Race At Center Of Creating Latino Majority LA County Seat

You can slice it pretty much any way you want, but it appears as though race was very squarely front and center in the recent fight to create another Latino-majority district for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Although initially the only (and first) Latina Supervisor Gloria Molina was backed by Mark Ridley-Thomas, who is African-American, in the end he switched sides for a 4-1 vote not to create the second district in favor of one that would preserve incumbent supervisors’ districts.

Which is to say, the lone Latino on the board has been working towards equitable representation while it appears that the other, non-Latino, supervisors are more interested in preserving their districts. I’ll give you this, it’s not so much racism as politics.

Almost 1,000 people showed up, according to The Los Angeles Times, and three overflow rooms plus lawn seating had to be set up. It was, apparently, the largest crowd at a supervisor’s meeting in “decades.” Nonetheless, race seems to have crept into this fight at every step of the way. The Los Angeles Times noted:

Supervisor Don Knabe, a white Republican from Cerritos, is fighting to preserve his district and retain his chances for reelection in 2012. Meanwhile, Supervisor Gloria Molina, the first elected Latino supervisor in modern history, is staking her legacy on forcing the creation of a second board district with a majority Latino voting population.

Molina has argued that the federal Voting Rights Act, which protects racial and ethnic minorities, requires the county to create a second Latino-majority district because preserving the current lines illegally dilutes the voting power of Latinos. She says the county will probably be sued if supervisors largely retain the current boundaries.

After six hours of testimony, the board didn’t approve it after Ridley-Thomas switched sides ostensibly to avoid having other public officials draw the boundaries for the supervisors. MALDEF has said the organization would file a Voting Rights Act lawsuit over what may be considered disproportionate representation of Latinos in LA County: it’s 50% Latino but only has one supervisor. SCPR reported:

…it takes four votes to approve new district boundaries required by the census, and the three white males on the board opposed creating another Latino district. They argued it would require moving more than 3 million people into new districts and joining distant communities with disparate interests…

Knabe and other opponents of a new Latino majority district noted that while nearly half the county’s population is Latino, one-third of the citizen voting age population is Latino. They also said Latinos have equal opportunity to win in at least one other district where they make up as much as a third of the electorate.

But Latino civil rights activists argued that because people tend to vote for candidates of their own race, it’s hard for Latinos to get elected in non-Latino-majority districts.

Now this is most definitely not the LA you saw depicted in “Crash,” people are not that hateful and racist, but at the same time, when it comes to power, it’s pretty obvious that race is a factor. What do you think, is this a big deal or not?