Private Lives That Belie Public Words

Mayor James K. Hahn’s announcement that he opposes a second term for Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks has provoked a full-scale political squabble. And like so many struggles in Los Angeles, the battle is being drawn along racial lines. Yet, race is not what threatens to tear this city apart. Despite their obvious racial implications, secessionist movements--from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro, from Eagle Rock to Hollywood--are about place, not race.

For too long, Angelenos have defined “community” racially. In our civic imaginations, the city is made up of a handful of ethnic and racial constituencies, rather than of hundreds of districts and neighborhoods. If we are going to cohere as one city, we must redefine community in geographic terms and eliminate the anachronistic racial vocabulary we have inherited from our segregationist past.

The obsolescence of our political language is underscored by the remarkable level of integration among the city’s native-born middle classes. One recent study showed that Angelenos are more likely than other Americans to have friends from other ethnic and racial groups. Further defying the conception that Los Angeles is a federation of self-contained, monolithic, ethnic “communities,” the city’s political elite itself is increasingly mixed. Indeed, in the past few years, the number of ethnically mixed or intermarried officials in L.A. County has skyrocketed.

Still, everyday in L.A., we routinely speak of the Asian, Latino or black “communities,” but never of a white community. The media like to call black and Latino elected officials “black leaders” and “Latino leaders,” but they never call, say, Hahn a “white leader.” It’s the language of a time when blacks were disenfranchised and a small African-American elite was expected to speak for them. But as newly gained voting rights turned minority advocates into elected officials, they were still regarded as representatives of their races, not of their districts. Today, this language is perpetuated by racial advocates, whose power it inflates, and by a media that finds it more entertaining and cost-effective to interview a “racial chieftain” than to conduct an opinion survey.

The underlying assumption is that whites live as individuals while nonwhites are mere extensions of a collective mind-set. We view minority groups as if they were centralized, hierarchical organizations rather than as aggregations of individuals with diverse opinions and outlooks. Worse yet, a vocabulary born of racial segregation inhibits us from envisioning civic integration.

Although many--particularly the poorest--Angelenos are still clustered along ethnic lines, race and geography are no longer interchangeable. If geography tends to be coterminous with any category, it is class. Hahn’s failure, so far, to appoint many commissioners from the city’s poorest neighborhoods spotlights his and other city politicians’ fixation on race. It is significant to note that even though the mayor has appointed only five commissioners from South L.A., African Americans are not underrepresented in the ranks of citizen panels. Just like white, Latino or Asian commissioners, most black panelists don’t live in the city’s most neglected areas.

Race, to be sure, matters in politics. Candidates routinely tailor their messages to appeal to a variety of Angelenos. Particularly among the foreign-born, ethnicity carries powerful political currency. But class and place may be as--and sometimes more--telling. In last year’s mayoral election, for example, Westside Jews voted heavily for former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, while their counterparts in the Valley--less wealthy, more moderate--cast their ballots for former City Atty. Hahn. Similarly, Mexican-American politicos in northeast San Fernando Valley have different agendas and ply a different style of politics than their co-ethnics on the Eastside. Constantly distinguishing themselves from what they call the Eastside establishment, Latino pols in the Valley are building a different kind of power base.

But the extent to which L.A.’s political class is mixing racially has potentially far-reaching effects on the way politics are played in Los Angeles. For example, when Councilwoman Jan Perry, who converted to Judaism two decades ago and is married to a Jewish man, authored the motion to waive city fees for this month’s Nation of Islam convention downtown, was she acting as a black or a Jew?

Does Eric Garcetti qualify as a traditional minority leader and, if so, which minority? The 30-year-old councilman is a Mexican Italian Jewish former Rhodes scholar and represents some of the same neighborhoods as Democratic Assemblyman Dario Frommer, a Mexican Hungarian Jewish official who is a rising star in the state Latino Legislative Caucus. In 1999, L.A. County’s Mexican American sheriff, Lee Baca, married a Taiwanese-born engineer. A year earlier, the lone Republican county supervisor, Mike Antonovich, wed a Taiwanese actress in a ceremony at an Armenian church.

L.A. City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, the city’s second-ranking official, is himself half-Anglo and married to an Anglo woman from the Midwest. Representing downtown Los Angeles, the former head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, is the wife of an Anglo Southerner. Her Mexican American colleague, first-term Rep. Hilda L. Solis, who represents the lower San Gabriel Valley and parts of East Los Angeles, has a Palestinian American spouse.

While most politicians prefer to keep their personal lives private, others, like former state Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg--who is Jewish and married to a Mexican American academic--have attempted to use their cross-ethnic marriages to strengthen political alliances. But the mixed backgrounds of most local politicians, like Czech Mexican Assemblywoman Sally Havice of Bellflower or her German Mexican colleague Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach, are generally ignored in the press. It’s not a stretch to say that most of the suburban voters who elected Chinese American Carol Liu of La Canada-Flintridge and Mexican American Robert Pacheco of Walnut to the state Assembly probably have no idea, nor would be particularly surprised, that their representatives are married to Anglos.

But that’s precisely the point. Today, class and geography separate Angelenos much more than race.

Charter reform, so far, has failed to produce a more representative democracy and to integrate the more isolated parts of the city with the whole. It takes 15 minutes for a police unit to reach my street from the station house. The desk commanders have never heard the name of my little neighborhood northeast of downtown. The fledgling neighborhood councils, our consolation prize for not having created more political districts, seem to be giving more power to the homeowner groups that already had plenty of it. And just as the controversy over Chief Parks was quickly reduced to a racial struggle, rather than to the merits of his performance in office, we can expect more of the same when the battle over secessionism heats up later this year.

At a time when race seems reflexively superimposed on every social issue, it is even tougher to ask the question that secessionism should force us all to ponder: What constitutes a community?