What Lies Beyond the L.A. City Council Debacle
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
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?
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Conversations of Note
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
