Lite Supremacy

 

Protestors outside Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images, via The New York Times.

The Times used the above photo twice this week, once yesterday in news coverage of the big scandal of the Los Angeles City Council, and once in a blown-up splash under the headline for today's David Brooks column ("This Is What Happens When Race Is Everything"), without any explanation of what it is actually a picture of, or in the Brooks piece even a passing reference, which isn't what you'd easily think of if you were following the story anywhere other than the L.A. Times (I heard about it on NPR but noticed I was hearing it only because it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately).

Namely, these people are protesting something quite different from the thing Brooks wrote about, or thought he was writing about:

Council President Nury Martinez — who has since resigned from the Council — along with two colleagues and a labor ally talked about a range of subjects, including redistricting, but two assumptions undergirded much of what they said. Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.

At one point Martinez vulgarly derided someone because “he’s with the Blacks.” You’re either with one racial army or you’re with another.

The second assumption was that these monolithic racial blocs are locked in a never-ending ethnic war for power. The core topic of their conversation was to redraw Council districts to benefit Latino leaders.

Rather, it's another part of the conversation, where the three are

heard discussing the growing Latino population in Koreatown when Martinez says: “I see a lot of little short dark people…,” followed by a man’s voice saying, “Yeah, puro Oaxacan…”

As the conversation continues, Martinez, who is Mexican American, can be heard saying, “Tan feos!” which translates to “so ugly.”

Because the protestors in the photo are Indigenous Mexicans from the southeastern state of Oaxaca, maybe Mixtec or Zapotec, and what really angers them isn't merely the crude prejudice but the betrayal, by the politicians who are supposed to be their Mexican American champions and instead turn out to be their oppressors, talking about them with naked contempt. 

The problem isn't that Martínez and her two colleagues see themselves as members of a monolithic bloc competing for privilege with other blocs, but that they see themselves in a fixed hierarchy where they are naturally superior, as more aligned with the whites than with their fellow Mexicans. This is also true in the better reported part of the conversation, the part where they insult "the Blacks":

Martinez complained that the advisory map removed political plums like the Van Nuys Airport out of her district, and suggested that Los Angeles International Airport be taken from a white councilman and put in a Black councilman’s district. That white councilman, Mike Bonin, she added, using a vulgarity ["little bitch"], was weak. She denigrated Bonin’s [adopted] Black son in racist terms ["changuito", little monkey] and said he needed “a beatdown.” She said that the Los Angeles County district attorney was “with the Blacks” and that white liberals on the Council were untrustworthy. 

It's not actually Black people they're complaining about so much as white people, liberals, Brooks's "someone" seen as siding "with the Blacks"; they also dunked on Jews for making alliances with Black people in the redistricting process (from which so much bad feeling arises):

“Judíos cut their deal with South L.A. They are gonna screw everybody else.” Judíos means Jews in Spanish, and South L.A. is where much of the city’s Black population is concentrated.  

Leave it to Brooks to only notice the part that attacked white people, and not to notice that he was noticing it. 

But it's the alliances they're really complaining about, expressions of solidarity that violate their sense of the skin color hierarchy in which they expect to be recognized as superior, like the light-skinned Mexicans who drove dark-skinned Julio Vallejo to emigrate to the US (please read the piece); like the Mexican American Vallejo later met in Los Angeles, 

a light-skinned man who at the time was an MBA student at UCLA, [who] replied: “I am not Latino — I’m Mexican.” I told him that by U.S. definition, yes, he was Mexican, hence, Latino.

He refuted again, this time raising his voice and emphasizing, “No! I am Mexican, not Latino!” I then asked him to explain the difference between both, to which he replied, “Mexicans are white, nice people who have visas and travel to the U.S. by plane, like me. Latinos, on the other hand, are indios prietos (dark-skinned Indigenous) who cross the border illegally and work in kitchens”.

Martínez and colleagues exemplify the problem identified by Charles Blow in his take on the incident:

a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of “lite” supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it.

I'm dwelling on the thing because of its relationship to my own contention that the increase in numbers of Latins voting for Republicans is race-based or pigmentocratic as well, a mode by which some Mexican and Cuban Americans in particular assert that kind of lite supremacy—and also to express a slightly more hopeful view than Blow's, that this is a reactionary response to the browning of America, a futile protest, and in the long run doomed.

Contrary to Brooks, these groupings are far from monolithic blocs; they are the stuff of which alliances are made, which is why they are so threatening to people like Martínez seeking to replicate the old 19th-century program of earning promotion to (a monolithic bloc of) whiteness and pulling the ladder up after you. And not a subject of endless ethnic war as neighborhoods are apportioned into legislative districts  but a vehicle for democracy on the basis of finding majorities that bring identities together, by, and for, the multiethnic people against the race-based tradition of white dominance.