Why is Orange County (and Southern California in general) so segregated?

I grew up there, in the shade of the palm trees.  The overwhelming population of Caucasian kids would often be a joke thrown around in the halls between classes.  Well we didn’t actually have halls per se; it’s sunny 300 days a year so we just sort of had buildings with paths between them.  I played soccer in high school, and since my high school was mostly white, the soccer team was mostly white, which didn’t stand out too much, until we played teams that were mostly Hispanic.

Driving around Orange County offers a similar experience.  In my days I have done quite a bit of driving through the county and the divides between Hispanic neighborhoods, white neighborhoods, and Asian neighborhoods was (and still is) often quite stark.  A block passes by inconspicuously enough and then all of a sudden the signs are in Spanish and there are places to buy horchata.    It’s all very strange.

So how has this happened?  Allow me to digress and say that while my high school team was mostly white, my club team was mostly Hispanic. From my experiences here I’ll offer up an optimistic answer: because it’s easier.  For everyone.  As a Mexican immigrant it is easier to move into a neighborhood that speaks Spanish, likewise for a Vietnamese immigrant or a Korean immigrant.  It is no secret that Orange County is the one overwhelmingly conservative part of California.  So not only is it easier for the people immigrating, but it is also easier for the current residents who may have an issue with immigration.  There is of course a more sinister explanation, that the status quo is forced into becoming equilibrium by a hand that sees color all too clearly.  These are delicate topics to move into and I think they exceed the reach of my meager abilities and so I think I will stop here and move on to a peculiar phenomenon in Los Angeles.

Racial lines once drawn are difficult to pick up but it does happen.  In the 90’s Compton, California, in South Central Los Angeles, gained a reputation for spawning many of the popular hip-hop groups of the day.  N.W.A., Dre, Snoop Dogg all call Compton their birthplace.  And in the 90’s it certainly was mostly African-American  (53%) but now, according to the 2010 census, it is only 33% black.  In 1990 it was 42% Hispanic as opposed to 65% now.  So why the switch?  West Hollywood’s lawns.  The affluence of western Los Angeles (Malibu, Beverly Hills) creates a demand for construction and gardening, two occupations often taken by Hispanic immigrants.  South Central is closer to Malibu than east LA so to make the commute shorter many Hispanic immigrants moved there and in so doing displaced a large portion of the African-American community.

Now on to the city of Long Beach, in the 90’s it was a boiling pot for racial tension and often cited as one of the most diverse cities in the nation.  Putting segregation aside for a moment, what makes it so diverse?  A simple explanation could be that it’s an industrial city with an industrial economy set in the middle of an area that bases most of its economy on the service industry.  It is the biggest shipping port in Southern California.  Since it is such a hub of industrial activity, there is a lot of opportunity for work for immigrants, and so immigrants flock.  What made it so segregated?  A much bigger question, that again I think I’ll leave open-ended.

These are simpler (the simplest, crazy oversimplified) cases of how the potential for these lines can get created.  What isn’t as obvious is how and why they get drawn.  More importantly it doesn’t explain how segregation has lead to tension in the past, but perhaps it can point to solutions in the future.

As the main attractions of Spring Term approach I have found myself suddenly shifting my attention from schoolwork to other things, most poignantly displayed by the scene set in the CMC on Saturday morning: Barcelona vs Atletico Madrid, the last game of La Liga, one that would decide the title (alas the blaugrana failed to get the win they needed) is on and my friends and I decide that the computers in the CMC will be the best place to watch.  It ended with a raucous celebration of Aaron Ramsey’s overtime goal to propel Arsenal to the FA Cup trophy over Hull City.

A little something to introduce a discussion about the economics of choosing a FIFA team.  No one wants to play with their local MLS team, and no one wants to play with the team they support every time, and so the process of choosing one becomes an elaborate ordeal.  And what about the casual FIFA player that doesn’t really follow European football?  I talked to Avery Rux, a former member of Carleton’s tennis team, about his infatuation with the German club Borussia Dortmund.  “[On why he plays with Dortmund] Mario Gotze man, is the next best player in the world.”  In the soccer video game FIFA, Borussia Dortmund is quite good but they aren’t too good (likewise with Gotze).  This is a problem I have with being a Barcelona fan: that every time I win with them when I play FIFA, people assert that the only reason for my victory was because I was playing with the best team in the game (and something about Xavi being overrated).

So let’s consider us as producers  in the very competitive market where we fight for wins and where the team we pick  is a raw good that we’ll have to mold.  I’ll assert that our demand for Borussia Dortmund is high because they are the best team of their rank (four and a half stars).  Usually when coming up with a match up, teams will be chosen with the same rank, and so while people complain about me playing with Barcelona, the difference in ability between Barca and another five star team like say Chelsea, is equatable to the difference in ability of Borussia Dortmund and Tottenham.  Even though this is true, the phrase “Dortmund is too good it’s not fair,” is never said.  And so Mr. Rux, in choosing Dortmund, is being quite clever, in that he is capping his competitors ability to produce at the same time as he maximizes his ability to produce.  It’s something akin towards putting millions of dollars into R&D for clean energy innovations in your company and then lobbying Washington to force your competitors to do the same after you’ve already figured everything out.  An advantage.

I don’t think that has much to do with what we are learning but my mind is on the Champion’s League this weekend (anyone but Real is my new motto).

http://www.policymic.com/articles/79143/the-economics-of-the-oscars-in-two-quick-and-easy-charts

The Oscars have a storied history of incest and kickbacks, though most of it is covered by the luxury of the red carpet and the inconceivable fantasy of the after party.  The “Oscar Bump” as it is called in this article has long been the end game of many a production companies efforts, so much so that it has turned the Oscar season into a campaign.  Most notoriously known for this pursuit is the movie Shakespeare in Love and its producers the Weinstein Brothers.  The 1998 Oscars, celebrating the movies of 1997, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is nominated and everyone thinks that surely it will take home the prize.  Saving Private Ryan however, did not have Bob and Harvey Weinstein behind its Oscar campaign, and, quite significantly it was competing with another war movie, The Thin Red Line (but that is another story).

The Weinstein Brothers were at the time working for Miramax Films at the time, a Disney-owned company; in 2005 they would eventually defect to form their own company.  They saw the possibility for a split vote.   The people in the academy that liked war movies would have a difficult time deciding, so much so that a large percentage that would’ve voted for Saving Private Ryan in any other year voted for Terrence Mallick’s more cerebral take on war.  It is said that the reason why Shakespeare in Love won the prize is because of a split vote and because of the fact that everyone in the Academy saw it.  It was impossible to be a member and not see it.  Miramax sent free copies out to everyone that would take it, realizing that this was an investment to help secure a nomination.  They had a wide release date of January 8th, 1998, meaning that it was among the movies still in theaters at the time of actual voting.  Saving Private Ryan on the other hand was a summer release and already in the back of voters’ minds.  And so, come time the reveal, everyone was shocked; everyone but the Weinstein Brothers.  Oscar campaigning has become essential to anyone movie with Best Picture aspirations.  This last year there wasn’t a single best picture nominee that came out before October.  Most production companies send baskets to the members of the Academy.  12 Years a Slave took home the big prize and it was released in November.

A few years ago the Academy increased the amount of possible Best Picture nominations from 5 to 10 to a hushed uproar.  The general question was why?  The real question however should be why not.  If the Academy is considered to ‘produce’ nominations (nominations are certainly worth quite a bit of money) then their marginal cost of production for those 5 more nominations is almost 0, while their marginal revenue is certainly not.  But they do not make money off of the movies, yes?  In thinking that one would fail to remember that the Academy (and it’s board) is comprised of Hollywood’s biggest and most powerful figures.  Last year the indie box office smash Philomena rode its Oscar nomination to a 100,000,000 dollar worldwide gross on a 12,000,000 dollar budget.  Though it premiered at film festivals in the early spring of 2013 its wide release came in November.  Distribution was handled by none other than the inimitable Weinstein Company.  To put hat kind of success into perspective The Avengers made upwards of 1 billion dollars worldwide, but they did it on a 200 million dollar budget.

The history of the Academy Awards is full of indie success stories like Philomena, but there are also movies that market themselves as Oscar bait but go unbitten.  Most famous of these is the Daniel Day Lewis starrer Nine.  A musical from the Director of 2002’s Oscar-sweeping Chicago that failed to make back it’s 80 million dollar budget despite 4 nominations (none of those 4 were in the big categories).  The Weinstein’s don’t get it every time.  Really it is a miracle they managed to secure 4 nominations after releasing a movie that got critically panned from all sides.

Its shark-infested waters out there on the red carpet, akin almost to the sort of speculation that happens on Wall Street.  This is the surface, of course, but I am out of time.