It’s only skin deep…The divide in San Fernando Valley
What are you? Who are you? Where are you from? He takes after his mother most. Well he has his daddy’s looks. Mixed, Oreo, Black, Latino and Dominican, you name it, I’ve been deemed it! As a Black Creole, questions of identity and belonging are bound to come. As a young child all the way until now as a young adult my family has been on the move. From Inglewood, to Culver City, back to Inglewood and now finally, Canoga Park. Each place with its own set of people. My childhood saw me surrounded by other Black and Latin kids. We shared together, laughed and played together. After all, we were just kids…
As a child of an African-American mother and a Creole father, the question of identity and belonging always followed me. As I grew older and moved into different neighborhoods, so did the groups around me. Gradually my life turned from being surrounded by others like me, to a melting pot of every ethnic group the world had to offer by the time my family moved to the San Fernando Valley at age 11. While my lodging may have been in Canoga Park, my life remained in Los Angeles. It’s where I continued my schooling until eventually coming to CSUN. And with the transition into high school, came the need for others to place a ‘placard’ on me, as it were. “He looks mixed” rings out from the P.E. fields. I was being identified as something that had to be put into a box somewhere.
The timing of moving into an ethnically diverse community while going to school surrounded by predominantly Black and Latin schoolmates sparked a realization in me. The realization that I would be forced to confront what I was. Who I was. The vast majority of my friends in high school were Latin and I didn’t have the “proper” ebonic speech to be “Black enough”, my shade of skin wasn’t dark enough and I dressed funny…A walking anomaly. In a lot of ways, I sort of mimicked my mother in speech, proper and prim but had my father’s pension for the foreign and strange. He’d spend much of his time near century old movies, plastered in Black and White, dining on strange food and romanticizing about the old days of Rock n’ Roll. My mother, proper, no nonsense, and a serious MSNBC and KTLA5 junkie…Makes sense that her son would become a bit of an MSNBC junkie too. Our Black family was not normal, that was fine, my Blackness wasn’t going to be denied.
I experienced both a heavily concentrated community and an ethnically diverse one simultaneously. The experience and growing pains were unique, discovering more about myself and the design my parents planned for me. A better life. In the midst of the pandemic however, I have quickly seen these two communities shift, with people being pushed in and out of neighborhoods. Inglewood had once been dominated by Black and Latin populations, it is seeing a reversal as more Black and Latin families are pushed out due to rising costs.
Tensions between all ethnic groups, particularly Black, Latin and Caucasians are on a high here in Canoga Park. It is troubling and sad that identity is more important than simply being decent human beings. Personally, I feel media has portrayed a poor image of African-American and Latin issues (Particularly shootings of Black and Latin men). Media ONLY reports Black and Latin people being abused. Tensions rise and the solutions seem too muddied to give comfort.