Rights Issue: It’s Quality, Not Race

Several weeks have passed since Judge Greg O’Brien decided that the 1st District supervisorial race was no place for an O’Brien.

He pulled out of the election after federal Judge David V. Kenyon drew new boundaries to assure the election of a Latino. Kenyon ruled that the Board of Supervisors in 1981 had created districts deliberately designed to split the Latino vote and weaken Latino political power. An appellate court upheld his decision.

The lines shifted east, away from O’Brien’s Glendora home, to neighborhoods with many more Latinos. O’Brien looked at the Latino-dominated demographics, added up his campaign debt of $101,000 and decided on the comparative security of the Superior Court.

Last week, I drove to the Pomona courthouse to have lunch with him. He’d been a decent, intelligent candidate with a positive campaign. You don’t find too many of those in politics and so I was anxious to renew our acquaintance.

The conversation turned out to be more than a pleasant swapping of campaign stories. The judge brought up a difficult, complex subject, something I often hear when talking about the 1st District race with Anglos: Why must a Latino area be represented by a Latino, or Latina? Isn’t that ethnic gerrymandering?

I remember a discussion I had with a group in the San Fernando Valley, which demanded an answer to that question. After all, some said, a white man, Supervisor Kenny Hahn, has provided parks, swimming pools, clean streets, a hospital and health clinics to his predominantly black South L.A. district.

O’Brien put it this way:

“One thing I found troubling . . . is the notion that ethnics ought to be represented by ethnics . . . I think that is ultimately destructive to our society because they’re going to be looking at each other and ourselves in terms of where our ancestors lived rather than in terms of neighbors and friends and co-workers and fellow Americans.

“My brother is married to a Korean girl. My other brother’s wife is of Hispanic ancestry. . . . At a time when we are achieving the American dream of the melting pot and of assimilation, all of a sudden, minority and ethnic leadership finds it necessary to regroup and restructure and I think it’s divisive and I think it is potentially dangerous.”

I replied that the supervisors weren’t being exactly colorblind when they created the district. “The argument was made during the case, and accepted by the judge and, later, by an appellate court, that the board’s white majority did take into consideration ethnic factors,” I said. The court found the supervisors split the Latino vote to protect white incumbents. That, Judge Kenyon ruled, violated the Voting Rights Act.

As a matter of fact, splitting up any kind of community deprives the residents of political power. One of the most notorious examples of that occurred in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Sherman Oaks and Studio City. All are upper-middle-class areas that reach up into the Santa Monica Mountain foothills from Ventura Boulevard. All have the same political agenda, including growth control along the boulevard and protection of the hillsides from overdevelopment.

To save incumbents’ jobs, the Los Angeles City Council divided the areas among three council districts, represented by council members who lived on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. That weakened the City Hall influence of Valley residents.

You can see what this means in county government by looking at the old 1st Supervisorial District, represented by Pete Schabarum. There were some poor neighborhoods in that district, but the voting strength was the middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbs of the eastern San Gabriel Valley. These were the constituents to whom the conservative Schabarum has been most responsive. That’s why he was so often accused by representatives of the poor of neglecting county health and social services.

The new 1st District contains many more poor neighborhoods than the old. One of their common interests is improving county health care, heavily used by the impoverished residents. The new supervisor, fearing defeat, presumably will not neglect these poor people.

By the way, that supervisor could have been an O’Brien. Despite the judge’s misgiving about ethnic politics, he might have put together a coalition of the substantial number of white voters in that district, combined with Asians and even some Latinos.

But if O’Brien had won, he couldn’t have survived as another Schabarum. He would have had to fight for more health care for the poor. He would have had to represent the poorer constituents. Quality of representation--and not race--was why Judge Kenyon created the new 1st District.