Book Review: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila, uses the post World War II urban development of Los Angeles to illustrate larger racial hierarchies. In this White Flight era, fears of minority population growth and ultimate cultural influence in urban areas, drew white Americans into the suburbs. There, they chased values of “domesticity, class harmony, and racial and ethnic homogeneity, the brand of ‘suburban respectability” (24). Avila uses cultural structures to illustrate the impact of White Flight on the city’s development, which ultimately created rigid racial and cultural divisions between whites and nonwhites.

The first two chapters outline the initial attempts of LA’s elites to create an exclusively white city. They imagined a white haven, without vice or slums, that provided protection from the post-slavery migration of minorities that other cities experienced at the time. Through instituting a “racially biased set of policies that virtually prevented blacks and other nonwhites groups from attaining suburban home ownership,” Avila argues, elites managed to separate society into “vanilla suburbs” and “chocolate cities” (35). Although not the idyllic white paradise imagined in the beginning of LA’s development, it served as a solution that pacified White America’s fears of integration. In chapter 3, Avila argues that Hollywood furthered these notions through the Noir film genre that painted cities as a threat to suburban values in which the “boundaries between the races, sexes, and classes dissolved” 72.

In chapters four and five Avila analyzes White America’s creation of cultural institutions to serve its notions of suburban utopia. Avila argues that Disneyland is the quintessential embodiment these values. The park was a highly controlled and predictable place, completely tailored to Victorian ideals of purity, conformity and security:

Disneyland offered a privatized environment, intentionally shielded from the outside world and inundated with reassuring commercials for the corporations that manufactured the exclusive brand of community suburban Americans craved. (225)

Furthermore, the park’s physical placement in suburban Orange County separates this utopia from urban blight, making it an ideal escape of for white families. The Disneyland of the 1950’s and 60’s, Avila argues, was a place without conflict because there was no dissent and minorities served as marginal novelty characters or the help. The park’s assertion of traditional Victorian values, intentional separation, and failure to represent minorities in any substantive manner make it the tangible incarnation of White Flight.

The strongest aspect of Avila’s argument is the novelty of his use of pop culture. Avila reaches beyond traditional definitions by using community legal structures, urban development and highway systems as representations of popular culture. However, some of his positions are overreaching, which weakens his overall argument. This is particularly true in his analysis of Hollywood’s creation of space invasion films. The connection between the success of this genre and greater patterns of white flight is weak and does not contribute to the larger themes of the book. Overall, however, the novelty of Avila’s approach and his use of Los Angeles as a microcosm make for a strong and interesting argument.