Several Democratic Los Angeles City Council members and a union leader are pushing the limits of the assumption that politicians of the Left can get away with flagrantly racist behavior that would immediately torpedo conservatives.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that council President Nury Martinez and colleagues Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Leon, along with LA County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, engaged a year ago in a hideously racist conversation.
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Martinez’s comments were the worst.
Speaking about fellow Councilman Mike Bonin, a homosexual white man raising a black son with his partner, Martinez complained about the child’s behavior during a parade.
“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Martinez said. “I was like, ‘This kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.’” Martinez used a Spanish phrase to describe the child as “that little monkey” and “su negrito,” which is a disparaging term for black people.
Worse, that was nowhere near the extent of the racist remarks during the conversation. Discussing the redrawing of district lines and other matters, Martinez, de Leon, and Herrera made other offensive statements, while Cedillo did not intervene to object. Again speaking of Bonin, Martinez described him as effectively the council’s “fourth black member” and “a little bitch” who would never “say peep about [in favor of] Latinos.” Speaking of LA District Attorney George Gascon, she said, “F*** that guy … he’s with the blacks.” And she also mocked Oaxacans, a Mexican sub-ethnic group, as “little short dark people” who are “ugly.”
Again and again, they spoke in broadly and explicitly racial terms, floating one Latino woman’s name for a potentially open council seat in part because she is “married to an African American,” worried that naming the wrong replacement would make “African Americans look at this as a hostile takeover” and saying, “It’s the white members on this council that will mother*** you in a heartbeat.”
Herrera, the labor leader, acted as if he fully supported the Latino politicians’ desire to produce districts benefiting their own ethnicity. “I get what we have to do,” he said. “Just massage to create districts that benefit you all.”
After significant public protests urging Martinez to resign, she said today she will step down from the council presidency but not from the council itself. That’s not exactly a huge sacrifice. If she had any sense of honor, she would leave elected office altogether. Meanwhile, no word yet on any repercussions for the others in the conversation.
This is all quite contemptible, of course, but let’s not pretend this is just some isolated incident. Instead, this is exactly what happens when people look at the world through a racial lens and try slicing and dicing political power according to racial identity. When people think according to race, they speak and act according to race. And the word for thinking, speaking, and acting according to race is “racism.”
The leftists today who have made a lucrative scam of being “anti-racist” are now pushing a form of Orwellian double-think in which to be “colorblind” is actually to be “racist.” Real anti-racism, they say, insists that race is determinative and that “equity” demands that the races be treated differently to account for past and present “privileges.”
That approach is pernicious. It denies our common humanity. And it leads to everlasting racial conflict about which ethnicity gets to claim how much power.
The Left’s obsession with racial power politics is a deadly societal pathology. To combat it, colorblindness is neither disease nor even a symptom; colorblindness is the cure.
