"what's my name?"

a moment of clarity.

words.

"South Central lags because it's South Central. It's got nothing to do with names. WeHo and NoHo were attracting development and seeing gentrification long before they got their snappy nicknames; they were already places to be. Not so South Central. And urban cores don't need to change names to attract gentrification -- look at Harlem. Part of its success was probably due to the fact that it had a name people knew; it was already branded. Like most big-city black communities, Harlem was associated not just with urban mayhem but with a great history of black ambition that for a long time made it the cultural and intellectual capital of black America. South Central's history isn't quite that illustrious -- we didn't have a literary Renaissance, for example. But we had Central Avenue, the Eastside, and we produced luminaries like Ralph Bunche, Charlotta Bass, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus (he was from Watts, but that's long been considered part of South Central, kind of its ground zero). Saying that all these people came from SOLA just sounds bizarre. Too, the attempt to rename/rebrand South Central feels uncomfortably like an attempt to dilute black history, to soften its complicated edges, and there's entirely too much of that going around. We don't need to try and make ourselves palatable to the outside world.

...Changing the name of South Central to SOLA may seem relatively harmless, a move by the tourism board. But it's part of the same instinct to make black people and their slave legacy, which includes economically paralyzed inner cities, palatable. It's focusing on advertising when we need to be looking harder at the product. It's nice to think that the advertising focus might actually change things -- i.e., if we rename it, they will come. History has proven that wrong. Over the years we have gone from Greater L.A. to South Central to South L.A., and it's still the same place.

...While other parts of town benefit from nicknames and branding -- WeHo, NoHo, and the ethnic hotspots like Chinatown and Little Tokyo -- black people have been on the losing end of the few name changes made with them in mind.

...But in a movie town, it all makes perfect sense. But renaming South Central doesn't need a sequel. The first show made its point."

KCET: The Name Game: South L.A. or SOLA, It's Still South Central