This image doesn’t represent Los Angeles today. Blacks are less than 10 percent of the population, and whites are gentrifying the city. Interestingly, blacks began leaving after the 1992 riots, and those who have stayed are reportedly telling each other not to sell houses to non-blacks. “White return,” wrote an author for the website Los Angeleno, poses a “real existential threat.” Whites who tried to save Compton in the 1940s and 1950s made similar appeals to racial solidarity, but once again, we see politics is not about what, but who. When blacks integrate a neighborhood, it is a triumph and anyone who objects is a bigot. When whites move back, non-whites can tell them to stay away.

However, the major trend is the increase in Hispanics. Los Angeles is less than 30 percent white and is about half Hispanic. Whites don’t want to think about how much the city has become part of the Third World, with its attendant tribalism. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2007 on Hispanics’ “ethnic cleansing” of blacks. In 2018, a gang used a firebomb attack to drive blacks out of a housing development. It would be wrong to say there’s a broad campaign to expel blacks, but violently or not, Hispanics are pushing blacks out. Los Angeles isn’t the (however unedifying) black cultural center it was 30 years ago.

BLM is unlikely to bring blacks back to Los Angeles; the pressure from Hispanics is too great. Hispanics could develop a BLM movement of their own, built around ethnic interests. What’s clear is that barring radical change, the only whites with a future in Los Angeles are the millionaires in the Hollywood Hills and a few hardy gentrifiers. We’ll see how long they hold out.