Los Angeles City Council has been rocked by a racial scandal that has already forced one member to resign. Nury Martinez, who served as city council president, initially stepped down from the leadership, but not her seat, when the 80-minute recording from October 2021 was leaked to the press, covered by The Los Angeles Times in their October 9 story. The tapes featured two council members—Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Leon. A top union official, Ron Herrera, the now-former president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, was also featured on the tapes and resigned on October 10. The meeting was reportedly over redistricting, where Martinez was caught making cruel racist remarks about some of the city's residents, including the adopted black son of Councilman Mike Bonin. She called the child a “monkey.” Martinez resigned earlier this week, and de Leon and Cedillo might be forced to go as well now that President Joe Biden has weighed in on this public relations nightmare. He said everyone involved should resign.
Yet, the media reaction also took a turn with this NBC News piece which just had to delve into the Latino community’s dabbling in white supremacy. The initial headline read: “Los Angeles City Council members’ racist remarks point to a not-so-hidden relationship between Latinos and white supremacy" (via NBC News):
Some may want to see the explosive, racist diatribes of a handful of prominent Los Angeles City Council members as an unfortunate incident that will eventually fade away. They might dismiss the remarks revealed in a leaked audio as isolated and confined to a few Latino leaders.
But the reality is that such prejudice from Latino to Latino and Latino to other racial groups is not so uncommon. Call it anti-Black racism, colorism, classism — it all adds up to a destructive strain that is not so hidden in Latino culture.
As the Latino population increases and diversifies, the persistence of racism threatens to dissolve hard-won Latino political and civil rights gains and fracture delicately balanced coalitions with other racial groups.
That was on stark display in the conversation among former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, council members Kevin De León and Gil Cedillo and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, who resigned Monday.
Martinez, the council’s first Latina president, resigned from the leadership role Monday and resigned her council seat Thursday. She stepped down after a recording revealed she had called her colleague Mike Bonin’s then-2-year-old son, who is Black, a “changuito,” Spanish for “monkey.”
“There are many Nury Martinezes,” said Fordham University law professor Tanya K. Hernández, the author of the recently published book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.”
“The idea is: ‘Oh no, not us. We can’t be harboring any kind of racial animosity.’ We need to put a stop to this shield against reckoning because of our Latino ancestry, as if that made us somehow immune to the legacies of slavery,” said Hernández, who is Afro Latina.
[…]
Martinez mocked Indigenous Mexican immigrants of Oaxacan descent living in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, calling them “short, dark people.” “I don’t know where these people are from. I don’t know what village they came [from], how they got here. ... Tan feos (they’re ugly),” she says in the audio recording.
What was said was racist—that’s not in dispute, but I thought that nonwhite folks could not be racist. For years, we were told that only white people could only carry that infamous moniker because they dominate specific power structures. It’s another lefty pseudointellectual goalpost that prevents the Left from calling out their side over viciously racist remarks. Does anyone stop and think why ‘stop Asian hate’ had a shelf life of about 20 seconds? It’s because Asians were predominately being assaulted and beaten by black Americans. The narrative was that white Trump supporters were committing the violence, and the crime statistics were compiled. These assaults were racially motivated, but not by the racial group the media loves to use as a punching bag. No doubt, they would weaponize these attacks against Trump and the GOP if the race was right. It wasn’t, so these assaults got suffocated with a pillow.
The woke Left is just a mess on these issues. The ever-changing rules on race and what constitutes as racism change every day, hence this new rule that now declares nonwhite folks can be racist. Of course, we all knew that anyone of any racial and ethnic group could hold prejudiced views, but now that a Democrat-run city is in ruins over a racial scandal, with Biden offering comment—the rules must change. Mr. Bonin is also gay, so it added another layer to this deep blue woke lefty mess.
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