Partners, Not Rivals, in County Suit : By Joining Latinos, Blacks May Help Open, Expand the Board

It may take Latino activists a while to appreciate it, but leaders of the black community did them a great favor when they decided to intervene in a pending lawsuit that accuses Los Angeles County of discrimination against Latino voters.

While many Latinos regard their efforts to improve the lot of their community as part of a larger struggle on behalf of civil rights for all people, there are a few who seem to think that Latinos are in competition with other minority groups for the goodies that American society offers those with political or economic power. They see progress for Latinos as a zero-sum game, where everything we gain must come at the expense of others.

Lately that attitude seems to have taken hold in Los Angeles County, with groups of both black and Latino employees in county government (as well as in the large Los Angeles Unified School District) sniping at each other in an unseemly rivalry over who deserves more jobs and promotions under affirmative-action programs.

To some extent this rivalry is understandable. Los Angeles is one urban area where a large black population must coexist with an even larger and still-growing Latino population. And with tight government budgets keeping a lid on the number of civil-service jobs--long seen by blacks and other minorities as a relatively safe, stable path to upward mobility--conflict over opportunities was probably inevitable.

The rhetoric is overblown on both sides. Blacks claim to deserve priority because they faced greater discrimination in the past. Latinos reply that their needs will be greater in the future. It sounds like a couple of poor drunks arguing over who is worse off--as if it were something to be proud of.

With any luck, the voting-rights lawsuit against the county should make both sides realize that what they have in common is more important than what divides them. The lawsuit was filed last year by the U.S. Justice Department, joined by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union. Among other things, it argues that the failure of county voters to elect a Latino to the Board of Supervisors in nearly 140 years is evidence of discrimination against Latinos under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

It is worth noting that, in all that time, county voters have also never elected a black to the five-member board, either. (Yvonne Brathwaite Burke served on the board a few years ago after being appointed by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., but she was defeated by a white man when she ran for election to a full term.) That important point is key to the companion lawsuit filed this week by local chapters of the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. To their credit, attorneys and spokesmen for those groups emphasized that their lawsuit “is not an instance where there is tension or friction” between blacks and Latinos. The Latino plaintiffs responded in kind.

Of course, that did not stop some Latino activists from speculating that black leaders are trying to make sure they are not left out of any negotiations that may take place if county officials try to settle out of court or, if the county loses, they have to redraw supervisorial district boundaries to make the election of minority candidates more likely.

As far as Latinos are concerned, there should be nothing wrong with such an approach. A companion lawsuit by black Angelenos makes it less likely that the white men who currently control county government will be able to weasel out of their legal dilemma by ganging up on one of their own.

The Board of Supervisors is dominated by three conservatives who represent mostly suburban districts--Pete Schabarum, Deane Dana and Mike Antonovich. The other seats belong to liberals Edmund D. Edelman, who represents most of Central Los Angeles including the largely Latino Eastside, and Kenneth Hahn, who represents South Los Angeles, still mostly black but with a growing Latino population. Hahn has recently been slowed by a stroke, and many blacks fear that his colleagues might turn on him if they suddenly had to create a Latino-majority district. In the cold world of big-city politics, it could happen more easily than most folks realize.

If the blacks’ lawsuit prevents that from happening, good. For that makes it more likely that the supervisors will have to fall back on another remedy to the Latino lawsuit that they have so far arrogantly refused to consider: increasing the size of the county board so that it is not only more representative of the Los Angeles area’s diverse population but also better able to serve almost 8 million county residents.

Contrary to what some cynics think, political advancement for minorities in this society does not have to be a zero-sum game. Rather than accepting political systems as they are, and exploiting them for their own selfish benefit once they get control of them, Latinos, blacks and other minorities should work to improve them once they get inside. That benefits not only minority communities but all of American society as well.