We began publishing essays on LAist from crowdsourced community contributors and LAist staffers, as part of Race In LA in June 2020. We've been humbled by the range of lived experiences and backgrounds that make Los Angeles so vibrant. Yet, within all that diversity there are shared stories of anger, pain, hurt and sadness resulting from overt and more subtle racism.
Nevertheless, there have also been stories centered around strength, beauty and pride: learning to love oneself and one's culture, even when the world doesn't; celebrating one's heritage and homeland; finding a place to belong and thrive in the face of discrimination and adversity.
WHAT IS THE 8 PERCENT?
So we're going deeper, and we're starting with the Black community, the 8%. Los Angeles city's population is about 8% Black (8.4%, if you wanna be exact, according to the most recent census estimates). When we say L.A. is Black and Brown, we sometimes focus on the overwhelming majority that is Brown. We relegate the idea of a "Black L.A." to geography, like the so-called Black Beverly Hills or Leimert Park or melanated South L.A. strongholds like Inglewood or Compton (I mean, just sing the lyrics of Tupac's "California Love" in your head).
So, we introduce The 8 Percent, a new project from KPCC + LAist that's an extension of the Race In LA series. The 8 Percent explores the inextricable ties between L.A. and its Black residents - how Black migration, community and culture have shaped and changed L.A.
We began planning this project in 2019, and published Part 1, LA to L.A., last year on the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in New Orleans. But this project is even more relevant and poignant as society grapples with this moment of racial reckoning. In the coming months, we'll be releasing new installments - videos, oral histories and more. Their content will vary but they will all be guided by one overarching idea: You can't tell the story of Los Angeles without telling the story of Black people.
This project, heavily multimedia and immersive, is intended to be unlike many others in which a particular community's story is told by journalists. Our intent is to tell the story of Black people, in their words, in their voice — unfiltered. We are messengers, amplifying voices that deserve to be heard, not interpreters who get to frame the narrative. We're committed to letting the people who are willing to invite us into their lives and homes do so on their terms. We will not rewrite their history, their family stories or their lived experiences through our journalistic pen or public media's highly criticized white lens.
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George Floyd's death shook the conscience of our pandemic-stricken nation, and set many of us on a path of self-reflection unrivaled by any single event in recent memory. A year later, there's no going back — that much we know. -
Lili Nadja Barsha doesn’t like hyphens. She sees herself as “the bloom of my ancestors, a vessel filled with genetic memories.” That, and as someone who is “included in many circles, but exists without a circle of her own.”
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College student Lia Hurd wasn’t around in 1992 L.A., but her mother was. After hearing comparisons between the trial of George Floyd’s killer and that of the four officers who beat Rodney King, she asked her mom a question: Has anything really changed?
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After Shirlee Smith wrote about her experience, that employer sought her out. She wondered if anything would come out of a conversation.
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Dr. Omar Amr wrote about his experiences with racism, on his path to graduating from Harvard medical school and as part of Team USA’s Olympic water polo team, in a Race In LA essay last year. He never imagined the notoriety or loss of personal friendships that would follow.
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Asked to make a "persona doll" and write its story for a college course years ago, Leilani Burrell-White drew from her experience as a biracial child in the early 1960s.
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She grew up Afro Latina in Los Angeles, where some people simply 'don't get it.' An Angeleña of proud Puerto Rican heritage shares her story.
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Adwoa Blankson-Wood is a Black nurse but felt she had to protect herself by keeping race out of her workplace. She writes, 'Nobody understands what it means to be Black in America, unless they are Black in America.'
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When you're young, male, and Black, you learn that sometimes, situations involving the police can instantly turn dangerous. Even if all you're doing is reading a book on the lawn.
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Brandi Carter reflects on what reparations for Black Americans could look like now, a modern-day take on the fabled 40 acres and a mule that were given to some slaves during the Civil War. "It's not just about righting a centuries-old wrong. It's about reinvestment in our country to create the level playing field that everyone deserved from the start."
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A self-described "Black Valley Girl" pledges to prioritize her dignity after feeling forced to explain herself to a suspicious neighbor. "I don't owe it to anyone to make them feel safe."
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She'd grown accustomed to the "sprinkling of macro- and micro-aggressions from some of my own people about my skin tone and hair texture" that comes with colorism. But there she was, scrambling to show photos on her phone of "my beautiful chocolate family" when yet another person brought up her light skin.
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Facing wage discrimination at the clothing store where she worked as a tailor, his mother decided to quit and strike out on her own. Working out of her basement, she built a clothing business that lasted more than three decades.
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A Black Armenian Angelena reflects on her identity -- the discrimination she's endured because of her race and feelings of being excluded because of her ethnicity -- the legacy of the Armenian Genocide and the current conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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Growing up in a family of New Orleans transplants in L.A.'s Jefferson Park neighborhood, Jervey Tervalon wasn't always appreciated by educators. It took some special teachers to take a deeper look and recognize his talents.
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A racial slur was part of Omar Amr's first experience playing Division I water polo at UC Irvine. It wasn't the first time he'd heard racist comments. Growing up in East L.A., Amr was groomed to "behave appropriately" so that hate directed toward him would not turn into harm.
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When he tuned in to a radio interview with a top law enforcement official, and the topic of racism came up, Keith Taylor was hoping to hear some sympathy for Black people killed by police. Or perhaps, "some idea of how to work in earnest to combat this pervasive issue." What he heard instead brought back painful memories from many years back.
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Growing up in the mostly white Orange County suburbs, she felt safer staying quiet, keeping her feelings to herself whenever stung by subtle or overt racism. But over time, she found her voice.
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I'm a 32-year-old black man. Last Saturday, another 32-year-old black man breathed his last breaths miles from where I work. In the wake of his death, I reflect on all the ways he could've been me.
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She'd been hired over the phone. All was well until she came in, and her new employer saw she was Black. Here's how having one door closed in her face put her on the path toward a lifetime of kicking other doors down.
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Brandi Tanille Carter apprehensively left her home Los Angeles to go to a college she had never seen in a state she'd never visited. But it's here she learned to embrace her Blackness, and it's this experience which allowed her to return home to L.A. empowered.
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When the voice of Black America is too loud for any newsroom to ignore, Take Two producer Austin Cross explains what it means to truly amplify Black voices.
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For some, racism has resulted in obscene and life-threatening actions. For me, it's been a never-ending journey of internalizing microaggressions and trying to live above them.
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It's the inheritance I never wanted, but also kind of need every day. It was delivered in pieces over the course of 30 years with no receipt. What can I say? Thanks. I hate it.
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Cheryl Farrell had a lovely Spanish-style home in a foothill suburb. She enjoyed her morning jogs along the tree-lined streets. Until she noticed people avoiding her.
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LAist Data Editor Dana Amihere struggles to find peace within her personal divisions -- as a black woman, journalist and wife of a white man -- following the past few months of police brutality and protests.
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Today, I carry on and do the most that anybody can do during this time: try to create something that heals the world, even if true change is something that I may never see.
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A biracial woman, who has lived in neighborhoods across greater L.A. has struggled to find a space where she's felt truly at ease, 'normal' and accepted as her whole self, both white and Black.
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An LAist reader, a lifelong Angeleno who has ties across the city, explores his duality as a Black man trying to survive and thrive in L.A.
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An LAist reader, an immigrant from Kenya, and an LAist reporter, born in Colombia but raised in America, share two very different experiences on being Black in L.A.
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Two LAist readers share their feelings of discrimination, isolation and marginalization to our query about their lived experiences as Black Angelenos.
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Velincia Ellis has seen her South L.A. neighborhood change over the years. She writes, 'What happened? Where did my people go?'
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Laurie, an account executive for our organization, moved to L.A. from Chicago as a child. Today, she understands L.A. as a city of "contradictions," embracing diversity but still struggling, and even perpetuating, the ills of racism.
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Today, a Hollywood woman who grew up in the San Fernando Valley writes about her experiences with code-switching.
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The theme of our Black History Month coverage this year is, “What does it mean to be Black in L.A.?” We kick off Day 1 with a reflection from a West Hollywood woman who found being bused across town as a kid in the 60s helped her see L.A. as a "place of possibilities."
