On Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

This is a good monograph that functions as an intersection between three major themes: racial formation, urbanization/suburbanization, and the development of popular culture. Critical to Avila’s analysis is the notion that postwar Americans produced a dichotomy that linked urban spaces to black people (“chocolate cities”) and suburban spaces to white people (“vanilla suburbs”).

In doing so, Avila looks at the production of a few different cultural artifacts that reify the idea that white = “good, new, glitzy, clean, safe” and black = “bad, old, degraded, dirty, dangerous.” These include the emergence of film noir (which dealt with corrupt cities), the construction of Disneyland (which framed “Main Street USA,” which was coded white, as a golden age before the collapse of urban institutions), the migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles, and the development of California’s freeway system (which permitted suburbanite, automobile mobility at the expense of traditional forms of urban transport like the streetcar). I don’t know that I understood the bits about the Dodgers—it seems that there are historical legacies there which Angelinos might be more familiar with, but the rest was really solid.

Avila is right when he says that “cultural history is the history of stories that people tell about themselves and their world.” That shows itself really well here, while Avila disentangles the implications within those stories. While I would have liked to see a bit more urban history here, that isn’t what Avila is trying to do, and I fully respect that.