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When California sends it's people, they're not sending their best.
You're experiencing blue tribe whites from LA. Native Angelenos are actually 2/3 non-white and 40% immigrant, and have the same complaints you do. They enthusiastically barge into Mexican and Korean neighborhoods with the same smug, passive-aggressive, arrogance they do in your neighborhood. The appropriate Vietnamese culture without any desire to be part of the Vietnamese community.
New Orleans has a greater cultural depth than any other city in this country, as it has been an outpost of one empire after another, wealthy enough to bring adventurers, but humid and distant enough that it doesn't become overwhelmed. Los Angeles isn't the cultureless wasteland you think it is though, due to another quirk: Prop 13. The East Coasters (black and white) that moved to LA for the post-war aerospace boom? They're still there, living in their 50s houses. They're paying $100/year in property tax because of Prop 13, and they'll stay there forever. The Persians, Armenians, and Koreans have been in LA for three generations now, as have the Vietnamese. They're still in their little houses that they can't extend because that would trigger a ruinous property tax increase.
That's real LA - a city built to 1950s row-house density, accidentally multi-generational and thus continuous due to Prop 13 keeping grandparents around, with thriving ethnic neighborhoods. The people that built the hot rods or fled the Shah (and possibly both!) are still there!
The same smug cultural vampires that have floated over to your culture have been sticking their fangs into LA for decades now. I assure you real LA hates them as much as you do.
Do you even read what you’re typing before posting it?
Everything important and valuable in Los Angeles was built by Americans from other parts of the country. The Tongva Indians who lived there before the Spanish arrived were hunter-gatherers and built no advanced settlements. Once the Spaniards showed up, they established a small mission, which had a few hundred people living in it at its peak. Later under Mexican sovereignty it grew to a small city of less than 2,000 people, which was still the population when Americans conquered it during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. Even in 1870 its population was only about 5,000. By the year 1900 it was over 100,000 people - the overwhelming majority of them Americans from different parts of the country. It was those people that built Los Angeles as you know it: Anglos from the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. You are merely a squatter on their patrimony. The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.
I also did a double take. California is the land of the great white hope, which makes the browning of the imminent horde that much worse.
It was 90+% white as late as the 70s.
I used the website below, which gets data from the census bureau, to see how much of California was white in 1975. 87.6%--because the 1975 data does not include Hispanic as a category.
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/california/?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1975-01-01
One of the major problems of the whole categorization system (as documented by David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy) is that Hispanic is basically a non-category. Hispanic just means, "sort of associated with Spanish" in practice, and most "Hispanic" Californians and Texans were European genetically for the vast majority of US history.
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Am I going mad? Because it looks like the 2021 data doesn't distinguish hispanic from white either, so in 2021 the state was 71.1% white.
That seems strange, I'd expect the census bureau to want more information than "black, white or other?" But on the other hand, if hispanics are white enough for the census bureau, why do they need to be distinguished?
Try narrowing the years to something like 2010—2023 and Hispanic will populate. I don't know what year the census bureau started asking people if they were Hispanic (I'm pretty sure the US Census is actually where the word "Hispanic" was invented) but the charts on that website will stop showing that data as soon as you include any years where the question wasn't asked.
I hope that makes you feel less crazy—although many people go mad for reasons that have nothing to do with the Census Bureau. I'm not qualified to rule those out for you.
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The Census Bureau considered Hispanic to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, one can be white and Hispanic (Ted Cruz) as well as black and Hispanic (eg many Cuban-American baseball players).
Hence, the Census Bureau reports that California is currently almost 71% "white alone" but only 34% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."
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