Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

Eric Avila’s book, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight addresses the relations between whites and nonwhites in Los Angeles. He states that popular culture contains “diverse and often contradictory meanings” (xiii). Avila approaches this view and opens a new view of Los Angeles. His argument critically looks at the “whiteness” of the United States and its “varied significance to diverse peoples” (xiii) in post World War II culture. Avila studies popular culture and media as well as space and its impact upon urban and suburban areas.

Avila opens his discussion with accounts of entertainment centers, such as amusement and baseball parks, closing or moving because of an increase in the African American population. An example of this behavior is drawn from the Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, commonly known as “White City.” This idea was transferred to Los Angeles where it was put into reality. The racial and sexual hierarchy was obvious in the ideal white nuclear family. Today, Los Angeles is home to several races, but it once was a “southwestern outpost of white supremacy” (20), which viewed the other races as cheap, invisible labor. The impact of space also plays a role in a city made up of suburbs, once viewed as a way to distance yourself from African Americans. A California State Railroad Commission survey calculated that about eighty-five percent of the population of Los Angeles traveled to work in cars.

Avila also studies the role of film in white supremacy. Chapter 3 specifically focuses on the late-1940s vision of “black city.” Hollywood directors chose interracial neighborhoods for the settings of the film noir, for a look of authenticity of urban decline. Avila specifically mentions Sunset Boulevard and its racial signifiers. The main character’s dark tone and exotic behavior place her as “other” and is contrasted with the angelic and light toned screenwriter. There were also reoccurring images of once-popular amusement parks in the films. To contrast the declines, Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955 in Orange County. This completely suburban setting “conformed to popular idealizations of suburban respectability in the age of white flight” (107).

Drastic changes were made to urban Los Angeles that affected various races in the city. One was the construction of Dodger Stadium. Although the team was racially integrated, the stadium itself was responsible for the decline of a “working-class Chicano community that became implicated within a noir vision of Los Angeles” (146). The stadium “facilitated the suburbanization of the city center” (146). Another was the construction of freeways, which were built “in coordination with urban renewal plans” (185). The inner city communities furthered the vision of a noir city. Avila states “the freeway mediated a new view of the metropolis, one that suited the very kind of suburban idealizations that surfaced in places like Disneyland and Dodger Stadium” (186).

Through a critical view of Los Angeles, Avila points out examples of white superiority in the city, forcing you to look at Los Angeles in a new way. Through film, important landmarks and freeways, “whiteness” is portrayed through urban and suburban.