Remaking Black LA: Flourishing in the Anti-Black Metropolis

My dissertation examines how Black people across the class spectrum experience and enable Black well-being in Los Angeles County. Black Los Angeles has experienced underinvestment, disinvestment, deindustrialization, an influx of Latinx residents, and high levels of crime, violence, over-policing, unemployment, incarceration, and poverty. Over the last 40 years, the Black population in Los Angeles County has decreased by more than 200,000 people. Yet, despite anti-Blackness and displacement, Black people flourish and make LA a more livable space. In my dissertation, I explain how Black people challenge the bleak racial future by prefiguring individual well-being through Black placemaking and flourishing activities at the macro- and meso-levels (e.g., community development and businesses). I conceptualize flourishing as a dynamic process with activities and outcomes. I argue flourishing activities are agentic and creative practices that make geographies and lives rewarding, satisfying, and dignified. Explicating flourishing activities helps us to answer the call of The United States government and large organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization for a deeper understanding of human flourishing and strategies to create, maintain, and increase it.

Immersing myself in Los Angeles County for over two years, I conducted an ethnography of Destination Crenshaw (a $100 million reparative development project and open-air museum), engaged in participant observations at various businesses throughout the county, conducted a survey, and interviewed residents, workers, city employees, politicians, and business owners. The Institute for Humane Studies, The Haynes Foundation, The Russell Sage Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the USC Equity Research Institute have supported my dissertation research.