PERSPECTIVE ON RACIAL TENSIONS : The Rift Is Exposed; Let’s Bridge It : In times of social crisis, the politics of race and culture may descend into bigotry. Latinos fear this is happening.

The mounting tension between the Latino and African-American communities must be coolly addressed or we may live to regret the consequences of ignoring it: a degeneration into violence that would rip apart the social and political fabric of Los Angeles.

The two communities have been on a collision course for the past few years. Acrimonious debate has raged over the county’s affirmative-action program, the reapportionment plans of the city, the county and the board of education, the hiring practices at places like Martin Luther King hospital and the competition for the position of Los Angeles police chief, to name a few.

Until recently, there were behind-the-scenes efforts to contain the ideological and racial pitch of the debate. However, the festering tension was blown wide open by the competition for shares of Rebuild L.A. funds and jobs.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand the roots of the tension: the deepening economic depression and the unemployment, social displacement and poverty that it has heaped on working-class and middle-class communities. In the Los Angeles inner-city and adjacent county neighborhoods, that means Latinos and African-Americans.

As a classist society, the United States has always maintained a caste system where non-Anglos are maintained at the bottom to fight over the crumbs left after the white middle class has cut the economic pie cooked up by the rich. In this pecking order today, Mexicans and Central Americans are at the bottom of the bottom.

Historically, the politics of race and culture have helped to advance every group’s demands for political parity and a just share of the economic pie. However, there is a downside: In times of social crisis, the politics of race and culture may descend into the politics of bigotry. And that is exactly what many in the Latino community feel they are experiencing from some elected officials and others speaking for African-Americans.

In the past decade, Los Angeles has again become, in terms of population, a Mexican city. With this majority status came the Latino demand for our just share of jobs, education, responsive services and electoral representation.

African-Americans, once the city’s major political minority, have resistedthese just demands. Their wish to protect their hard-won gains is understandable; their hostility toward us is not. Some of the rhetoric is downright inflammatory. For example, school board member Leticia Quezada’s motion to give parents who are legal immigrants the right to vote for school board representation (a long-standing practice in several U.S. cities) was characterized as a ploy to empower “illegals” in a conspiracy to destroy the voting power of African-American U.S. citizens. And efforts to increase the percentage of Latinos in the county work force to reflect our population percentages were met with arguments by the Black Employees Assn. that the figures were inflated because they included immigrants who are not eligible to work here legally.

Even so, the rhetoric was not as vitriolic as it became with the Rebuild L.A. competition. When Danny Bakewell blew the lid, essentially demanding that African-Americans be hired for jobs held by Latinos, some in the Latino community, like Xavier Hermosillo, responded in kind (both appeared on this page). Now, in the halls of government and in the press, we are engaged in a war of words that, as it filters down to the masses in the city, may spark African-American/Latino violence.

An argument advanced by African-Americans, even by some progressive ones, is that they, as a people, deserve the fruits of civil-rights gains more than Latinos do because they struggled more. This reflects an ignorance of the history of conquest and violence against the Mexican people and of our resistance to cultural aggression and our struggle for social justice. But even if the argument were factual, it would be, in effect, social Darwinism--a divisionist “justice for just us” attitude.

On the other hand, it is just as wrong for us Latinos to abuse our new plurality status and demand change at the expense of African-Americans, Asians and other oppressed peoples because we have the numbers.

While we must be keenly aware and respectful of the right of the African-American community to preserve its gains, African-Americans must accept the Latino reality of Los Angeles and our right to a proportionate share of leadership and representation. That is what African-Americans support for South Africa, and that same principle should apply for us in this city.

The politics of bigotry is by definition myopic. The big picture is that we both are victimized by repression and the recession, and we both are subject to an unprecedented attack on our quality of life from the Bush and Wilson administrations. Are we big enough to play a responsible role in the big picture? Our children’s future depends on our beginning a mature and principled dialogue. Never has the need for visionary and responsible leadership between the Latino and African-American communities been more crucial.