies, and social movements that have the potential for challenging current ideologies and policies, and transforming inner cities such as South Central Los Angeles. I examine normative possibilities that point to projects of social organization whose premises and practices present alternatives to the present state of affairs.
ASSUNTO(S)
antropologia ethnic groups social groups los angeles black americans black population
