Real talk about race, identity, and ability has entered the political chat in the U.S. Let’s dig in.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times shared a leaked audio recording of Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez making a series of racist and disparaging remarks about her colleagues and how the city should be governed. Unaware she was being recorded, she said Councilman Mike Bonin, who is white, used his Black son as an “accessory” and said the boy was “parece changuito,” or “like a monkey.” She further mocked the Oaxacan community and said, “F— that guy … He’s with the Blacks,” in reference to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón.
“Along with revealing cruel and racist comments, the leaked audio offered a rare window into the behind-the-scenes machinations of the redistricting process and the bare-knuckled fighting between various groups trying to secure political power,” reports the Times.
Martinez has since resigned, but the political machinations and racial tensions remain.
New York Times commentator David Brooks adopted a familiar take on the matter, declaring “This Is What Happens When Everything Is About Race”. In his view, racial categorization is a barrier to a multi-ethnic, “blended” future, and that’s the problem to be solved. “You do that by emphasizing how much all humans have in common and by emphasizing how complex each person’s identity is — that it includes race but so many other things, too.” (In my view, he mischaracterized Ibram X. Kendi’s work, but that’s for another time.)
But Brown University professor Jonathan E. Collins says it’s really a design problem.
“This scandal is particularly personal for me because I started studying local politics by getting deeply involved in Los Angeles politics. It’s unique for a number of reasons. Weak mayor/strong council, which is why former Council President Martinez definitely had to resign,” he wrote in a must-read Twitter thread. What most people miss is that racial coalitions are the only way to amass any sort of political power in Los Angeles. “Spatial segregation put in place by structural design is what fuels this,” he noted. Even if the coalitions are fragile, the perception of racial alignment has advanced both groups leading to meaningful power.
“So, in essence, Los Angeles & California lawmakers have designed a city that makes race the most viable mechanism for amassing political power,” he wrote. “It should be no surprise to us that race is what political leaders in LA use (weaponize?) to build political power.”
On the other side of the country, a contentious Senate race has raised a different issue. Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor John Fetterman, who is currently running for U.S. Senate, suffered an ischemic stroke five months ago, like hundreds of thousands of Americans do every year. And like many of them, he’s continued to work with accommodations as he recovers.
NBC News’s Dasha Burns caused a significant dust-up when she said that Fetterman seemed unable to understand her in some pre-interview small talk that was conducted without the use of the closed captioning app he used for the formal televised conversation. Fetterman has been open about his struggle to process the words he hears. For anyone interested in the political horse race, it was easy to characterize her observation as a blow to his campaign.
But what may have started as a reporting “gotcha” moment quickly became a richer conversation about disability and dignity.
Connie Schultz, writing about Fetterman for USA Today, framed it this way. “The bigger conversation, the one we need to be having, is about why we make accommodations for people with disabilities, both visible and invisible.” Burns made the mistake that many people in the workforce do. “In pointing out, without confirmation, that he couldn’t hear her, Burns centered herself as the standard when the accommodation was meant to make them equals.”
Other influential journalists offered more nuanced views of Fetterman, including Rebecca Traister who profiled the candidate and decried the role of the political press in amplifying the attacks leveled at him by his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz. “Watching tv/news online pundits leer over clips of an interview in which he’s completely engaged and communicative is stomach-turning and a super depressing example of what I was trying to describe,” she tweeted.
For me, the common thread for both these political stories—besides journalists putting their thumbs on the scales for clicks—is that much more work is needed to understand race, identity, and opportunity in politics and at work.
The Los Angeles City Council story is not about identity politics; it’s about how power learns to behave in a poorly designed system—and we all are living in poorly designed systems. The Fetterman story is not about his ability to dazzle a crowd (who seem fine with him); it’s about how we think about what’s possible for people with disabilities—a community that any of us may join at any time.
Both these stories, as is so much of what we cover here, are reminders for all of us to ask better questions about what we think is happening and why we think it. That kind of reflection can be hard to do in a trigger-and-click age, but someone’s gotta do it. Let it be us.
More news below.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ashley Sylla.
On point
New poll: Most Black Americans are expecting violence at the midterms. A new Grid-Harris poll finds that 35% of Black adults expect violence at their polling sites compared to 22% of their white peers. Forty percent of Black adults polled said the results of the midterm elections on Nov. 8 are likely to spark displays of violence in their area, compared to 23% of white adults. And… that is making Black voters more likely to vote than not.
Grid News
Does your employer offer professional training? Read this. Employers offering upskilling, certification, and other trainings to their workforce are increasingly requiring them to repay—often large sums—if they quit their jobs. These “training repayment agreement provisions” (TRAPS) are often hidden in the fine print of employment agreements and tend to target underrepresented or other aspiring employees. Some 10% of employees are subject to these provisions, though the number is growing. "Employers are looking for ways to keep their workers from quitting without raising wages or improving working conditions," says Loyola Law School Los Angeles instructor Jonathan Harris.
Reuters
Hear Ye, at your peril So…where to begin. Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) is acquiring Parler, the conservative-leaning social platform. The move comes after Ye was banned from Twitter for an anti-Semitic tweet. The Parler folks said it was “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.” When asked by journalist Chris Cuomo about the problematic tweet and his plans to go “death con 3 on Jewish people,” the mogul just made things much worse. “The reason why I repeated it a bunch of times and for all of my friends that are in the entertainment energy industry that are Black actors, Black athletes, and Black musicians … there’s so many Black musicians signed Jewish record labels, and those Jewish record labels take ownership, not only of the publishing … but also ownership of the culture itself. It’s like, ‘oh, that’s mine.’ …like modern-day slavery. And I’m calling it out.” Also, “Black people are all also Jew – I classify as Jew also – so I actually can’t be an antisemite. The term is actually not factual.”
CNN
On background
What we need to understand about Donald Trump’s veiled threats about Jews. Here’s what the former president said on his Truth Social platform. “Wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of [his record on Israel] than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S…U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!” This particular stereotype, that Jewish people in the U.S. have dual loyalty to Israel is a familiar trope. It's not the only one Trump has employed, however. He’s very much embraced the secret, money-hungry, and controlling “puppet master” stereotypes as well.
There are plenty of people for whom these sentiments feel like a familiar set of facts, and we all need to do more work to understand why.
I will point you to Ultra, a new podcast from Rachel Maddow produced with MSNBC and NBC Universal. It is a deep dive into the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 and covers the cultivation and growth of widespread angry, anti-Semitic sentiment into a popular movement that was whipped into an armed attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. It was an open attempt to vilify (and murder) Jewish people in the U.S. in support of the Nazi movement in advance of what would become World War II. And it was all stoked by the most popular entertainment figure in the country at that time, radio star and fascist sympathizer Father Charles E. Coughlin. The parallels to the modern era are clear, but what struck me is how deeply embedded and often conflicting ideas about Jews are in the West—they are both Communists and money-grubbing capitalists; they are both weak-willed and secret power mongers. Like all “isms” antisemitism isn’t about individual people; it’s about the collective false characteristics that are ascribed to an entire group. After listening, I’m more convinced than ever that we’ve never fully confronted the antisemitism that took root in what nearly became Hitler’s America.
MSNBC
Parting words
“However, it is my opinion that Nazism, the effect of Communism, cannot be liquidated in its persecution complex until the religious in high places, in synagogue and finance, radio and press, attack the cause, attack it forthright, and the errors and the spread of Communism, together with all our co-nationals who support it. I will satisfy myself simply by drawing your attention that since the time of Christ, Jewish persecution only followed…after Christians were first persecuted, persecuted either by exploiters in their own ranks as in the Middle Ages, or by the enemies from without as in our own day…Relative to Christian persecution in our day…witness the price that Christians have paid to uphold their religion against those who were anti-religionists, to uphold their cloister against those who were anti-Christ, to uphold their patriotism, their nationalism against those who were unpatriotic and international."
—Father Charles Coughlin, from an excerpt from a radio broadcast, 1938.