Wars of Words : Government: Council reissues its ’93 declaration that L.A. is a ‘racism-free’ city. Some question effectiveness of the action.

It may come as a shock to people around the world who are following the saga of the Fuhrman tapes--and to the 3.5 million people who live here--but Los Angeles is a “racism-free city.”

That’s right. On paper at least, it has been since Jan. 6, 1993, when the City Council responded to the riots that had erupted eight months earlier by declaring it so. In case anyone missed it the first time around, the council on Tuesday reiterated its resolve, voting unanimously to declare the nation’s second-largest city free of one of society’s worst plagues.

“It’s quite obvious to all of us that the kind of racial hatreds that we’re talking about here are very close to the surface in our city and have had--and will continue to have--a really poisonous effect on our society unless we come to grips with it,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, who sponsored the motion along with Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas.

“It’s also important that our repudiation of bigotry and hatred not be a one-time thing,” added Wachs, who passed out stickers with the common “no” symbol--a circle with a slash through it--over the word racism. “Maybe we should put this on the calendar every single day, because each of us needs to be reminded of it on an ongoing basis.”

But some community leaders questioned the force of the symbolic resolution, which Wachs and Ridley-Thomas chose to revive because of the passions raging since the release last month of inflammatory, racist comments by retired Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman. Since Fuhrman’s taped comments were revealed to the world as part of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the City Council and the Police Department have been struggling to project a bias-free image, but have been barraged with criticism from the public on the issue.

“Motions can be passed every day,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban League. “What we need now is an accelerated, active, aggressive commitment by our leadership to bring people together” and root out racism in the LAPD and throughout city government. Elsie Hui, civil rights coordinator for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, told the council that she supported the measure, but pushed for more. “We hope this will also lead to more proactive measures to ensure that racism ends, because otherwise the statement is merely empty words,” Hui said.

And when told of the council’s action, David Lehrer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, asked: “What exactly does that mean?”

Experts said that such “government by declaration” as Tuesday’s action has a history in America dating back to the Constitutional Convention, and that legislators invoke resolutions such as the anti-racism statement when they are powerless to do much else.

“It’s sort of a joke. It’s amusing, because one has the sense that there are a variety of problems that government has no ability to remedy, and racism may be one of them,” said Mark Petracca, a UC Irvine political scientist who specializes in local government and politics. “Passing a resolution of this sort is an admission on the part of those passing it that there’s very little government can do.”

Petracca, however, noted that some of the country’s founders had frowned on adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, saying those freedoms were already guaranteed by the main document.

Raphael Sonenshein, author of “Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles,” said he has seen little impact from the council members’ original declaration that the city was racism-free--he didn’t even know they had done it--and that the real need is for substantive policy changes and the dollars to implement them.

“Any resolution that’s passed unanimously probably isn’t going to do anything--that’s a simple rule of life,” said Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist who is a visiting professor this term at USC. “Resolutions are nice, but the fact is, we disagree a lot about what to do about [racism]. It’s really the next step that matters.”

Wachs’ staff believes that Los Angeles is the only city ever to declare itself racism-free, though several others in California have taken other steps to combat discrimination. West Hollywood outlawed discrimination against gays and lesbians on the night it became a city in 1984, and half a dozen other cities--including Los Angeles--have since passed similar laws.

But the racism-free resolution “legally doesn’t mean anything,” Sonenshein said.

Ridley-Thomas noted that in the second round, the council added a special provision to the racism-free resolution: It will be sent to every city department and commission. He also tacked onto the motion a move to establish a blue ribbon commission on race relations, which he had proposed more than a year ago.

“The work is unfinished,” Ridley-Thomas, one of the council’s three African American members, said to explain why he wanted the council to pass the resolution again. Indeed, the racism-free motion was sandwiched between two other council items dealing with the issue of discrimination: How to keep up the pace of police recruiting while working to rid the department of bias, and what to do with an airport commissioner who has publicly tangled with the council over affirmative action.

Said Councilman Richard Alarcon: “I only wish in my heart I knew that simple words alone would cause change.”