Just started watching “Them” on Amazon Prime. The first season focuses on a Black family in 1953 moving into what was then lily-white Compton.

The Emory Family’s home on Palmer Street would be about 1.5 miles north of where I grew up near Compton College. https://blackgirlnerds.com/deborah-ayorinde-and-ashley-thomas-on-research-while-working-on-them/

Like Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas), my dad was an engineer. The aerospace business was booming in Southern California in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Henry Emory (the character) is Black; my dad is not.

They moved to the Compton area because it was affordable and nice.

At the time I lived there it was a mixture of mostly White and Black middle class families. What we didn’t know was that, in the wake of segregation being declared unconstitutional and “covenant” neighborhoods (depicted in “Them”) no longer legal, it had been secretly “redlined.”

Over time, White families moved out and were replaced by working class Black families who were not being shown homes in other communities.

Here’s the thing about how that goes: the first White families that move out are the ones that don’t want to live around people of color. …

They’d probably been there since Compton/Lynwood/LBC were lily-white suburbs and they couldn’t take it anymore. So they moved. Maybe to Orange County, maybe to Simi Valley. But they moved.

Here’s the thing: they stayed ahead of the drop in real estate prices *they* precipitated.

Back then, as these middle-class Black families moved in, part of the “Great Migration” (also depicted in “Them”) the neighborhood became less “desirable” to White families, and property values fell, a trickle at first and then a waterfall.

Ironically, if you are not Black and…

… you don’t care whether your neighbor is Black or White or Hispanic or Asian, you’re rewarded for not being a sh¡tty racist by seeing your home values plummet, too, along with that of all your new middle-class Black neighbors.

So eventually, some of them moved, too.

When we left Gale Avenue, we were one of three non-Black families in our half mile by half mile block. And when we moved, we were part of a wave of middle-class families — now mostly Black — that got out because they didn’t want to see their main family wealth plummet in value.

I was a kid when this happened, but I remember seeing it and hearing about it, and I talked with my dad about it a number of times later. I remember our dad saying he wasn’t going to move just because a bunch of White people don’t want to live around Black people. But we did…

… His cue to go was when our Black neighbors who had moved there, from New York, Chicago, etc., decided they needed to get out of Dodge as well.

Because Compton, Lynwood, and North Long Beach were no longer what they’d signed on for. With property values plummeting, …

… the tax base also plummeted and that meant the schools and municipal services also plummeted. Our local elementary was suffering so my parents got us put into a magnet school miles away. 8-year-old me took the RTD home after school with my 10-year-old sibling.

Finally my parents did the math and decided they had to move because home values in our area were going down too fast and home values where they wanted to go in Orange County were going up too quickly and if they waited, we’d be screwed.

So we moved. Our new neighborhood was…

… almost entirely White and Asian, though a bit more Hispanic now. There were almost no Black people, though the White people there should sounded like they knew everything about Black people (this was my first inkling that loads of White people were racist morons). A few of…

… the White people there were upset that so many “boat people” (all Asians were boat people to them) were moving in and going “Ching Chong Ching Chong” (yes, they really sad *that*).

Some of those White people moved farther south, Orange County’s own version of “White flight.”

But most stayed. I think most adapted, or at least made peace with their new integrated circumstances. It gave me faith that most people can drop their prejudices — at least enough — when they actually get to know people different from themselves.

When a few Black people moved…

… into our Orange County neighborhood, it did not lead to a mass exodus of White people to Mission Viejo. But of course, in Orange County we weren’t redlined.

We had been redlined in Compton/Lynwood/North Long Beach. That was the pen the powers that be would keep the POCs in.

I live in Honolulu now. It has it’s own racial issues, but it really is a place where no one will stare at you or think you don’t belong whatever your apparent background is and wherever you live (well, with a couple notable exceptions).

Hawaii is the only place in the US where

… Mrs Kushibo, an immigrant, has lived. She may have different experiences when we move to Southern California next year. For me it is “back” to California, but for her it is the first time living there. Where we’re planning to go it’s still pretty red. There are people there…

…who think it’s perfectly acceptable to tell Asians they don’t belong there or to use words like Ch***, J**, or G***. I can take all kinds of sh¡t, but I dread that happening to my wife or kid.

When White people think they are the default, when they redline, it’s a bad outcome.

I have faith most White people today are not like that. Shows like “Them” are a lesson for White people about what not to do, and most take heed (though some are certain of the narrative that “Them” is about “canceling White people,” as if their identity is about being racist).