Retreat of the Race-Baiters

Funny, but it wasn’t too long ago that optimists were heralding a new dawn in Southern California politics, a chance to leave behind the stormy racial and ethnic conflicts of the ‘90s. The occasion was the election of three members to the Los Angeles Board of Education, a slate backed by Mayor Richard Riordan to reform the district. Certainly it had been easy to lose trust in a board that couldn’t get textbooks in children’s hands and decided that an old oil field was a fine place for a $200-million high school that may never open. Of the board members up for reelection, it was easiest to say good riddance to Barbara Boudreaux and her brand of racial rhetoric.

It was Boudreaux, an African American, who accused Los Angeles’ white mayor of engaging in “plantation politics” in backing the campaign of rival Genethia Hayes. Black leaders took to the ramparts for Boudreaux. It mattered little that Hayes, also African American, had a solid record of service and was regional director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Hayes, Boudreaux suggested, was “the in-house slave” being used “to control workers in the field.”

All of which made the election of Hayes and other reformers feel like the sudden warmth of sunshine. The politics of ethnic identity had failed, I thought.

How quickly the storm clouds reappeared. When the new board, with Hayes as president, clumsily engineered the sacking of Supt. Ruben Zacarias in October, it was Latino activists who took to the ramparts, asking why, in a district where almost 70% of the students are Latino, only one of seven board members has brown skin. There were protest demonstrations, sharp criticisms of Hayes, snippets of anti-Semitic rhetoric directed at board members.

What’s wrong with this picture, class? In an ideal world, candidates, school superintendents and other public officials would be judged by character, performance and ideas. However, this not being a perfect world, race and ethnicity will drive Southern California’s political dynamics for the foreseeable future, or at least until mixed heritage blurs identity distinctions.

That’s not to suggest nothing has changed. To the contrary, as Southern California gallops into the next millennium, it seems identity politics are paradoxically both more and less important. It’s more important in that a generation of immigrants has bolstered Latino power and built up other distinct communities--Armenians in Glendale, Chinese in the west San Gabriel Valley, Koreans in the Mid-City and east San Gabriel Valley, Cambodians in Long Beach. The gay-rights movement has created another identity. Now there are more tribes, more turf battles, more land mines to step over.

Yet in searching for Southern California’s future, in listening to dozens of activists, academics, elected officials and schoolchildren, I encountered more hope than dread, though no one was sanguine. Certainly there will be struggles and controversies that break along racial and ethnic lines. But as the region’s demographics change, as a growing number of identity groups gain strength, problems will have to find solutions through broad coalitions, and political candidates will have to find support outside their individual ethnic groups. Together, those influences may well foster a public arena that is less polarized and more constructive.

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What is most striking about the transformation of the L.A. school board is the long-anticipated rise of Latino power. “We’re going from a black-white paradigm to a brown-whomever paradigm,” says Paul Vandeventer, president of Community Partners, a nonprofit agency that is incubating more that 125 civic and charitable programs in greater Los Angeles. The successful leader, Vandeventer suggests, “is the one who can break out and straddle multiple ethnic groups. That will be the key to civic leadership.”

Numbers tell part of the story. The 2000 U.S. Census is expected to show Los Angeles County to have a population of about 10 million--Latinos at 45%, whites at 33%, Asians at 12%, blacks at 9%. By 2020, Latinos are expected to make up about 55%, whites about 23%, Asians 14% and blacks 8%. These estimates, however, don’t take into account another important trend: The growing number of intermarriages means more people with multicultural identities.

To get a better sense of the changes, imagine a mural. Once upon a time, what grabbed your eye--or at least the media’s--was the conflict between black and white: Watts, Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley; the NAACP and the BusStop anti-busing campaign; Daryl Gates, Eula Love, Rodney King; Florence and Normandie avenues; O.J. Simpson. For more than 20 years, with the exception of one year, L.A. has had a black mayor and a white police chief, or vice versa.

There was always lots of brown in the L.A. mural, but until recently it seemed oddly muted, mostly just background. Latinos hadn’t come close to possessing the political clout their raw numbers would suggest, largely because so many were too young to vote or were not citizens. Then came 1994, when Proposition 187--a populist backlash against illegal immigration--triggered a backlash of its own. Passed by the voters and then declared unconstitutional by the courts, Prop. 187’s legacy is the activism it inspired among Latinos. Protesters marched on the streets, waves of immigrants applied for citizenship, the Democratic Party strengthened its hold. Orange County Republican Robert K. Dornan discovered the new realities two years later when voters in his U.S. House district, which had a burgeoning Latino population, replaced him with Democrat Loretta Sanchez.

The Prop. 187 experience carries a couple of lessons. First, identity politics is in the eye of the beholder. (One man’s affirmative action is another’s reverse discrimination.) Second, identity politics breeds more identity politics. Play with fire, you might get burned.

Los Angeles’ mural today is more crowded, more colorful, more complicated--more interesting than ever before. The brown shades have thickened and gained texture. You’ll notice that the strokes of yellow, representing Asians, are more plentiful and bolder, especially in the San Gabriel Valley. And because this political portrait isn’t only about race and ethnicity, there’s plenty of green for money, some work-shirt blue for organized labor, the gold of Hollywood glitter, the pink of gay power.

Because so many municipal races are nonpartisan and so many state and congressional districts are designed as “safely” Democrat or Republican, ideology takes a back seat to identity in Southern California. While whites and Asians tend to divide roughly equally between Democrat and Republican, blacks and Latinos are predominantly Democrat. Among the Democrats, you’ll find the black caucus and the Latino caucus as well as a network of white Jewish politicians that has had striking success in L.A.. The groups function almost as parties within a party.

One of the most interesting chapters in identity politics will be the spring primary for the Assembly seat being vacated by Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who hopes to become the city’s first Latino mayor since the 1800s. In the heavily Latino and Catholic district--stretching from Hollywood east through Silver Lake and into northeast L.A. and Boyle Heights--the two top contenders are openly gay. Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg is trying to duplicate school board member David Tokofsky’s feat of being a white Jew who wins election in a district that is more than 70% Latino. AIDS activist Cesar Portillo, Goldberg’s leading challenger, passes out campaign brochures that emphasize his Boyle Heights roots and tout him as “Our Own.” Portillo says he has been struck by the communities’ differing perceptions: “Among Latinos on the Eastside, it’s, ‘Jackie? Doesn’t she live in Hollywood?’ In the gay community, it’s, ‘Cesar? Why is he running against Jackie?’ ”

In this era of more pluralistic politics, Latinos play a significant role in important debates and most electoral contests. Whites remain powerful, especially on a regional level, because they tend to have the green. But in many locales, contests will come down to Latino versus whomever--black in South Los Angeles, Asian in the west San Gabriel Valley, white in scattered areas. Those who worry about civil unrest look first where L.A. has erupted before--the low-income southside neighborhoods. They have their reasons. Indeed, while identity politics will lift Latino prospects in the coming years, the changes pose an “identity crisis” for African Americans, says Brenda Shockley, president of Community Build, an agency established in the aftermath of the 1992 riots to provide job training.

African American leaders, she suggests, need to reach out more: “As an African American, I’m very interested in helping my people. But being for my people doesn’t mean being against somebody else. And that nuance often gets lost.” Black politicians understand that the Latino power in South L.A. is literally coming of age.

“It’s not brain surgery,” says Assemblyman Roderick Wright, who lives in South-Central. In his district, Wright explains, 70% of the residents up to age 15 are Latino, as are about 60% of those between ages 15 and 25. Over age 50, the vast majority are black. “As the older blacks die, they’ll be replaced by Latinos. When their numbers increase, they’ll take the seat. I’m just a realist. I can’t go to Mississippi and get more black people.”

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On a recent visit to the San Gabriel Valley, I stopped in to watch a procession of Latino and Asian children proudly read their winning essays in Monterey Park’s “Harmony Month” celebration. The essay topic: “How Would You Promote Cultural Diversity in the New Millennium?” The question seemed a bit off target. To paraphrase an old theater saying: Diversity is easy. Harmony is hard.

A decade before Prop. 187 divided California, this city of about 65,000 residents was split by an “English Only” movement that originated in elements of the city’s shrinking white community. Troubled by a huge immigration of Chinese and Chinese-oriented development, the “English Only” crowd pushed for ordinances to ban foreign languages on commercial signs and in library collections. One “English Only” advocate won election to the City Council--and, in 1988, so did Judy Chu, a Chinese American backed by a coalition of Asians, Latinos and whites.

Although Chu was by no means Monterey Park’s first Asian council member, she was the first elected in a racially charged environment. The alliance between Asians and Latinos carried beyond Monterey Park’s boundaries into the post-1990 census redistricting. Conscious of the divide-and-conquer practice of racial gerrymandering, Asians and Latinos successfully lobbied for districts that would have Latino majorities but would also group Monterey Park with three neighboring cities with sizable Asian populations: Alhambra, San Gabriel and Rosemead. “Their common enemy,” Leland Saito, an ethnic studies professor at UC San Diego, observed in a 1998 study, was “the political establishment. . . . They also knew that if Asian Americans and Latinos were pitted against one another in the process, both groups could end up losing.”

In the San Gabriel Valley and beyond, rising numbers of Asian candidates have won races where it mattered less whether they ran as Republicans or Democrats and more whether the political climate was “de-racialized,” to use Saito’s term. But Asian activists also know that, as a group, they are far from political maturity. One reason is that among Asians, especially immigrants, ethnic identity matters more than race. While Latino immigrants share a common language and overlapping history, the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and others speak different tongues and are divided by often bitter history.

Yet despite the hopeful signs in the San Gabriel Valley, as the new century opens, we can find many examples of identity politics as usual. Asians and Latinos, once allies in the San Gabriel Valley, increasingly see each other as rivals. Just ask Chu. When she ran for the Assembly in 1998, her strategists, counting the identity politics numbers, thought that only 15,000 votes would be needed if the remaining votes split among the Latino candidates. Chu got her 15,000 votes, including the vast majority of Asians’. But the East L.A. precincts came in heavily for eventual winner Gloria Romero, a candidate backed by the Eastside Latino political establishment.

With another redistricting coming up, electoral districts likely will drift eastward--a few blocks here, a few miles there. It is easy to foresee a district in which Asians are stronger. Chu hasn’t ruled out another run.

Will identity politics ever end? Will birds of a feather ever not campaign together? There is, perhaps, one sure way to de-racialize politics--a social program advocated by the celluloid Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth. What America needs, Bulworth suggested in the 1998 film of the same name, is a “voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction.” In other words: Make love, not war.