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After Racist Comments, Los Angeles Democrat City Council President Faces Calls to Resign
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ratman
Oct 10, 2022, 11:01:27 PM10/10/22
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LOS ANGELES — The president of the Los Angeles City Council faced
widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording
revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white
council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s
Koreatown neighborhood.
The comments, made during a meeting last year with two other council
members and a labor official, exposed longstanding racial tensions in the
governance of one of the nation’s most multicultural cities as well as
fault lines among the city’s Democrats.
In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New
York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, the City
Council president, Nury Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child
of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She
also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark
people.”
It was unclear who leaked the recording of the October 2021 meeting, which
included Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members representing parts
of the city’s East Side, and Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles
County Federation of Labor. Also unknown was who made the recording, which
was initially uploaded to Reddit earlier this month by an unidentified,
now-suspended user, and continued to circulate via email after the post
was taken down. No one has disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Ms.
Martinez and Mr. de León have issued apologies.
Although advocates on all sides of upcoming city races are unleashing
information to sway voters, the exact motivation behind the release of the
recording was not immediately clear. But an unsigned introduction in the
Reddit post, shared via screenshot with the recording, denounced the ties
between organized labor and some members of the Council, including Ms.
Martinez, complaining that “the labor movement is in bed with City Hall.”
The four officials in the meeting were strategizing about political
redistricting in advance of this year’s election. Mr. Herrera can be heard
telling the group that “my goal is to get the three of you elected, and
I’m just focused on that — we’re like a little Latino caucus of our own.”
A citizen advisory committee conducts Los Angeles’s redistricting process
each decade and recommends maps, but the final lines are determined by the
Council, which ultimately approved a map far different from the one that
was recommended. The conversation focused on those heated negotiations and
on the distribution among the 15 council districts of economic and
municipal “assets” such as stadiums, universities and airports. Such
assets provide jobs to constituents and can enhance an officeholder’s
political influence and fund-raising abilities.
In the audio, the group echoed long held complaints about Latino
representation in the city, where Latinos make up about half of the
population but hold only about a third of the seats on the Council. Ms.
Martinez complained that the commission had recommended moving key assets,
such as the Van Nuys airport, out of her district while claiming to back
broader representation for Latinos.
“If you’re going to talk about Latino districts, what kind of districts
are you trying to create?” she asked her colleagues. “Because you’re
taking away our assets. You’re just going to create poor Latino districts
with nothing?”
Ms. Martinez, who is not up for re-election until 2024, added that Nithya
Raman, a council member of South Asian descent, should not represent
Koreatown, which is now largely Latino.
Ms. Martinez also weighed in on a dispute between two Black council
members over whose district would include Exposition Park and the
University of Southern California. Rather than fight among themselves, she
said, they should demand a map in which one of them gets the massive Los
Angeles International Airport. That asset, she noted, is in the district
of a white council member, Mike Bonin, whom she referred to with a
vulgarity.
In the ensuing exchange, Mr. de León referred to Mr. Bonin, a West Los
Angeles liberal, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and joked with Ms.
Martinez that Mr. Bonin carried his adopted son, who is Black, as if the
toddler were a designer handbag. Ms. Martinez complained that on a parade
float on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Bonin had failed to control his
son and said that the child’s antics had nearly tipped the float over.
“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Ms. Martinez says. “I was
like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and
then I’ll bring him back.”
She also cursed George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney,
saying that “he’s with the Blacks.”
News of the audio ricocheted around Los Angeles on Sunday, eliciting shock
and fury but also acknowledgment of the complexity of race relations in
the sprawling city. The furor extended to the city’s increasingly tight
race for mayor between Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and police
commissioner endorsed by Mr. Cedillo, and Representative Karen Bass, who
is Black and was endorsed by Ms. Martinez.
“This entire situation shows that City Hall is fundamentally broken and
dysfunctional,” Mr. Caruso said in a statement. “In a closed-door meeting,
leaders at the highest levels of city government used racial slurs and
hate speech while discussing how to carve up the city to retain their own
power.”
Ms. Bass issued a condemnation as well. “Let me be clear about what was on
those tapes: appalling, anti-Black racism,” she said in a statement,
adding that she had “spent the day speaking with Black and Latino leaders
about how to ensure this doesn’t divide our city.”
“Homelessness is out of control, crime is on the rise, and Angelenos are
being priced out of their hometown,” she said. “The challenges we face
already threaten to tear us apart and, now, this hateful and shocking
conversation among some of our city’s most powerful leaders could divide
us even further. All those in the room must be held accountable.”
Eunisses Hernandez, a progressive who in June won Mr. Cedillo’s council
seat in an upset, said she was “beyond disgusted.”
“We have three sitting council members being explicit about the Black
community, and their language exemplifies anti-Blackness,” she said. “How
is it we have these people in leadership?”
Latinos are by far the largest demographic among the city’s 3.8 million
residents. But the Black community in Los Angeles has long wielded greater
clout than would be suggested by its 8.8 percent of the population, and
the Asian community has become a rising political force with nearly 12
percent of the population. White Angelenos, with more than 28 percent of
the population, have long controlled much of the city’s wealth and power.
Residents of the city routinely tout their diversity as an asset, and,
since the 1992 riots, have expressed pride in the strides they have made
in race relations. In polls, Latino residents of the city repeatedly say
that their Black neighbors understand them better than do any other ethnic
group in Los Angeles, and vice versa, said Fernando Guerra, whose Center
for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University regularly
surveys the city’s residents.
Mr. Guerra said that when he heard the recording, he was appalled,
particularly at the remarks about Mr. Bonin’s child. But he also noted
that, as in most of California, getting along remains a work in progress
and that unlike the county and state, the city of Los Angeles still allows
elected officials, rather than an independent commission, to have the
final say in their own district maps. That practice, he said, has
contributed to ongoing racial tensions.
In drawing a fair map, the council “had to talk about race,” Mr. Guerra
said. “Although not like this.”
Calls for Ms. Martinez to step down as president or resign from the
council altogether came from politicians across the state as well as
business owners and activists. Ms. Martinez, who did not respond to a
question about whether she would step down, did not deny making the
remarks, and she apologized for the comments.
“In a moment of intense frustration and anger, I let the situation get the
best of me, and I hold myself accountable for these comments. For that I
am sorry,” she said in a statement. “The context of this conversation was
concern over the redistricting process and concern about the potential
negative impact it might have on communities of color. My work speaks for
itself.”
Mr. de León, who also is not up for re-election, apologized as well.
“There were comments made in the context of this meeting that are wholly
inappropriate,” he said in a statement, “and I regret appearing to condone
and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague
and his family in private. I’ve reached out to that colleague personally.
On that day, I fell short of the expectations we set for our leaders — and
I will hold myself to a higher standard.”
Mr. Cedillo did not respond to requests for comments, and neither did Mr.
Herrera. But Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, who heads the California Labor
Federation, condemned the comments as “repulsive and unacceptable” in a
statement posted on Twitter.
“Black and brown communities are too often pitted against each other in
our fight for equity,” she said.
Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a Black council member who represents some of the
city’s historic Black communities, not only condemned the comments from
colleagues whom he had considered friends but also called for an
investigation into the private meeting. He said that it may have violated
the state’s government transparency law and called into question the
entire redistricting process. “I don’t think we’ve ever faced anything
like this, so we have to figure out a path,” he said.
In a searing joint statement, Mr. Bonin and his husband, Sean Arian, said
that they were “appalled, angry and absolutely disgusted” by Ms.
Martinez’s comments and called on her, Mr. de León and Mr. Herrera to
resign from their positions. The couple added that “it hurts that one of
our son’s earliest encounters with overt racism comes from some of the
most powerful public officials in Los Angeles.”
In condemning the entire conversation, Mr. Bonin and Mr. Arian said that
it showed a troubling level of coordination in an effort to “weaken Black
political representation.”
Ms. Raman, a liberal who won her council seat amid the social justice
reckonings of 2020, said that she was horrified and disappointed and that
she echoed the calls for resignations. “I think there’s always conflict in
politics, but the level of blatant racism on display here was shocking and
appalling,” Ms. Raman said. “We can’t normalize this.”
You cocksuckers normalized it when you went after Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/los-angeles-city-council-tape-
leak.html
widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording
revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white
council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s
Koreatown neighborhood.
The comments, made during a meeting last year with two other council
members and a labor official, exposed longstanding racial tensions in the
governance of one of the nation’s most multicultural cities as well as
fault lines among the city’s Democrats.
In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New
York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, the City
Council president, Nury Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child
of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She
also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark
people.”
It was unclear who leaked the recording of the October 2021 meeting, which
included Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members representing parts
of the city’s East Side, and Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles
County Federation of Labor. Also unknown was who made the recording, which
was initially uploaded to Reddit earlier this month by an unidentified,
now-suspended user, and continued to circulate via email after the post
was taken down. No one has disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Ms.
Martinez and Mr. de León have issued apologies.
Although advocates on all sides of upcoming city races are unleashing
information to sway voters, the exact motivation behind the release of the
recording was not immediately clear. But an unsigned introduction in the
Reddit post, shared via screenshot with the recording, denounced the ties
between organized labor and some members of the Council, including Ms.
Martinez, complaining that “the labor movement is in bed with City Hall.”
The four officials in the meeting were strategizing about political
redistricting in advance of this year’s election. Mr. Herrera can be heard
telling the group that “my goal is to get the three of you elected, and
I’m just focused on that — we’re like a little Latino caucus of our own.”
A citizen advisory committee conducts Los Angeles’s redistricting process
each decade and recommends maps, but the final lines are determined by the
Council, which ultimately approved a map far different from the one that
was recommended. The conversation focused on those heated negotiations and
on the distribution among the 15 council districts of economic and
municipal “assets” such as stadiums, universities and airports. Such
assets provide jobs to constituents and can enhance an officeholder’s
political influence and fund-raising abilities.
In the audio, the group echoed long held complaints about Latino
representation in the city, where Latinos make up about half of the
population but hold only about a third of the seats on the Council. Ms.
Martinez complained that the commission had recommended moving key assets,
such as the Van Nuys airport, out of her district while claiming to back
broader representation for Latinos.
“If you’re going to talk about Latino districts, what kind of districts
are you trying to create?” she asked her colleagues. “Because you’re
taking away our assets. You’re just going to create poor Latino districts
with nothing?”
Ms. Martinez, who is not up for re-election until 2024, added that Nithya
Raman, a council member of South Asian descent, should not represent
Koreatown, which is now largely Latino.
Ms. Martinez also weighed in on a dispute between two Black council
members over whose district would include Exposition Park and the
University of Southern California. Rather than fight among themselves, she
said, they should demand a map in which one of them gets the massive Los
Angeles International Airport. That asset, she noted, is in the district
of a white council member, Mike Bonin, whom she referred to with a
vulgarity.
In the ensuing exchange, Mr. de León referred to Mr. Bonin, a West Los
Angeles liberal, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and joked with Ms.
Martinez that Mr. Bonin carried his adopted son, who is Black, as if the
toddler were a designer handbag. Ms. Martinez complained that on a parade
float on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Bonin had failed to control his
son and said that the child’s antics had nearly tipped the float over.
“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Ms. Martinez says. “I was
like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and
then I’ll bring him back.”
She also cursed George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney,
saying that “he’s with the Blacks.”
News of the audio ricocheted around Los Angeles on Sunday, eliciting shock
and fury but also acknowledgment of the complexity of race relations in
the sprawling city. The furor extended to the city’s increasingly tight
race for mayor between Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and police
commissioner endorsed by Mr. Cedillo, and Representative Karen Bass, who
is Black and was endorsed by Ms. Martinez.
“This entire situation shows that City Hall is fundamentally broken and
dysfunctional,” Mr. Caruso said in a statement. “In a closed-door meeting,
leaders at the highest levels of city government used racial slurs and
hate speech while discussing how to carve up the city to retain their own
power.”
Ms. Bass issued a condemnation as well. “Let me be clear about what was on
those tapes: appalling, anti-Black racism,” she said in a statement,
adding that she had “spent the day speaking with Black and Latino leaders
about how to ensure this doesn’t divide our city.”
“Homelessness is out of control, crime is on the rise, and Angelenos are
being priced out of their hometown,” she said. “The challenges we face
already threaten to tear us apart and, now, this hateful and shocking
conversation among some of our city’s most powerful leaders could divide
us even further. All those in the room must be held accountable.”
Eunisses Hernandez, a progressive who in June won Mr. Cedillo’s council
seat in an upset, said she was “beyond disgusted.”
“We have three sitting council members being explicit about the Black
community, and their language exemplifies anti-Blackness,” she said. “How
is it we have these people in leadership?”
Latinos are by far the largest demographic among the city’s 3.8 million
residents. But the Black community in Los Angeles has long wielded greater
clout than would be suggested by its 8.8 percent of the population, and
the Asian community has become a rising political force with nearly 12
percent of the population. White Angelenos, with more than 28 percent of
the population, have long controlled much of the city’s wealth and power.
Residents of the city routinely tout their diversity as an asset, and,
since the 1992 riots, have expressed pride in the strides they have made
in race relations. In polls, Latino residents of the city repeatedly say
that their Black neighbors understand them better than do any other ethnic
group in Los Angeles, and vice versa, said Fernando Guerra, whose Center
for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University regularly
surveys the city’s residents.
Mr. Guerra said that when he heard the recording, he was appalled,
particularly at the remarks about Mr. Bonin’s child. But he also noted
that, as in most of California, getting along remains a work in progress
and that unlike the county and state, the city of Los Angeles still allows
elected officials, rather than an independent commission, to have the
final say in their own district maps. That practice, he said, has
contributed to ongoing racial tensions.
In drawing a fair map, the council “had to talk about race,” Mr. Guerra
said. “Although not like this.”
Calls for Ms. Martinez to step down as president or resign from the
council altogether came from politicians across the state as well as
business owners and activists. Ms. Martinez, who did not respond to a
question about whether she would step down, did not deny making the
remarks, and she apologized for the comments.
“In a moment of intense frustration and anger, I let the situation get the
best of me, and I hold myself accountable for these comments. For that I
am sorry,” she said in a statement. “The context of this conversation was
concern over the redistricting process and concern about the potential
negative impact it might have on communities of color. My work speaks for
itself.”
Mr. de León, who also is not up for re-election, apologized as well.
“There were comments made in the context of this meeting that are wholly
inappropriate,” he said in a statement, “and I regret appearing to condone
and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague
and his family in private. I’ve reached out to that colleague personally.
On that day, I fell short of the expectations we set for our leaders — and
I will hold myself to a higher standard.”
Mr. Cedillo did not respond to requests for comments, and neither did Mr.
Herrera. But Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, who heads the California Labor
Federation, condemned the comments as “repulsive and unacceptable” in a
statement posted on Twitter.
“Black and brown communities are too often pitted against each other in
our fight for equity,” she said.
Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a Black council member who represents some of the
city’s historic Black communities, not only condemned the comments from
colleagues whom he had considered friends but also called for an
investigation into the private meeting. He said that it may have violated
the state’s government transparency law and called into question the
entire redistricting process. “I don’t think we’ve ever faced anything
like this, so we have to figure out a path,” he said.
In a searing joint statement, Mr. Bonin and his husband, Sean Arian, said
that they were “appalled, angry and absolutely disgusted” by Ms.
Martinez’s comments and called on her, Mr. de León and Mr. Herrera to
resign from their positions. The couple added that “it hurts that one of
our son’s earliest encounters with overt racism comes from some of the
most powerful public officials in Los Angeles.”
In condemning the entire conversation, Mr. Bonin and Mr. Arian said that
it showed a troubling level of coordination in an effort to “weaken Black
political representation.”
Ms. Raman, a liberal who won her council seat amid the social justice
reckonings of 2020, said that she was horrified and disappointed and that
she echoed the calls for resignations. “I think there’s always conflict in
politics, but the level of blatant racism on display here was shocking and
appalling,” Ms. Raman said. “We can’t normalize this.”
You cocksuckers normalized it when you went after Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/los-angeles-city-council-tape-
leak.html
26C.Z968
Oct 10, 2022, 11:31:12 PM10/10/22
to
On 10/10/22 11:01 PM, ratman wrote:
> LOS ANGELES — The president of the Los Angeles City Council faced
> widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording
> revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white
> council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s
> Koreatown neighborhood.
American Leftists - the Neo-Brownshirts.
> LOS ANGELES — The president of the Los Angeles City Council faced
> widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording
> revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white
> council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s
> Koreatown neighborhood.
A couple weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi revealed why she thought
imported 'hispanics' were important - SOMEONE has to pick
the crops after all ........ and she's hoping for a new
slave class .......
Byker
Oct 12, 2022, 12:29:27 PM10/12/22
to
"26C.Z968" wrote in message
news:t7KdnfQhtdLnftn-...@earthlink.com...
identify them. With the help of facial recognition software, it'll make it
easier to liquidate them when things get bad enough...
news:t7KdnfQhtdLnftn-...@earthlink.com...
>
> American Leftists - the Neo-Brownshirts.
Let the loonie leftists come out in the open where everyone can see and
> American Leftists - the Neo-Brownshirts.
identify them. With the help of facial recognition software, it'll make it
easier to liquidate them when things get bad enough...
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