Racist Comments by Los Angeles City Council Members Spark Controversy

As a native of the greater Los Angeles area and follower of everything LA (including the Los Angeles Dodgers, who beat the San Diego Padres last night in the Major League Baseball playoffs), I have been closely watched the developments in the recent controversy involving the Los Angeles City Council.   It shows the continuing tensions between African Americans and Latina/os (as well as the established Latina/o community and recent immigrants).

In “Los Angeles Confronts Racial Divide Anew After Leak of Racist Comments,” Jill Cowan and Shawn Hubler for the New York Times offers a close look at the troubling case.

Protesters are demanding that three Latino council members immediately resign over a secretly recorded private discussion.  

“Latino residents said they were betrayed by their own leaders. A Black speaker said she wanted `an investigation into all decisions that have affected Black people” in Los Angeles. A white council member whose Black child was the target of racist comments tearfully told his colleagues how he and his husband were both “raw and angry and heartbroken and sick.’

President Biden on Tuesday called for the departure of the three council members in the nation’s second-largest city. . . .

The recorded conversation involving some of Los Angeles’s top power brokers exposed the racial and ethnic factions that have come to dominate politics in California. But it also highlighted the political impatience among leaders of the city’s largest ethnic group: Latinos, who make up roughly half of the city’s population but who hold only four of its 15 City Council seats.

…..

The recording was a conversation among Nury Martinez, the Council president; Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members; and Ron Herrera, the leader of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, that took place in October 2021 during intense negotiations over City Council redistricting.

Ms. Martinez is heard comparing the Black child of Councilman Mike Bonin to a `changuito,’ Spanish for little monkey, and joking with Mr. de León that Mr. Bonin carries the child around like a designer handbag. Those were only two of the offensive comments in the 80-minute recording, which included ugly remarks describing recent migrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and disparaging remarks about the trustworthiness of white liberals and a councilwoman who is of South Asian descent.

News of the recording was first reported on Sunday by The Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles has seen a “cascade of scandals.” As described in a Politico article,

““It just looks like a dumpster fire on top of a hurricane,’ said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor and former president of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. `We have three of the most powerful Latinos in the city who are part of a conversation that is openly racist, you have one of the most powerful African-American leaders who’s on trial for corruption issues (in Ridley-Thomas), you had Jose Huizar’s problems, you had Mitch Englander’s problems — this is not a one-off situation.'”

KJ