Zoo-ifying South Central

Los Angeles is known for tour bus excursions that intrude on the star-studded neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, but not as known are the tour busses that schlep curious tourists into the gang and poverty stricken South Central Los Angeles. I was recently reading the LA Times when I came across a story about LA Gang Tours, a company that proudly touts that it will reveal to tourists “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations.” The company was created by a former gang member who has made a pact of sorts with local gang members to not disturb the tour, and he in turn will hand out micro-loans and find jobs for gang members. I do not know why this concept surprised me, in fact it makes just as much sense as the tours on the other side of town.

The most rudimentary explanation for this phenomenon can be linked to the glorification of thug life through hip-hop or to the promise that to visit or immerse oneself into these neighborhoods will lead to a transformation or redemption as seen in The Blindside, Southland, or Dangerous Minds (to name a few.) I however would push the explanation further and in line with the arguments of Bell Hooks or Renato Rosaldo. By consuming the “other,” or by seeing the “other” in a state of suffering one is experiencing “nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. Os as a process of yearning for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.” (Rosaldo Culture and Truth) To venture into these neighborhoods that are primarily inhabited by Hispanic and African Americans the Anglo American is obscuring actual human suffering through the novelty and kitsch of tourism. Furthermore, by marking the other as primitive, dangerous, and exciting the other becomes fetishized as a reparation to the sterility that is whiteness. There is no attempt to enter these neighborhoods and change them, but instead to temporarily inhabit them and to witness them through the eyes of the other. By establishing a difference between one culture and the other, one is able to feel empowered by their status after experiencing or consuming the other’s.

At the risk of sounding completely awful I do not find that much difference between gang tourism and the videos that celebrities keep posting of themselves visiting Haiti. There is an overwhelming desire to consume human misery. Misery may not be “cool,” but to be there first person to experience it is. Celebrities post videos of their recent voyages to Haiti, while German tourists can brag about experience the LA thug life. By observing or consuming raw human suffering you become an authority or at least a witness. Celebrities do not have to post the videos of themselves doing charitable work, but it is imperative that they prove their authority. By proving you were there or experienced it first hand you are placing yourself in history and raising your own cultural value.