Ugly or Polite, It’s Racism

Next week’s general election could be very encouraging for Latino citizens. Every incumbent Latino member of Congress, most of them Democrats, will likely be reelected. Even the Republican Party is running strong Latino candidates this year for U.S. Senate in Maryland, governor of Florida and attorney general in Texas.

But casting a pall over these potential achievements are two campaigns in California--the battle over Proposition 63, the initiative to declare English the state’s official language, and the effort to oust California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso. If both succeed, every other Latino political victory will be tainted.

Proposition 63 was put on the ballot by U.S. English, an organization that fears English is somehow threatened in this country. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, including long lines of Latino and Asian immigrants signing up for English classes, U.S. English drafted a benign-sounding initiative that would open a Pandora’s box of complex lawsuits.

Proposition 63 seems to affirm the obvious: that most of us speak English most of the time. But in the initiative’s vague language is a phrase that invites innumerable lawsuits against official use of any other language. We can only hope that the courts would put public health and safety first and keep bilingual operators working on the 911 emergency number, or allow information about communicable diseases to be printed in Spanish and Asian languages. But consider how the courts would be tied up with suits against, say, the Southern California Rapid Transit District for having Bienvenidos printed on the side of its buses.

There are members of U.S. English who have taken that frivolous extreme in other states, like the Miami woman who demanded that McDonalds and Burger King stop using Spanish on their menus. U.S. English doesn’t like to talk about her, but imagine the legal havoc that a flake like that could cause if Proposition 63 passes.

Most voters, including many Latinos, don’t understand the initiative’s implications. Once Latinos do realize how bad it is, their best protection will be the courts--and the hope that judges who handle the resulting lawsuits will be decent and fair-minded--like Reynoso. That’s why his reconfirmation is the most important issue on the ballot for Latinos.

The campaign against Reynoso and his colleagues, including Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, is being pushed by law-and-order advocates who claim that the “liberal” justices are lenient on crime. It has been waged for several years and has been analyzed more than any other issue on the state ballot--except for a troubling undercurrent that Californians have become too polite to discuss openly: racism.

I don’t mean the ugly racism that motivates some people to burn crosses. The campaign against Reynoso is more subtle. It indirectly suggests that because Reynoso came from a large family of farm workers he is not quite as capable as judges with a different (that is, “better”) social background. And it slyly hints that a Mexican-American judge can’t analyze cases affecting poor people dispassionately.

That polite racism fairly oozed beneath the surface of a quiet conversation I had recently with a group of attorneys campaigning to have Reynoso removed from the bench. During our talk, they kept referring to Reynoso and Bird as “incompetent,” while two other justices who are every bit as liberal, Joseph Grodin and Stanley Mosk, were praised as “competent.” I asked them to define what they meant by a “competent” judge, and they couldn’t. They mumbled things about speed in handing down judgments, but beyond that could not clearly explain how Grodin or Mosk are “competent,” while Reynoso and Bird are not.

My gut tells me that what they mean by competent judges is old white men, and I suspect that is the signal they want California voters to get. After all, opinion polls continually show Reynoso to have the narrowest margin of approval of all the justices, except for Bird, who has been the focus of the anti-court campaign all along. The reason is Reynoso’s Spanish name, according to a recent analysis by two of The Times’ veteran political writers, Bill Boyarsky and George Skelton. They convincingly showed, using Los Angeles Times Poll data and past election results, that race and ethnicity still play a negative role in many California elections.

The political professionals trying to oust Reynoso, Bird and their colleagues know this, and are counting on voter hostility to California’s biggest minority population as a factor in their favor come Election Day. So are backers of Proposition 63. If they are right, Latinos are in for some hard times. They’ll have to fight many tough legal battles without the benefit of one of their own on the state’s highest court.

The message that Proposition 63’s enactment and the defeat of Reynoso would send to the nation’s Latino community should be pondered by every politico who wins next week. Are voters saying “We elected you because you aren’t like the rest of them” ? Not a pleasant thought, but one that all Latinos must weigh as we define our place in this nation’s political system.