Blogging Social Difference Week 9: Response to Danielle Reppen's Blog Post

Outline of Inglewood, CA

This week I wanted to respond to Danielle Reppen's post on Inglewood and Brentwood, specifically the part about Inglewood. I found her comments on Inglewood very interesting! Especially where she showed the billboard for gambling, which of course would be unseen in richer, majority-white neighborhoods. I decided to look into the demographics of Inglewood in detail.

Based on data from the LA Times’ Mapping LA project, I found that Inglewood is approximately 46.4% Black. At first thought, it would seem integrated, yet looking at it by census tract, it appears Inglewood is actually segregated by neighborhood. There are some census tracts that are about 85%-90% Black and some with only 5% Black, all within the same small city of Inglewood.

The white population is at 4%, and remains consistently at this statistic throughout the all census tracts in Inglewood. There is an explanation for this too, and I will expand later in the blog post/comment.

In addition to its black and white population, Inglewood is 46% Hispanic. Furthermore, those census tracts that are 5% black are also 90% Hispanic. The neighborhoods that are more mixed follow a gradient from a majority Hispanic to a majority black. It seems as though, based on this analysis, that there is Hispanic/black segregation, and a clear color line.

The color line. Hispanic is yellow and black is represented by blue. The darker shades are above 80%. The gradient between majority/minority is clear.

Inglewood didn’t always look like this. In fact, Inglewood used to be one of the whitest neighborhoods in the US. It was so white that it was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20’s. Signs saying ‘Caucasian-only” were posted in Inglewood and racial covenants, discussed in Massey and Denton, kept it that way. Interestingly enough, an incident involving a suspected bootlegger, the Klan and Inglewood police made national headlines.Inglewood continued to have a majority population through the 60’s, but by 1980 it was 20% and kept dropping in half in continuing censuses until the year 2000 when it reached 3% (link). This is due to the phenomenon of white flight, explicitly referenced in an obituary for Inglewood’s first black mayor. Massey and Denton state that “White prejudice is such when black entry into a neighborhoods is achieved, that area becomes unattractive and whites begin departing at an accelerating.” This is how the demographics in Inglewood shifted.

Looking at Inglewood, I also found it has a budding arts district. These tend to be indicators of gentrification. Whether or not that happens is speculation, but this would raise rent prices and drive out the mostly lower/lower-middle class population as it did in Echo Park and as is currently happening in Highland Park. This is a possible future demographic shift for a city that has seen a few.

Theoreticals aside, Inglewood today is a city of equal black/hispanic mix but it is also one with a clear color line. Yet it is interesting that a minority-majority city was once a hotbed of racist ideology. The radicalism faded, yet fear and racism led the whites to flee Inglewood and the white population divided with each census. Though Danielle stated that this did not seem to be a low income area, Inglewood is still a ghetto. A ghetto is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.” Today’s demographics of Inglewood were created by the social structure of racism.