RACIAL AND ETHNIC CATEGORIES

According to the 1990 Census, persons who identified themselves as "White, not Hispanic" accounted for 41.0 percent of Los Angeles County's population, while Asians and Pacific Islanders represented 10.4 percent. (See Appendix Table 10.) An examination of the map at the end of this section, as well as the accompanying graphs and tables, shows that while Blacks and Hispanics together represented 48 percent of the county's residents, there was a high degree of physical separation between this combined group and the White, not-Hispanic portion of the population, in terms of residence. For most of the communities that have been identified in this report, the separation is economic and educational as well. Excluding the Wilshire, Hollywood, and San Pedro Planning Areas, and the City of Long Beach, the remaining 10 communities were overwhelmingly Black or Hispanic. Taken as a whole, the share of the population in these 1 0 areas that was either Black or Hispanic was 92.5 percent, and accounted for 1,069,130 of the 1,156,209 residents of these combined communities. These areas also contained 704, or nearly 83 percent, of the 850 buildings severely damaged during the civil unrest.

Within the 10 areas that had a high Black or Hispanic population, 3.9 percent were White, not-Hispanic, and 3.0 percent were Asians and Pacific Islanders. The non-Hispanic Black residents of these communities comprised 52.7 percent of all of the county's Black residents, but only 17.2 percent of the overall Hispanic population resided in these areas. Black residents were over 50 percent of the population in five of the communities, while Hispanics represented over one-half of the residents in four of the 10 communities.

Table 1 summarizes statistics for the 10 communities in which persons who were either Black or Hispanic represented at least 80 percent of all residents. When the statistics for the residents of these communities are compared with the same statistics for the rest of the county, a clearer picture emerges that, in some measure, quantifies the sharp division within the county in terms of the relative well-being of its citizens.

Click Here

Analysis of the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest