What You Overlooked in the "LA" Episode of Song Exploder

A brief reflection by a first year law student.

​1939 HOLC"redlining"map of south Los Angeles,

courtesy of LaDaleWinlingand urbanoasis.org.

In the "LA" episode of Song Exploder, editor and producer, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians and dissects their songs to get the story of the creative process behind the masterpiece. The "LA" episode features its creator, Ty Dolla $ign.

Through this episode, I realized that like New York neighborhoods, LA’s are museum-like exhibitions of America’s racialized landownership system. I was born and raised in Ecuador. Before coming to the U.S. in 2013, all I knew was that Hollywood was in LA and Broadway in NYC. As a student at the City College of New York, a classmate warned me that 'people from LA are superficial.' Ty says that those people are not from the real LA. I learned that NYC is diverse beyond its tourist attractions when I interned as a community organizer fighting gentrification in Harlem. There, I understood that NYC is more than just skyscrapers and pretty lights. This city has real New Yorkers, those who’ve lived through the struggle of attending underfunded public schools in upper Manhattan for generations. Ty says to know LA is to go "past Wilshire,” which in contrast to the hills, shows unambiguous housing injustice, just like NYC.

NYC and LA’s wealth gaps show that although America is the land of opportunities, access to those opportunities is skewed. It turns out that the people my friend warned me about are those with access to the lavish opportunities America offers. I know a friend whose parents own real estate in Rancho Palos Verdes, a neighborhood full of mansions. I'm unsure how much capital this requires. However, I doubt that Ty's grandparents could have accessed homeownership there having migrated from Memphis, TN with $1,000. The effects of redlining and lack of homeownership loans available to Black and brown minorities, make it unlikely. American law has thwarted non-Whites from gaining access to land and capital. Thus, Ty’s grandparents raised their family with the opportunities available in southern LA, a historically redlined area.

Perhaps if Ty's grandparents raised their grandsons in Rancho Palos Verdes, Ty's younger brother, Gabreal Griffin, wouldn’t have to serve sixty-seven years in prison now. The song “LA” is in the album Free TC, dedicated to Gabreal (also known as TC), who at 19 was convicted of first-degree murder for having testified, after police coercion, that he ‘personally and intentionally’ shot dead a member of his own gang, the Schoolyard Crips. On appeal, the prosecution presented testimony by a “fearful [Brenda] Freeman [who] at first told the police she had not seen the shooter, but later identified Griffin from a photo array," People v. Griffin, (2008). Police had asked her to identify anyone who lived in the neighborhood, and since TC did, she identified him. They misconstrued the rest. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty depends on who the defendant is and society criminalizes Blackness. Therefore, the evidence didn’t cast doubt on the white woman judge, who affirmed TC’s conviction.

The mass incarceration and killing of youth entangled in gang activity manifests the residual toxicity of redlining. As a country, we criminalize poverty and don’t address those conditions that give rise to gang violence, gentrification, and homelessness, all of which are tied. Maybe that's because even in Brown v. Board of Ed., the seminal case that desegregated schools, Judges didn’t correct the true causes of inequality. They answered whether – assuming equal facilities – segregation was constitutional, and while they answer was a clear no, they never addressed the part that assumes equal facilities. Yet, because of segregation, Black and White school facilities were never, equal. Less so with redlining. Land and wealth distribution across America evidently favors the white landowner.

American criminal law overlooks the conditions creating poverty, it just punishes it. Youngsters just want to feel a sense of belonging, and in poor neighborhoods, they are punished for joining a gang. Yet, if TC had grown up in the well-funded schools of Ranchos Palos Verdes, it’s likely he would have chosen to belong to a community there, too. Similarly, in Jones v. City of Los Angeles, (2006) I saw the City attempting to punish people without homes for sleeping on the streets, when all they want is to rest. Laws punish those who engage in conduct that a White landowning person, who attended a well-funded school would not engage in, like joining a gang or sleeping on the streets every night. If judges would have set precedent making redlining laws (and the resegregation therefrom) obsolete, perhaps we wouldn’t have much of today’s unjust land distribution and urban poverty that lead to TC, and thousands of other youth, to engage in conduct punishable with over half a century’s time in jail...

Stay thoughtful. Xx Sulafa

---

References

“LA.” Song Exploder. 2020 Ty Dolla Sign. Free TC. Atlantic Records, 2015.

People v. Griffin, Not Reported in Cap.Rptr.3d (2008).

Brown v. Board of Education (Brown II), 349 U.S. 294 (1955).

Jones v. City of Los Angeles, 444 F.3d 1118 (2006).