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As a district of Los Angeles situated to the southwest of the city's center, Crenshaw is but one of many places that collectively comprise a large and sprawling metropolis. However, Crenshaw has an incredibly rich history that draws attention to many of the complex issues that often get raised under the auspices of "diversity." Nearly a century ago, the district came into being as a white suburb. A generation later, it became the center of the postwar fight for residential integration in Los Angeles and developed into a middle-class black/Japanese neighborhood. After the urban turmoil of the 1960s, Crenshaw became known simultaneously as an inner-city ghetto and the African American cultural and political center of Los Angeles. While it retains that latter reputation today, Crenshaw now has a significant and growing Latino population.
As a popular cultural referent in a city where image is king, Crenshaw has assumed a larger than life dimension as a quintessentially "black" neighborhood. Such imagery might come from scenes of young black men cruising down Crenshaw Boulevard in the movie Boy z n the Hood (1991). Others may know that the rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube have both called Crenshaw home. Such imagery undoubtedly was in the mind of a Santee, California woman interviewed by the New York Times in the wake of a tragic incident at the local high school. On March 5, 2001, a depressed and alienated teenager named Andy Williams went on a Columbine-style shooting spree-one that the Times reported shocked residents out of their "it can't happen here" mentality. "I searched and searched all over the country for a place where my kids would be safe and I chose Santee," said the mother of two children in the Santee schools. "I mean, we have Los Angeles and Crenshaw just up the road and nobody is going into their schools and shooting people. I'm just baffled why it would happen here" ("Santee").
It would be hard to find a more definitive statement of the degree to which suburbia is not only a physical construct but also an ideological construction that relies upon urban neighborhoods like Crenshaw to serve as a dialectical other. For many suburbanites, safety is measured in distance from places like Crenshaw. And there should...