All of Los Angeles Needs to Be Heard

Leadership in Los Angeles presents extraordinary challenges. The city’s demographic shifts are unprecedented; its complexity, unparalleled. Given this reality, all public leaders will need substantial competence in handling the many group dynamics that come with Los Angeles’ landscape. This will require expert communication, trust-building and the ability to navigate the city’s many real and perceived intercultural fault lines.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board’s controversial decision to appoint Howard Miller first as CEO and now as chief operating officer has exposed these schisms. The fallout from this crisis has shown how a lack of communication and fragmentation in diverse leadership can lead to the erosion of trust that fuels intergroup tensions.

There can be no doubt that in the midst of this crisis, all affected parties have had difficulty communicating with one another. Nor is it surprising.

Key Latino leaders say that their concerns about the lack of due process in the board’s decision have largely been characterized in media accounts as ethnic protectionism. Roundly condemned as disrespectful and exclusionary by many Latino leaders, the board’s decision reminded many Latinos of past injustices perpetrated by those in power against a once small and nearly voiceless minority.

Board members say that they felt they were confronting a major crisis that required immediate and decisive action to rein in a deteriorating district that appeared out of control. They say they believed that with each passing day the 700,000 children in the district, 69% of whom are Latino, were falling deeper in peril.

As with any racially and politically complex issue, the grievances on all sides are deep. In 2000 and beyond, any governing body or public official exercising leadership will need the intercultural competency to navigate these fault lines. It is not enough, however, to suspend words on sound bite airwaves proclaiming that we only need to move beyond ethnic identity politics. In a city that will soon become “majority minority,” those who have traditionally been left out of and injured by public policy decisions will continue to feel outrage at closed-door decision-making, however legal or well-meaning these decisions may be.

We are in no way suggesting that tough policymaking be avoided, including personnel decisions involving minority officials who have failed to do the job. However, public discourse, information and communication are critical to effective governance, even though such democratic processes are often cumbersome, time-consuming and tedious.

Even in moments of crisis, the sensibilities and needs of all community stakeholders should be taken into account in any major restructuring decision. Without needlessly impeding difficult and perhaps unpopular decision-making needs, the key is to strike the fragile balance between making significant reform and allowing Los Angeles’ various communities access to decision-making.

Power-sharing always has been a part of the American ideal, but seldom a part of the reality. Those who traditionally have had power need to begin to understand the idea of sharing power. Likewise, those just coming into power need to understand that simply shifting authority from one group to another is not enough. The prosperity of Los Angeles rests on our collective will and ability to navigate the terrain of Los Angeles’ diversity by creating strong intergroup collaborations in a city where all can participate and thrive.