Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista

Wearing the Shirt*

Wearing the Shirt September 2006 My neighbor is selling his house. I’m taking the news of his selling hard, with a low flame of panic and a sense of loss that’s settling in too early, like old age. This goes well beyond the loss of a friend I had just begun to make on my morning rounds with the dog. This is not about me. Inglewood needs him. Shelton is young, in his thirties. He is black, like the majority of residents here in this city-­ conceived-­ as-­ suburb that borders both hard-­ luck South Central and the beachy, quintessentially California enclaves of South Bay. Shelton and his wife moved to Inglewood less than two years ago; their block is long and lovely, the one I never tire of walking. It’s gently uphill from my own block in an area of Inglewood called Century Heights, which is one those L.A. real-­ estate monikers that, in this case, makes sense. Century Heights has many things real-­ estate agents eagerly describe as “charming”: sculpted lawns that occasionally burst into bonsai or tropical themes, homey 1950s architecture, ample backyards. It’s the essence of civility and middle-­ class pride of ownership that has prevailed in Inglewood for decades, ever since its inception in the early 1900s as a bedroom community strictly for whites; it retained that exclusiveness later when it became a residential outpost for the aerospace industry that boomed in the South Bay after World War II. When the racial convenants dissolved in the late ’40s, white flight steadily followed, but the blacks who moved in kept the idyllic look of Inglewood going, to prove to that they had inherited something wonderful worth keeping rather than something tainted that had to be given up. They were half successful. Century Heights has endured, but its endurance now looks like something of a paradox. Over the years, Inglewood schools have deteriorated. Commercial development is spotty and mostly uninspired ; gang activity has grown. It is these elements, not Shelton devoutly watering his lawn every day, that frame Inglewood for the rest of the world, 178 Stomping Grounds and that have framed it for some time. Century Heights has suffered from the general downward drift of black America into a vexing stagnation that encroaches upon our middle class and its expectations for modest but endless improvements. The fact is, the prevailing black reality does not sit well in any kind of “heights,” and Shelton and his wife finally decided it was sitting too close for comfort. On his block, along with the manicured lawns, he said he routinely saw young black men rolling up in trucks. Sometimes they sat idling in the middle of the street, playing music or hanging out. They did nothing wrong, he said. Nothing illegal. They were cooperative, even polite, parked their trucks properly on the curb when asked. Most of them seemed to have jobs. But Shelton couldn’t help but conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that these consistent congregations of black men meant nothing good or promising or stabilizing for our neighborhood, or for our people. He and his wife were worried about not what it meant, but what it could mean. Shelton knew better than most; he’d grown up in South Central, like me, in a much more precarious part of town than Century Heights. He confessed that these guys themselves didn’t threaten him nearly as much as they collectively threatened an expectation of blessed predictability and a black social order finally free from the worry of gangs, bad schools, all of it. Driving home at night, he wanted to turn the comer onto his street and not tense up over what he might find, not rage against some blemish that, in the middle of Century Heights’ singular loveliness, looked uglier and more cancerous than it probably was. No, he couldn’t take that chance. Too, he was sick of his own paranoia and wanted to be rid of it, to not live it anymore: he wanted to consider himself and his fellow lawn-­ waterers and dog-­ walkers as the controlling force in the neighborhood, not fear. But he says he’s not there yet—we’re not there yet—and he can’t wait to be. So he’s moving. He says it’ll be somewhere between Inglewood and the San Fernando Valley. I tell him that sounds awfully pricey; the always-­ crazed L.A. housing market has reached a fever pitch, and houses...