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A child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?
Los Angeles erupted in protests last week after covertly recorded audio emerged of three city council members, Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, and Kevin de León, conversing with a labor leader about how to manipulate the municipality’s once-per-decade redistricting process. They sought to increase the political power of Latino politicians at the expense of other groups––and managed to speak about Black people, Oaxacans, Armenians, Jews, Koreans, and white people in ways so glaringly offensive that people on all sides of the culture wars were united in disgust.
“This entire ugly incident blows a massive hole in the narrative that many would like to believe about Los Angeles—and about California—being some sort of multicultural mecca, where Black and brown people build alliances to work together in solidarity toward solving problems,” Erika D. Smith wrote in the Los Angeles Times. (White Angelenos are also engaged in that problem-solving project, but set that aside.) “It’s true that South L.A., once a stronghold for Black Angelenos, is no longer that. Today, Latino residents make up roughly half of L.A.’s population but represent less than a third of the council’s districts. That raises questions about fair representation. But the answer cannot be a city run by Latinos only for Latinos.”
Many people would agree with that conclusion––but there are significant disagreements about the root causes of what went wrong on the Los Angeles City Council and how best to move forward.
“We have had a long-running debate in this country over how to think about racial categories,” David Brooks wrote in The New York Times. In his telling, one side sees American society “as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. They center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity. Justice will come when minority group power is used to push back on white supremacy.” Another side argues that “racial categorization itself can be the problem,” because racial categorization was a crude lie from the start, and so long as it is an organizing foundation of our politics, essentialist bigotries will follow.
I see why some people sense the pernicious ideology of white supremacy in the recordings. Councilman Mike Bonin, who is white, has an adopted Black son who is 3 years old. The kid was apparently being rambunctious, as toddlers are wont to do, on a parade float. “They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Martinez said on the recording. “I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.” Was she suggesting that Black children require beatings by their parents in a way that isn’t true of white children?
What’s more, Martinez used a Spanish word for “monkey” to refer to the child and told her colleagues that Oaxacans, who hail from a region of Mexico with a large indigeneous population, are short, dark, and ugly.
