Today’s Agenda

The population figures for Los Angeles--about 40% Latino, 40% European-American, 10% African-American and 10% Asian-American--aren’t reflected yet in voting figures, where European-Americans still predominate. But as more of the immigrants who were legalized in the 1986 federal amnesty go through the citizenship process, the Latino vote is expected to rise dramatically. Among Asian-Americans, immigrant Koreans and Filipinos are allying with established Japanese and Chinese political organizations. African-American voters turned out in force for the Diane Watson-Yvonne Brathwaite Burke race for county supervisor, galvanized by the campaign between two respected black politicians.

The Los Angeles mayoral campaign, coming after 20 years of Tom Bradley at the helm, has raised expectations for new leadership and increased openness at City Hall. In a special Platform, activists from the range of Southern California’s major communities talk about what they expect of the new mayor and what they want to hear from the candidates. There are as many agendas as there are people on the page, but a common thread is that the doors of power had better open wider, and City Hall had better start tending more closely to the dispossessed.

Education is high on most agendas, though schools are outside the official purview of the mayor. The sense that they’re broken was heightened by the recent fatal shootings of students on the campuses of Fairfax and Reseda high schools. In Community Essay, Steven Rude, a psychologist with the L. A. Unified School District who has counseled students at Fairfax, expresses some of his own fears. The students he talked to were almost matter-of-fact, he says, reflecting a sort of emotional powerlessness and an expectation that such violence will occur again. Rude and his colleagues do what they can to patch up the aftermath, and he believes that diversity training could have a role in prevention.

Older books, no matter how well-written or well-meaning, often contain racial stereotypes. “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” became controversial for this reason, and were dropped from required reading lists at many high schools. Similarly, the NAACP has protested use of “The Cay” by Theodore Taylor, a 1969 book about a white boy’s shipwreck and rescue by a black man, because of an offensive description of the rescuer. In the Youth opinion column, Travis Moon, a junior at Royal High School in Simi Valley, says the local NAACP chapter’s protest is wrong, because such stereotyping, especially in an otherwise benign or positive setting, is a good teaching opportunity, not a cause for censorship.

And in Making a Difference, USC provides a corporate model for vigorous outreach to minority and female contractors. The original program was set up to meet contracting requirements for federally funded projects, but USC has gone far beyond the law in seeking qualified providers who don’t have big advertising or sales budgets.