Candidates’ Complex Views on Race Issues

Race and ethnicity are the background noise of Los Angeles’ politics.

And the cacophony they generate drowns out a dissonant reality: L.A.’s mayor is elected by one city to govern another.

The Los Angeles that elects the mayor--and other citywide officeholders--remains white and largely affluent; the city the mayor governs is predominantly nonwhite and largely poor.

Turnout in the April 8 election will be low, somewhere around 30% of the eligible voters, predicts Susan Pinkus, director of The Times Poll. The most recent Times poll found that 65% of the likely voters are white, 20% are African American, 9% are Latino and 2% are Asian American.

These facts delineate the reasons for both Mayor Richard Riordan’s substantial lead over state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and his continuing difficulties with civic issues involving a racial or ethnic component. In 1993, when the mayor defeated former City Councilman Mike Woo, Riordan carried 67% of the white vote. African American, Latino and Asian American voters preferred Woo by substantial margins. Moreover, 87% of the white voters who thought “race relations” were an important issue voted for Woo. Last week’s Times poll found that substantial pluralities among all races and ethnicities believe Hayden would do “a better job of improving race relations in L.A.”

Riordan acknowledges the persistence of such perceptions, but says flatly that “they are wrong. I get tremendous respect when I go to South Los Angeles, and it’s a feeling I return. It’s also true that I don’t get along with the vocal few in every community who continually speak in the rhetoric of divisiveness.”

How should the mayor of Los Angeles reply to such rhetoric?

In a recent series of interviews, both Riordan and Hayden discussed their thoughts on the question. On one level, what emerged simply confirmed a singular fact of this year’s mayoral campaign: Angelenos seldom have had the opportunity to choose between two candidates whose operational conceptions of fair and effective government are so diametrically opposed. On another, more personal level, what emerged was surprising: Though both men would be loath to acknowledge it, they share important assumptions--and even some conclusions--on how questions of race and ethnicity ought to be approached.

For instance, both Riordan and Hayden insist first of all that there is a moral imperative to address this issue.

Riordan is particularly explicit in this respect. “God expects me to love people and to deal with them as equals,” he says. “The most important thing is that every ethnic group in this city has the same top priorities: They want to live in safety. They want a good education for their children. They want clean, healthy neighborhoods in which to raise their families--places with good libraries and good parks.

“When you walk out of your house in--say, South Los Angeles--and you don’t see those things, it’s not just bad social policy; it’s wrong, morally wrong. Plus, it doesn’t give you much hope for your future.”

Similarly, Hayden insists that “the mayor has to be able to tell the 14-year-old in the projects that hope is on the way. And that 14-year-old has to believe it or the gang violence will increase. The immigrants have to feel that their work as gardeners, janitors and so on is respected. If they’re not respected, frustration increases, which too often leads to violence among their children. A mayor can’t raise people out of poverty overnight, but he can raise them out of hopelessness.”

But in the architecture of government--no less than that of buildings--”God is in the details,” as architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum goes. And when it comes to essential governmental details, particularly with regard to racial and ethnic issues, Riordan and Hayden have markedly different visions.

Though the two are separated by less than a decade in age, the 57-year-old Hayden attributes this to generational differences. The 66-year-old mayor, according to the former student activist, has “a pre-1960s view of race. I can’t get into his mind, but his attitudes seem paternalistic. His idea of importance is based on your status and your bank account. Everybody else is to be pitied and given charitable contributions. I think he’s very tolerant of people who are very successful and happen to be of another race or sexual orientation.”

Riordan, contends Hayden--who began his public life as a Freedom Rider trying to integrate bus systems in Mississippi--”was not present during the last 30 years for the entire history of the civil rights movement. I’m sure he never attended a single march, ever.”

For his part, Riordan says he feels “more anger than I’ve ever felt at anybody, when I hear someone question the depth of my concern for racial equality. I care as much as I am capable of caring.”

His understanding of racial and ethnic issues, he says, has evolved with experience. “Growing up in New Rochelle, N.Y., there were a lot of blacks in my class during the first three years of grammar school. We were friends. We played together. I went to their houses, which were in the poorest area of town, and they came to mine, which was in the wealthiest. My parents didn’t object and neither did theirs.

“But when I was 21 or 22, it suddenly occurred to me that our parents never socialized. When I asked myself why, that revelation taught me something.”

And so, Riordan says, did his adult reflections on another childhood incident. “I was in the supermarket and I saw this young black boy who was lame, and I felt so sorry for him that tears came to my eyes. For some reason, as an adult, I recalled that little moment, and it occurred to me how demeaning my reaction was to him. I didn’t know anything about him as a person--nothing about how he coped, what his strengths or accomplishments were. I just assumed that being disabled was awful and that being black made it worse. Demeaning someone by depriving them of their individuality in that way is the worst thing you can do.”

Separated by time and experience, Riordan and Hayden also have decidedly different notions of what makes for an effective mayor in the nation’s most diverse city.

To Hayden, questions of “quality of life, crime and violence, education and business growth all come back to race relations. People see into this problem in different ways. But I just see it straight out that this is a city enveloped in constant seismic activity around race. In other words, we’ve just had some earthquakes while we’re talking, but they don’t bother us because they’re just little vibrations.

“They’ve occurred between people in two separate cars and between people on street corners. We don’t notice it. But every 30 years we have a major earthquake along racial fault lines. Just as we design the city’s buildings to be as safe as possible from the ‘big ones,’ we need a social policy that makes life sustainable in the face of the seismic activity that’s constantly occurring along racial and ethnic lines.”

As an example of such a policy, Hayden cites a recent experience that occurred when he spoke to Impacto, the community group organized by Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit well known for his work with members of the Eastside’s Latino gangs. The group included young people as well as their parents and, according to Hayden, “the last question was, ‘Are you ever going to come back?’

“So I said, ‘Of course, I’ll be back. Instead of having 60 staff people downtown, like Riordan does, I’m going to have people in offices in this community. They’re going to be teaching people how to use the law in tenant-landlord and consumer disputes, so you can empower yourselves. And instead of making you come downtown, we’re going to have community councils where you get the ability to do things. I’ll be back every couple of months.’ ”

According to Hayden, the Impacto audience said, “ ‘Great! Could you write that down?’ I said, ‘If you don’t believe me, sure!’

“They didn’t ask me to provide a hundred thousand jobs. They just asked me to come back,” Hayden says. “That’s how disillusioned and powerless people feel in these communities.”

Riordan too sees racial friction as a reality of life in contemporary Los Angeles, but has a very different view of the part the mayor ought to play, and of the obstacles he confronts.

“In many ways, this is not the great melting pot that I was led to believe in when I grew up as an Irishman whose people congratulated themselves on their assimilation into the rest of American society,” he said.

“Today, people take great pride in their distinctive cultures. But there’s also jealousy of other cultures and antagonism between one culture and another. These are facts you have to deal with and, quite honestly, these are facts I think the media has totally failed to acknowledge because they’re concerned about being politically correct.”

Riordan believes his administration has done a good job of “encouraging the formation of neighborhood groups and they have proliferated throughout South Los Angeles. For two years, I’ve been speaking with them and saying damn near the same thing: ‘If you want to solve problems in your community, you have to organize and take responsibilities.’ At our meetings, somebody will ask me a question about ‘what are you, as mayor, going to do about the tree that’s overhanging my driveway?’

“I’ll say, ‘Organize, get something going. Then you go to the council office or you come to me as an organization or, better yet, do what I would do. Cut the tree down yourself without asking anybody.’ I guess it comes down to the word empowerment. If you feel that you can’t make a difference, then you won’t do anything.”

To encourage empowerment, Riordan says, the mayor must “bring people of various cultures into solving the problems of other cultures, particularly the wealthier helping solve the problems of the economically disadvantaged. We’re really focusing more and more on how can we get the whites from the Valley to help the blacks in the inner city and Latinos in East L.A. A lot of people would like to help, but don’t have any idea how to do it. It’s our job to remove the mystery and lead them and to do this.”

In this context, Riordan believes strongly that he leads by example. In fact, he has personally and through his family foundation donated millions of dollars to schools, child-care facilities, churches and community organizations throughout the poorest neighborhoods in the Latino and African American communities. His philanthropy, he says, is directed as much as possible at giving its recipients “the tools to compete.”

“Some people may think it’s paternalism to insist that the people to whom you give money use it to become self-sufficient enough to secure that equality for themselves. But I don’t think so,” Riordan says.

Hayden, by contrast, believes that the mayor vastly overstates the importance of philanthropy, whatever its goals. “Charity has never been a substitute for public policy,” he says. “Charity has never been a substitute for a full-employment agenda. Charity is private. Government is public. Charity has strings. Charity keeps the powerless dependent--on charity.”

To Hayden, the linkage of private philanthropy with the rhetoric of self-sufficiency masks a deep contemporary problem he describes as “the secession of the affluent.”

“What Riordan is doing,” Hayden says, “is part of a march of abandonment away from the inner city, leaving police behind. Investment is relocated to the suburbs, and politics becomes about suburban voters. And the crazy assumption of this process is that we can withdraw from our cities. Well, we can’t get out of our cities and turn them into law enforcement processing areas requiring the expenditure of billions of public dollars for the lifetime incarceration of half of the young African American and Latino men in Los Angeles.”

Similarly, Hayden believes that Riordan’s aversion to what the mayor calls “political correctness” actually is an insensitivity to the complexity of leadership in a multicultural city. As an example, he cites the part he says the mayor played in encouraging the Police Commission not to renew Chief Willie L. Williams’ contract.

“It’s like being totally blind to the racial dynamics of the city,” Hayden said. “It doesn’t mean you pander to race or that you follow some politically correct line. It means that the first understanding of the mayor when he wakes up has to be: ‘We’re in a city of racial misunderstanding and divides.’ The most important criterion to judge the police chief by is whether he has stabilized and promoted harmony between racial and ethnic groups in the city. Everything else has to be seen as room for improvement and not grounds for dismissal.

“Willie Williams is the most important healing and stabilizing figure in terms of race relations in the city of Los Angeles right now,” Hayden says. “To fire him is the most irresponsible approach that a mayor of this city could take.”

This is a line of argument Riordan utterly rejects. “I don’t judge people on their color,” he says, “and I think that’s a form of racism. I don’t think Willie Williams wants to be judged as a black. He wants to be judged on his competency.”

In this, as in his approach to community development, Riordan says his personal conduct mirrors his public rhetoric. He points out, for example, that his single largest personal investment stake is in PIA, a national company whose African American president, Tom Gloss, Riordan personally recruited.

Drawing on his experience as a businessman, the mayor observes that few blacks apply for jobs at his downtown restaurant, the Original Pantry.

“It’s basically Latino, for whatever reason,” Riordan says. “They don’t get many black applicants. They have some black waiters, but not very many. I don’t know the reason and I hesitate to guess, but it’s true to a great extent throughout the city. [Waiters] tend to be more Latino. I think a lot of groups [like] Filipinos become doctors and nurses.”

To Riordan, however, such comparisons among groups “take your eye off the solution. You have different cultures that have lasted for centuries, and then you have an African American who started out . . . a little over a hundred years ago, started out from zero as slaves. Maybe in the history of the world you can’t expect them to have gotten where other cultures have gotten over many centuries. But that doesn’t mean you give up. You have to fight, fight, fight to give them the tools to compete.”

When asked to name the minority Americans they have most admired during their lifetimes, Hayden and Riordan offered a virtual capitulation of both their common ground and their radical divergence. Both named Martin Luther King Jr. and United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez. But when they were asked to explain the latter choice, their different reasons were instructive.

“Cesar may be the most important,” says Hayden, “because the legacy of the others, including King, has turned into books or stale articles or remembrance days. But if you look at what’s really happening in L.A., it’s the mobilization of Latino workers. And every single economic justice movement in Los Angeles that I know of is led by somebody who was originally trained somewhere in the farm workers [union].”

Riordan’s perspective, like his experience, is a different one. “I think our system works best, is most just,” he says, “when labor and management fight out their differences on a level playing field. Cesar Chavez did more to level that playing field under more difficult circumstances than anyone else in my lifetime.”