Going west for fortune and adventure is a part of the great American story: manifest destiny, gold rushes, land rushes, religious rushes, great migrations, dust-bowl flights, speculation, visions, and dreams of fame and glory. Teddy Roosevelt said that California was “west of the West,” back when it was still a frontier for Americans on the ragged edge of the continent. Now, almost a tenth of all Americans live in California, the fourth largest economy in the world, and one quarter of all Californians live in Los Angeles County, which by itself is more populous than 41 other states. That’s where my family and I moved 12 years ago, pulled west like many millions of Americans for generations.
We needed to leave the Deep South, but it wasn’t necessarily the South’s fault altogether. My wife and I had been married for 13 years, and it felt like we’d been in a fighting stance against the world for most of that time. We loved our folks, even as we felt like dissidents in our own jobs, churches and neighborhoods. We had two young daughters, and we wanted to raise them outside the patriarchal confines we’d inherited and their straight and sticky expectations for them and us. We moved to ocean-blue California in the age of Obama, living by the Santa Monica Bay, thrilled to be in a county where people speak more than 180 native languages on the doorstop of the whole world. We had broken free and took deep breaths in L.A.
But the shine will come off any nickel. L.A. has the highest highs and lowest lows. It is fully American: full of dreamers, families, conspicuous consumption, gross wealth, crushing poverty, activists, sociopaths, hustlers, preachers, kind neighbors, tyrannical HOAs, faithful Christians, pagans, seekers, entitled brats and profoundly hard workers. The sun shines a little too brightly, making everything brilliant all at once then fading it out to bland anonymity. L.A. will celebrate the successful and its chosen eccentrics in a flash; it will ignore everyone else. Eighteen million people live in the greater Los Angeles area, so the L.A. metro really doesn’t care what you think about it or if you’d rather leave. But it appreciates your style. It is all so cool but will roll its eyes if you try too hard.
For my family, it was just what we needed in 2013, even as we started to see the cracks in the veneers. I’m a law professor, and I direct public-interest legal clinics that hope to teach law students to be standup people while providing access to justice—or at least aiming to—for people who need it. In that post, we could see all the way from bucolic Malibu to brutal Skid Row, and we worked with some of the most exposed people on the streets and the courts.
Hollywood dreams and Bel-Air glamor arise among crushing poverties, acute traumas, unjust policies and excruciating inequities. Even so, these all inspire some of the most creative, courageous communities and leaders working hard for justice, inclusion and solidarity. L.A. will dazzle and depress, confuse and provoke, exhaust and empower.
‘Know Your Neighbors’
While we lived in the Santa Monica Mountains with an ocean breeze through our windows open for 50 weeks a year, we’ve also had to run for our lives from wildfires and witness neighbors ending up displaced for years. This is the risk of living in a wild, spectacular place. We lived through Hurricane Katrina in Jackson and saw communities rise through devastation. In California, we lived through the Woolsey, Franklin and Palisades fires and responded to many more across the state. Storms and fires have become the prices we pay to live in the places we love, and our legal clinics accidentally became seasoned experts in legal responses to natural disasters.
Dr. Lucy Jones is a brilliant, decorated seismologist with a storied career at Cal Tech. She’s famous in L.A., one of the first, best and most trusted public voices after an earthquake. (She’s also an Episcopalian like we are and one of my most treasured celebrity sightings.) She is a true scientist, a global expert in natural disasters, and she offers this wisdom as her most important advice for surviving a natural disaster and its aftermath: “Know your neighbors.”
When I first heard her say this as a conference, it illuminated a nagging discomfort that had been haunting me in L.A. for a long time. For years, I taught a graduate class on law and society, literally using L.A. as our classroom. We’d take a long bus tour through many disparate neighborhoods, and I’d narrate the histories, policy decisions, economics and politics that shaped the places from their founding. We focused a lot on homelessness, its intractable causes and the policy attempts to address it for more than a century.
One student from Nebraska was lamenting the destitute in downtown L.A., puzzling why it persists in a place with so much public funding and aggressive policies. “They’re just so alone,” she said. This was part of my illumination: Southern California is truly glorious in so many ways, but individuals can fall fast and far and fall alone among the sprawling millions. This is just brutal, apathetic math. Despite massive funding, creative policies, and countless programs, it’s just too easy to be alone and isolated in the city.
But this is part of its appeal to those of us who leave small, old towns where our families have lived for generations. The Deep South won’t leave you alone. We couldn’t miss more than a couple of church services monthly without encountering a search party. Families take stock and keep score. Neighbors inquire. This may be from care and concern, but it can feel awfully like judgment and interrogation. Comfort blankets can suffocate, so some of us long for wide open spaces where no one knows us or cares.
I’m painting in broad strokes, and there are exceptions to every generality. But this cultural contrast may explain some of our social and political divisions across the country, and it may suggest some paths toward justice and reconciliation. The Deep South can be immensely generous and hospitable to individual neighbors even while sustaining brutally racist, and cruel public policies. Southern California builds better economies, infrastructures, and resources for the common good but neglects personal care among close neighbors. One place needs better policies; the other needs better proximity.
The Deep South is among the poorest regions in the nation, with some counties virtually underdeveloped by global standards, perpetuating shocking disparities in health care, mortality, housing, education and jobs. It often has retrograde public policies, unnecessary poverty and infuriating, stubborn refusals to invest in the public good. But it also has relatively few people living alone, outside on the streets without housing, in comparison to my home city.
My theory is that, despite the lack of resources and reactionary public policies, people know their neighbors. Families, churches, schools and folks are going to share shelter and bread as much as they can for the people they know, and almost everyone knows everyone else or knows someone who does. Poverty and homelessness remain, but with fewer people in the wild without a roof. It exacts vengeance in public, mercy in private, and the transitions are jarring.
In Southern California, by contrast, public policy and programs are better funded and more effective. The scale of the problems and solutions are so much bigger, so the infrastructures must be more capable. But it is missing the strong cultures (even stifling cultures) of neighborhoods that help keep people off the streets. I have witnessed California and Californians turn first to programs and policies to address problems, rather than starting with neighbors and neighborhoods. It reacts through government and industry at first blush, but it needs more love and connection among neighbors.
‘Culture of Neighborhood’
The Deep South and the Southland are merely American variations on American themes. Income inequality, wealth disparities, and cyclical poverty are as potent and lethal as ever across the land. Within all these rising economic crises is a resegregation of American life by forces and policies that are more polite than Jim Crow but often as effective.
In the 20th century, dominant powers in the South segregated itself by public and proud laws. Dominant powers in Los Angeles did it privately through racially discriminatory covenants in real-estate development and policing. Today’s segregation is more subtle, quietly rejecting any notion that we ought to repent for racism even after we confessed to it in the last century. Both the Deep South and Southern California are among the most racially diverse places in the nation, but both are reverting to form.
On their worst days, our two homes glare at each other to justify themselves. Some Deep Southerners will denounce godless California as a broken, liberal disaster of crime, debauchery and taxes, while missing its genuine beauty, wild diversity, immense creativity and dynamic optimism. Some Southern Californians will mock the South as backward, poor, racist and ignorant, while missing its genuine beauty, wild diversity, immense creativity, and dynamic optimism.
My great hope and faith is that the South could make vital strides toward justice and development with smart and generous public investment in fundamental goods like housing, health care and education. And Southern California could accelerate its sound policies and capital investments if it would cultivate a richer culture of neighborhood, hospitality and community care than does not depend on the government. America needs more love among its neighbors that will dignify every single person, and it needs to generate consistent, generous investments in the public good, in favor of the poor and disenfranchised.
Part of the American story may be going west, but another part of that story is coming home when the deep roots call us back. This summer, we moved back to the Deep South. Those daughters we raised in Los Angeles are in college in the South and New England, both brilliant and brave, ready for their own adventures. We will always be grateful for our season in California because of the women they’re becoming.
We love L.A., and we love the South. Now it is time for us to get back to the folks and fabrics that made us. We’ve missed the woods and rivers and the strong cultures, stories and songs that hold us up. We want to share life with our complicated, eccentric, vibrant and flawed neighbors, and we will advocate for better public policies, genuine integration, and richer investments in the common good. Beloved communities can only emerge where we imagine and create better ways in benevolent proximity with our neighbors.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
