Los Angeles: Land of the White Hunter

Abstract

Los Angeles reveals two critical dimensions of the postwar racial history of sexual policing. First, it showcases how midcentury processes of sexual liberalization in social science and legal reform influenced law enforcement authorities’ growing reluctance to pursue white women, while preserving police officers’ discretionary power to target Black women. By the end of 1961, liberal legal reforms in California effectively decriminalized straight, nonmarital sex. But morals law reform took shape in the postwar context of rapidly segregating urban neighborhoods and the aggressive police mobilization to contain the growing Black population. As a result, white women were increasingly shielded from citywide sexual policing even as Black women were relentlessly policed. Second, Black rebellions against police gained momentum in Los Angeles during these years, in part triggered by this racial inequality in sexual policing. The racial inequality in sexual policing—exacerbated by liberal morals law reform—was a powerful, if underappreciated, factor in the many clashes between police and Black residents that culminated in the 1965 uprising in the Black neighborhood of Watts.