My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White

7. The Valley Revisited, via Santa Monica

90 The Valley Revisited, via Santa Monica it’s an interesting environment for contemplation, the coach-class cabin of a passenger jet. This human stew-pot. South Florida is a uniquely diverse region, and it’s impossible for me (perhaps on account of my itinerary ) not to reflect upon the diversity on ample display in these cramped quarters. On the first leg of the trip, I sit beside a distinguished black couple in their sixties or so. The man I presume to be the husband of the woman beside him wears a starched oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled to reveal a gleaming metal watch. His hair at some point seems to have nearly completed its transition from salt and pepper to salt. A younger black woman sits just in front of me, sporting a painstakingly lacquered do; small, disciplined waves lap up at the air like so many tongues. For pretty much the entire trip, she carries on a spirited conversation with the elderly white woman beside her. Across the aisle, a hulking white man with a down-home dialect and buzz cut opens a glossy magazine to a page featuring various hunting rifles. Behind him, one row back, a young black man wearing a designer sweat suit bobs his head to whatever’s playing on his iPod and fiddles with what appears to be a high-end PDA, while, behind him, two Latinos (a young woman and an older man) carry on a loud conversation in Spanish. I’m under no illusion that this brief moment of forced integration betrays an actualized, amicable integration in South Florida. On the whole, our traffic with one another will dissipate dramatically once we return to our South Florida neighborhoods and workplaces. All the same, The Valley Revisited, via Santa Monica • 91 the dis-integration of South Florida has never seemed as dramatic to me as that of Los Angeles. That I teach at an increasingly diverse state university may account, in part, for this impression. Diverse Issues in Higher Education ranked FAU ninth nationally in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to African Americans in 2007, and US News & World Report recently ranked FAU twenty-seventh nationally in overall student-body diversity.1 But the starkly contrastive geographies of South Florida and Los Angeles, I suspect, influence relations between races in these locales. Greater Los Angeles, its basin and beyond, is capacious, sprawling, divided here and there by mountains and valleys and canyons. The Southern California topography flaunts its bursting personality as we make our descent. In South Florida, by contrast, we all occupy more or less the same meager swatch of real estate, stranded as we are on a coastal ridge at the easternmost toe-tip of the state, hemmed in by the uninhabitable Everglades to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, with absolutely no topography to shield one community from the other. The very reason that gated communities proliferate in South Florida, I suspect, is that we lack not only the sheer acreage of Greater L.A., but also the natural, geological barriers that might be of use. Once we step outside of our homes, we have little choice but to put up with one another. “Well, folks, it’s another miserable day in Los Angeles,” our L.A.-based pilot informs us facetiously over the loudspeaker. “Clear, sunny skies, and a temperature of just about 78 degrees.” I smile, reflexively. It’s always struck me as an amusing curiosity, the way Angelenos boast of their weather, as if it’s all part of some organized public relations campaign. (By contrast , all the people I’ve met from Seattle tend to overplay the inclemency of their region, the incessant precipitation, perhaps to keep their liveable city from being overrun by L.A. transplants.) The much-touted Southern California climate, I’ve come to believe, represents a crucial element of the L.A. ethos. They put up with a lot, Angelenos: exorbitant real estate prices, earthquakes, mud slides, raging wildfires that send homeowners scurrying atop their cedar-shingle roofs with garden hoses, bumper-to-bumper traffic at any given hour on the complex web of cruelly named “freeways.” It seems churlish to deprive them their energetic claim to the best weather in the country. All the same, I grew up in L.A., so I know what the weather 92 • My Los Angeles in Black...