After Racist Comments, Los Angeles City Council President Faces Calls to Resign - The New York Times

In a leaked recording of a meeting last year, she mocked Indigenous immigrants and the Black child of a fellow council member.

LOS ANGELES — The president of the Los Angeles City Council faced widespread calls to resign on Sunday after a leaked audio recording revealed racist and disparaging remarks about the Black child of a white council member and also about Indigenous immigrants in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood.

The comments, made during a meeting last year with two other council members and a labor official, exposed longstanding racial tensions in the governance of one of the nation’s most multicultural cities as well as fault lines among the city’s Democrats.

In the profanity-laced recording, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times, the City Council president, Nury Martinez, who is Latina, compared the Black child of a white council member to a “changuito,” Spanish for little monkey. She also called Oaxacan immigrants living in Koreatown “short little dark people.”

It was unclear who leaked the recording of the October 2021 meeting, which included Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, council members representing parts of the city’s East Side, and Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Also unknown was who made the recording, which was initially uploaded to Reddit earlier this month by an unidentified, now-suspended user, and continued to circulate via email after the post was taken down. No one has disputed the recording’s authenticity, and Ms. Martinez and Mr. de León have issued apologies.

Although advocates on all sides of upcoming city races are unleashing information to sway voters, the exact motivation behind the release of the recording was not immediately clear. But an unsigned introduction in the Reddit post, shared via screenshot with the recording, denounced the ties between organized labor and some members of the Council, including Ms. Martinez, complaining that “the labor movement is in bed with City Hall.”

The four officials in the meeting were strategizing about political redistricting in advance of this year’s election. Mr. Herrera can be heard telling the group that “my goal is to get the three of you elected, and I’m just focused on that — we’re like a little Latino caucus of our own.”

A citizen advisory committee conducts Los Angeles’s redistricting process each decade and recommends maps, but the final lines are determined by the Council, which ultimately approved a map far different from the one that was recommended. The conversation focused on those heated negotiations and on the distribution among the 15 council districts of economic and municipal “assets” such as stadiums, universities and airports. Such assets provide jobs to constituents and can enhance an officeholder’s political influence and fund-raising abilities.

In the audio, the group echoed long held complaints about Latino representation in the city, where Latinos make up about half of the population but hold only about a third of the seats on the Council. Ms. Martinez complained that the commission had recommended moving key assets, such as the Van Nuys airport, out of her district while claiming to back broader representation for Latinos.

“If you’re going to talk about Latino districts, what kind of districts are you trying to create?” she asked her colleagues. “Because you’re taking away our assets. You’re just going to create poor Latino districts with nothing?”

Ms. Martinez, who is not up for re-election until 2024, added that Nithya Raman, a council member of South Asian descent, should not represent Koreatown, which is now largely Latino.

Ms. Martinez also weighed in on a dispute between two Black council members over whose district would include Exposition Park and the University of Southern California. Rather than fight among themselves, she said, they should demand a map in which one of them gets the massive Los Angeles International Airport. That asset, she noted, is in the district of a white council member, Mike Bonin, whom she referred to with a vulgarity.

In the ensuing exchange, Mr. de León referred to Mr. Bonin, a West Los Angeles liberal, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and joked with Ms. Martinez that Mr. Bonin carried his adopted son, who is Black, as if the toddler were a designer handbag. Ms. Martinez complained that on a parade float on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Bonin had failed to control his son and said that the child’s antics had nearly tipped the float over.

“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Ms. Martinez says. “I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.”

She also cursed George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney, saying that “he’s with the Blacks.”

News of the audio ricocheted around Los Angeles on Sunday, eliciting shock and fury but also acknowledgment of the complexity of race relations in the sprawling city. The furor extended to the city’s increasingly tight race for mayor between Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer and police commissioner endorsed by Mr. Cedillo, and Representative Karen Bass, who is Black and was endorsed by Ms. Martinez.

“This entire situation shows that City Hall is fundamentally broken and dysfunctional,” Mr. Caruso said in a statement. “In a closed-door meeting, leaders at the highest levels of city government used racial slurs and hate speech while discussing how to carve up the city to retain their own power.”

Ms. Bass issued a condemnation as well. “Let me be clear about what was on those tapes: appalling, anti-Black racism,” she said in a statement, adding that she had “spent the day speaking with Black and Latino leaders about how to ensure this doesn’t divide our city.”

“Homelessness is out of control, crime is on the rise, and Angelenos are being priced out of their hometown,” she said. “The challenges we face already threaten to tear us apart and, now, this hateful and shocking conversation among some of our city’s most powerful leaders could divide us even further. All those in the room must be held accountable.”

Eunisses Hernandez, a progressive who in June won Mr. Cedillo’s council seat in an upset, said she was “beyond disgusted.”

“We have three sitting council members being explicit about the Black community, and their language exemplifies anti-Blackness,” she said. “How is it we have these people in leadership?”

Latinos are by far the largest demographic among the city’s 3.8 million residents. But the Black community in Los Angeles has long wielded greater clout than would be suggested by its 8.8 percent of the population, and the Asian community has become a rising political force with nearly 12 percent of the population. White Angelenos, with more than 28 percent of the population, have long controlled much of the city’s wealth and power.

Residents of the city routinely tout their diversity as an asset, and, since the 1992 riots, have expressed pride in the strides they have made in race relations. In polls, Latino residents of the city repeatedly say that their Black neighbors understand them better than do any other ethnic group in Los Angeles, and vice versa, said Fernando Guerra, whose Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University regularly surveys the city’s residents.

Mr. Guerra said that when he heard the recording, he was appalled, particularly at the remarks about Mr. Bonin’s child. But he also noted that, as in most of California, getting along remains a work in progress and that unlike the county and state, the city of Los Angeles still allows elected officials, rather than an independent commission, to have the final say in their own district maps. That practice, he said, has contributed to ongoing racial tensions.

In drawing a fair map, the council “had to talk about race,” Mr. Guerra said. “Although not like this.”

Calls for Ms. Martinez to step down as president or resign from the council altogether came from politicians across the state as well as business owners and activists. Ms. Martinez, who did not respond to a question about whether she would step down, did not deny making the remarks, and she apologized for the comments.

“In a moment of intense frustration and anger, I let the situation get the best of me, and I hold myself accountable for these comments. For that I am sorry,” she said in a statement. “The context of this conversation was concern over the redistricting process and concern about the potential negative impact it might have on communities of color. My work speaks for itself.”

Mr. de León, who also is not up for re-election, apologized as well. “There were comments made in the context of this meeting that are wholly inappropriate,” he said in a statement, “and I regret appearing to condone and even contribute to certain insensitive comments made about a colleague and his family in private. I’ve reached out to that colleague personally. On that day, I fell short of the expectations we set for our leaders — and I will hold myself to a higher standard.”

Mr. Cedillo did not respond to requests for comments. Mr. Herrera issued a statement apologizing “for my failure to stand up to racist and anti-Black remarks in that immediate moment,” adding that “there is no justification and no excuse for the vile remarks made in that room.”

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, who heads the California Labor Federation, condemned the comments as “repulsive and unacceptable,” in a statement posted on Twitter. “Black and brown communities are too often pitted against each other in our fight for equity,” she said.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a Black council member who represents some of the city’s historic Black communities, not only condemned the comments from colleagues whom he had considered friends but also called for an investigation into the private meeting. He said that it may have violated the state’s government transparency law and called into question the entire redistricting process. “I don’t think we’ve ever faced anything like this, so we have to figure out a path,” he said.

In a searing joint statement, Mr. Bonin and his husband, Sean Arian, said that they were “appalled, angry and absolutely disgusted” by Ms. Martinez’s comments and called on her, Mr. de León and Mr. Herrera to resign from their positions. The couple added that “it hurts that one of our son’s earliest encounters with overt racism comes from some of the most powerful public officials in Los Angeles.”

In condemning the entire conversation, Mr. Bonin and Mr. Arian said that it showed a troubling level of coordination in an effort to “weaken Black political representation.”

Ms. Raman, a liberal who won her council seat amid the social justice reckonings of 2020, said that she was horrified and disappointed and that she echoed the calls for resignations. “I think there’s always conflict in politics, but the level of blatant racism on display here was shocking and appalling,” Ms. Raman said. “We can’t normalize this.”

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