As the campaign heats up in the final weeks before November’s U.S. midterms elections, so have overt appeals to racial animus and resentment, reported The Washington Post (WP) last week.
“The toxic remarks appear to be receiving less pushback from Republicans than in past years, suggesting that some candidates in the first post-Trump election cycle have been influenced by the ex-president’s norm-breaking example,” said the report.
The racial invective has come at a time when Democrats are dealing with their own scandal in Los Angeles, where Democratic city council members and a labor leader were recorded making racist statements, according to the report.
Civil rights leaders say they are holding out hope that the environment will improve after the U.S. midterms but worry that each new attack further erodes the standards for how people in public life talk about race and religion.
“I don’t know if it’ll be very easy to put the genie back in the bottle,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, was quoted as saying.
The racist messages from prominent Republicans came in rapid succession. It was on Friday, Sept. 30, when Donald Trump used racist language toward Elaine Chao, who served as his transportation secretary for four years. A week later, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used racist rhetoric about Black people, crime and reparations.
The next day, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia re-emphasized her support for the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. All the while, Black candidates for the U.S. Senate were confronting attack ads emphasizing race in unsubtle ways. Yesterday, for good measure, Trump thought it’d be a good idea to dabble in antisemitism — again.
To be sure, the push isn’t especially surprising. It’s also an offensive with ample precedent in the American tradition. What’s more, it’s very likely to have the intended effect: The right would steer clear of such ugly tactics if conservatives were convinced they wouldn’t work.
But The Washington Post had a good report over the weekend noting the difference between this year’s offensive messaging and what voters have seen in recent years.
LA council member Kevin de Leon said he won’t resign over racist remarks he made in a leaked recording.
Speaking in an interview with Univision Noticias, de Leon repeated an earlier apology and said that he was wrong, but he defied calls to step down — coming from people including President Joe Biden and Mayor Eric Garcetti.
The push for de Leon and fellow LA council member Gil Cedillo, who was also part of the taped conversation, to depart has led to protests outside their homes and at Los Angeles City Hall, shutting down council meetings.
Last week, Nury Martinez stepped down as LA council president and ultimately resigned from her seat amid the deepening scandal over racist comments she made last year, revealed in the leaked audio, about a colleague’s young Black son. In the exchange, de Leon said the child’s father, who is White, carries around his son like a designer handbag.
A fourth participant, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, also resigned from his position last week.
In the interview on Wednesday, de León said that he “failed in that moment in time in not stepping up and shutting the meeting down.”
Martinez resigned the council presidency last week and later her council seat. Herrera also stepped down. It’s still not known who recorded the conversation, which took place last year and the labor federation headquarters.
But de León and Cedillo, so far have resisted calls to step aside from a number of colleagues and top Democrats, including President Joe Biden. Cedillo will soon be departing the council anyway at the end of the year after he failed to win another term, but de León’s term runs through 2024.
During the conversation, Martinez used the Spanish term for “monkey” to refer to Bonin’s son, while de León appeared to agree with her comment that the child was used like a fashion accessory like Martinez’s designer handbag. De Leon called that remark “flippant.”
A Chatsworth racist woman was seen on a video banging a hammer against her neighbor’s car and telling her to “get the (expletive) out of this neighborhood.”
The resident who posted the video to social media described the neighbor as racist.
In the video, the woman has a hammer in each hand and she bangs dents into her neighbor’s car. She then starts walking toward her neighbor with the hammers in her hands. As her neighbor backs away, she says “Get the (expletive) out of this neighborhood you (expletive.)”
The woman tells her neighbor to go ahead and call the police – which she does. As the neighbor is calling police, the woman can be seen using the hammers to attack and knock over her neighbor’s recycling bin.
The woman was arrested but then released from jail the next day due to COVID-19 rules requiring low or no bail and quick release for minor offenses.
Since the video was posted Saturday, it has been viewed more than 5 million times.
The man who owns the damaged car said his insurance didn’t cover vandalism. He set up a GoFundMe page to help with repair costs and has already received thousands of dollars in contributions.
Randell Minott has earned widespread praise for a viral video in which he berated a racist cop who, he said, pulled him over and approached with his gun drawn — just because he forget to signal a turn. But Minott also inspired many questions — ones he came forward to address in a detailed interview with TheWrap.
The video, shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, fueled discussions about racial profiling and overzealous cops — especially in light of NFL player Michael Bennett recently accusing police of profiling him, and countless cases of unarmed African-American men, like Minott, finding themselves at the ends of officers’ service weapons.
“When people say, oh, I went overboard [in the video], they don’t understand what was going through my mind at that time,” Minott told TheWrap. “The more and more I started talking to him, I started realizing this guy could have made a mistake and killed me over a f—ing turn signal.”
Minott said the incident occurred on Sept. 6 in Kansas City, Missouri — and provided a citation that confirmed those details. The New Jersey-based DJ, who sometimes performs under the name Jimmy Spliff, said he was visiting Missouri for work.
Once the video went viral, many praised Minott for his courage and nuance as he emotionally took the officer to task. But some on Twitter and Reddit cast suspicion on his account, noting that the officer in the video is not seen with his gun out. Skeptics wondered if Minott was just looking for internet fame.
Minott told TheWrap he didn’t begin recording himself and the officer until the officer had holstered his gun because he wanted to be sure he wasn’t in danger.
“Why the hell would I reach for a phone or reach for anything if he has a gun pointed at me? He [had] a gun pointed at me, I didn’t say anything to him until he re-holstered the gun,” Minott said.
Teachers are being given anti-racism training in Wales as pupils have spoken of their experiences of racist bullying and feeling isolated in schools.
Wales is the first UK nation to make the history of Britain’s colonial past mandatory in school lessons.
Figures show that 35 teachers identify as black and 75 as Asian, and 25,915 as white in Wales’ schools.
Education Minister Jeremy Miles said more needed to be done to attract an ethnically diverse range of teachers.
Pupils who spoke to BBC Wales described their experiences of racist bullying, with one saying he wanted “everyone to feel safe”, while a teacher spoke of feeling alone, and hoped the anti-racism training would help.
Schoolmate Gwen believes the community in Wales can feel “quite a white place”, adding: “By being a person who isn’t white within the community, you can feel quite alone, or you can feel different.
Welsh government figures show that for the 2021-22 academic year of the 26,600 teachers in Wales, 25,915 of them said they were white.
Around 1% of teachers in Wales say they are black, Asian, or from other or mixed minority ethnic backgrounds, according to the 2021-22 school workforce census.
In terms of pupils, for the 2021-22 academic year, 350,842 said they were white British, while 51,128 were from other ethnic backgrounds.
New resources are now available to teachers called ‘diversity and anti-racist professional learning’ which were created by academic Chantelle Haughton, a former pupil of Betty Campbell.
The Cardiff Metropolitan University lecturer described it as “groundbreaking” but added: “It’s really troubling that we’re still having this conversation in 2022”.
The training was launched at Llanwern High School in Newport, which has its own diversity club and was the first winner of the Betty Campbell MBE award.
Learning about black, Asian and minority ethnic histories and experiences is now a mandatory part of the new curriculum for Wales, which is billed as the biggest reform to Welsh education in decades.
This week, a recording of Latino Los Angeles City Council members making racist comments burst into the news. But racism among Blacks and Latinos and Latino anti-Black racism is not new or surprising. A number of scholars have examined the conflict between these two groups, including Efren Perez and colleagues, here at The Monkey Cage.
Blacks and Latinos are more likely to move into neighborhoods dominated by the other group than into predominantly White neighborhoods, which means they are especially likely to have social and political interactions. But our research finds that the Black-Latino relationship is complicated by the fact that these two communities think of racial solidarity in fundamentally different ways. Here’s what that means for collaboration.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Black and Brown communities worked together in Los Angeles politics.
The Black and Latino communities appeared to join in political solidarity during the 1960s and ’70s, with a wave of civil rights protests across the United States. In Los Angeles, the Chicano movement borrowed tactics heavily from the Black Panther party. A group that called itself the Brown Berets sponsored walkouts in East Los Angeles to protest police brutality, advocate for better housing and education, and protest the U.S. war in Vietnam.
As with so much activism from that period, this died down by the 1990s. Latino populations in places such as Los Angeles grew larger than the Black population, leading scholars and other observers to begin discussing conflict and competition between the groups.
Many scholars and political observers have assumed these groups are competing over a limited set of resources — with one group or the other getting more or less of, say, job opportunities and political power. For instance, as apparently was happening in the offensive Los Angeles conversation, discussions of redistricting often turn into debates over whether one community or the other will have more or less influence over choosing the potential representative from a particular district.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The two groups could instead work to build solidarity so as to gain power for both. However, achieving that requires that groups consider how their marginalization is similar, different and at times connected to the oppression of others. We found that Latino folks are less likely to perceive systemic oppression in general.
Every day in the United States, Black children are investigated by the child welfare system and forcibly separated from their parents, at rates far greater than their white peers. Decades of data, research, and lived experiences reveal the deep disparities and discrimination within this system.
Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children). One in 41 Black children will have their relationship with their birth parent or parents legally terminated (more than double the rate of the general population). Let those numbers sink in for a moment.
Each of these numbers represents a child and a family for whom contact with the child welfare system has caused harm—from intrusion and disruption to shattered lives. These horrifying statistics don’t even account for the additional trauma Black children often face within the child welfare system (a point we will return to). Involvement with this system, which authorizes the surveillance, regulation, control, and separation of families, causes immeasurable harm to Black children, families, and communities.
That the state can intrude into the private lives of families and separate children from their mothers and fathers hits at some of the most fundamental aspects of our humanity. It touches on the right to family integrity and on a child’s right to his or her identity, and, when compounded by the racial discrimination our child welfare system is structured to impose, it becomes a question of basic equality and human dignity.
Racial discrimination in U.S. child welfare is, in other words, a human rights issue. And a key body of the United Nations (UN) agrees. On August 30, 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a group of international experts charged with monitoring state compliance with human rights obligations on racial discrimination, expressed concern at the “disproportionate number of children of racial and ethnic minorities removed from their families and placed in foster care” in the U.S. The UN committee called on the Biden administration to “take all appropriate measures to eliminate racial discrimination in the child welfare system, including by amending or repealing laws, policies and practices that have a disparate impact on families of racial and ethnic minorities.” We could not agree more.
Bricia Lopez has welcomed people of all walks to dine at her family’s popular restaurant on the Indigenous-influenced food of her native Mexican state of Oaxaca — among them Nury Martinez, the first Latina elected president of the Los Angeles City Council.
The restaurant, Guelaguetza, has become an institution known for introducing Oaxaca’s unique cuisine and culture to Angelenos, attracting everyone from immigrant families to Mexican stars to powerful city officials such as Martinez.
But now after a scandal exploded over a recording of Martinez making racist remarks about Oaxacans such as Bricia Lopez, the 37-year-old restaurateur and cookbook author said she feels a tremendous sense of betrayal.
Martinez resigned from her council seat Wednesday and offered her apologies. But the disparaging remarks still deeply hurt the city’s immigrants from Oaxaca, which has one of Mexico’s large indigenous populations. Sadly, many said, they are not surprised. Both growing up in their homeland and after reaching the U.S., they say they’ve become accustomed to hearing such stinging comments — not only from non-Latinos but from lighter skinned Mexican immigrants and their descendants.
Following Martinez’ departure, two other Latino City Council members also are facing widespread calls to resign since the year-old recording surfaced of them mocking colleagues while scheming to protect Latino political strength in council districts. Martinez used a disparaging term for the Black son of a white council member and called immigrants from Oaxaca ugly.
Bricia Lopez said she heard such racist comments growing up in California but had hoped they would be a thing of the past and that young Oaxacan immigrants would not have to hear them.
Oaxaca has more than a dozen ethnicities, including Mixtecos and Zapotecs. The southern Mexican state is known for famously hand-dyed woven rugs, pristine Pacific tourist beaches, a smoky alcohol called Mezcal and sophisticated cuisine including moles — thick sauces crafted from more than two dozen ingredients.
A racist drunk man berated fellow straphangers and screamed racial slurs on a subway train this weekend until a group of angry commuters decided they’d had enough — pushing him out the door when the train made a stop and even tossing soup at him, a video captured by a rider shows.
The white man, who was openly drinking a can of Lime-A-Rita on the L train as it barreled through the tunnel toward Brooklyn just before 2 p.m. Saturday, was already in the middle of a fit when rider Joshua Pyne turned a camera on him and caught him yelling about his First Amendment rights. He repeatedly uttered the N-word.
“I talk s–t because I know I can,” the racist drunk man shouted. “I’m a lawyer. I went to NYU Law.”
Before Pyne started up his camera, the man got into a spat with a group of black teenagers at the 1st Avenue stop, he said. Once they got off the train, the racist drunk referred to them as “stupid n—–s,” which prompted one woman to spit on him and a guy to try to get him to stop yelling.
But that’s when the jerk doubled down and kept screaming.
A racially diverse group of riders on the car tried to get him to calm down and quit yelling, but he repeatedly refused. As the train pulled into Bedford Avenue, some of the riders stood between the man and his shopping bag, which he had left on a seat.
He told them they couldn’t take his property, but they continued to hold him back.
“F–k your bag, dude,” one guy told him.
The crowd then shoved him out the door onto the platform. A man kicked him several times and the woman who spat on him threw soup at him, which landed all over his arm.
The end of the incident wasn’t caught on video, but Pyne says a cop walked up and the racist drunk man started arguing with him while the train continued on its way. The man never got his bag back.
“Everyone on the car felt pretty demoralized,” said Pyne.
Joe Biden has called for the resignation of three LA city council (Los Angeles) members who were caught on tape making racist comments in a meeting last year.
The profanity-laced recordings, which emerged on Sunday, document three Latino city council members and a labor leader discussing the city’s redrawing of council district boundaries amid the redistricting process, as well as the need to re-elect Latino members and protect economic interests within Latino districts.
The recordings capture the then LA city council president, Nury Martinez, mocking the Black son of a white councilman, and her and the council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León crudely discussing Black voters and the Indigenous residents of certain LA neighborhoods.
Martinez stepped down as council president and apologized on Monday, saying she was ashamed of her racially offensive language in the recording of the meeting. Martinez, the first Latina to hold the title of president, also said she would take a leave of absence from the council.
Cedillo and de León have apologized but have not vacated their seats.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday Biden thought all three members should resign.
“The president is glad to see that one of the participants in that conversation has resigned, but they all should,” she said. She called the language in the recording “unacceptable” and “appalling”.
Previously, many of California’s top politicians, including the governor, Gavin Newsom, US senator Alex Padilla, and the outgoing LA mayor, Eric Garcetti, had encouraged the members to “take responsibility”.
The president of the Los Angeles county federation of labor, Ron Herrera, who also took part in the meeting, stepped down from his position on Monday evening.
Demonstrators filled the LA city council chambers on Tuesday for the first meeting since the story broke, chanting in protest over the trio’s remarks and demanding their resignation. Speakers urged the council to investigate the redistricting process in light of the council members’ comments and address racism in its ranks.