Black Los Angeles: South Central plays itself

In the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries mass media, films, literature, music and other types of cultural production try to (re)discover the real life of Angelenos as well as LA’s life as an individual representative of American culture. A French sociologist Jean Baudrillard remarks of Los Angeles that “it seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, we should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; we should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city” (qtd. Shiel and Fitzmaurice 61). Undoubtedly, the City of Angels has come to symbolize urban intricacies of the early 21st century, so too has Black LA come to manifest the complex racial phenomenon and class subordination by expanding the South Central “ghetto mentality”.