The conversation on the audio recording (which was initially posted to Reddit, and the origins of which are still a mystery) took place in October 2021 and concerned disputes over redistricting in the upcoming city council elections. The participants’ ire, at least in the most widely excerpted parts of the exchange, was directed mainly at council member Mike Bonin, who is white and has a young adopted son who is black. Martinez complained about the little boy’s rambunctious behavior when, in 2017 at the age of 3, he was with his father on a Martin Luther King Day parade float. Said Martinez: “They’re raising him like a little white kid. I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.” Worse, she referred to the child as su negrito (“his little Negro”) and as a changuito, or “little monkey.” Meanwhile, when Martinez sneered that Bonin was toting his son around like “an accessory” to prove his multiracial bona fides, de León chimed in to say, “It’s like when Nury brings her Goyard bag or the Louis Vuitton bag.”
Elsewhere in the audio, the council members—along with now-former L.A. County Federation of Labor president, Ron Herrera—took swipes at the Jewish community; referred to Oaxacans (mostly indigenous people from the Oaxaca region of Mexico) as “little short dark people” and called them “ugly”; and suggested that Nithya Raman, a young progressive politician of South Asian descent, should not represent a mainly Latino district.
It is worth noting that, as of this writing, de León and Cedillo have resisted calls to resign.
To New York Times opinion columnist Charles Blow, this appalling conversation represents the troubling prospect that the racial and ethnic diversification of America could simply mean a shift from “white supremacy” to “lite supremacy,” in which lighter-skinned minorities join the white power structure to perpetuate the subordination of blacks and other darker-skinned minorities. Blow concedes that the incident shows how “performative” some progressive “antiracism” is: During the 2020 antiracist protests, Martinez had declared her solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and called for defunding the police. Yet Blow also argues that the Latino city council members spewing racial abuse were simply “doing the work of white supremacy”—even if they were doing it while strategizing to maximize Latino political power through redistricting.
Fellow Times columnist David Brooks takes a very different view: The controversy, he argues, is a demonstration of what happens when racial or ethnic identity becomes paramount. To Brooks, the outrageous recording is a twisted reflection of the progressivism represented by such figures as scholar/advocate Ibram X. Kendi, who “see American society as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups” and “center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity.” (To Kendi and other race-focused progressives, Brooks contrasts heterodox minority intellectuals such as Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, and Reihan Salam, who want to jettison “crude racial categorization.”)
Kendi pushed back against Brooks on Twitter, accusing the columnist of misunderstanding and distorting his scholarship and claiming that, in fact, he opposes racial essentialism, supports treating identity as complex, and believes in intersectional alliances rather than racial or ethnic blocs. Yes, Kendi ostensibly recognizes multiple identities and is strongly committed to “intersectionality”—but only within the progressive hierarchy in which deference is always due to the more oppressed identity. As Kelefah Sanneh noted in a New Yorker article about Kendi’s 2019 bestseller How to Be Antiracist, Kendi’s writing harbors some major unexamined contradictions. While Kendi claims to oppose the “essentialism” that reduces people to their racial or ethnic identity, he also insists on viewing everything through a racial lens and maintains, among other things, that any social or economic disparities between demographic groups can be due only to racism—and not even the legacy of historical racism that has left black Americans with less wealth and less cultural capital, but racist practices here and now. (It’s hard to imagine a cruder binary than the Kendian claim that every idea or practice is either antiracist or racist, with nothing in between.)
In the Kendian scheme, all racism stems from, and works for, white supremacy—which apparently is also Blow’s conviction. But does that framing really make sense in this case? It’s certainly possible for nonwhite minority groups to turn on each other in a way that reinforces a dominant white power structure. But the L.A. City Council incident wouldn’t seem to fit such a pattern: Martinez, de León, and Cedillo were talking about increasing Latino power in city politics; Herrero, at one point, said that “we’re like a little Latino caucus of our own.” Some have argued that diluting black political power was part of the agenda in the conversation. Yet the tirades against Bonin were occasioned by Martinez’s observation that two black council members vying over which one’s district would include particularly valuable properties—Exposition Park and the University of Southern California—should instead aim to take Los Angeles International Airport from Bonin. Elsewhere in the recording, Martinez also collectively slammed the council’s white members, saying that they “will motherfuck you in a heartbeat.”
One can argue the point of whether Martinez and her co-offenders represent the new radical multiracial progressivism or (as New Yorker columnist Jay Caspian Kang suggests) an older and more “moderate” style of Democratic identity politics built around ethnic and racial blocs. But the rhetoric heard in the recording certainly channels themes from progressive racial politics. De León’s mocking remark that Bonin “thinks he’s black,” for instance, seems to be less about Bonin allying himself with the black community than about Bonin appropriating undeserved minority status. The notion that white parents with adopted black children may be insidiously treating them as property also has a fair amount of currency in progressive discourse, as illustrated by a tweet from none other than Kendi in response to a tweet referencing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s two adopted children from Ethiopia:
