We’re a City in Denial About Race

State Sen. Richard Polanco, an East Los Angeles Democrat, says the leadership struggle at the Los Angeles Unified School District is not about race but about “stability, process and credibility.” That shades the truth, and Polanco knows it. The struggle is about the power of race in the race to power in Los Angeles.

However, Polanco can be forgiven because so many Los Angeles leaders speak only in euphemisms about race. An atmosphere of polite civic denial smothers our de facto racial segregation.

Let’s talk racial reality.

Seven of every 10 LAUSD students are Latino, 500,000 in all, many of them immigrants. It is a poor Third World district in the richest of First World cities. The “developing country,” in this case, is a new United States that will be multicultural.

Many white and black voters have resisted this reality by voting for propositions 187 and 227, cutting off educational opportunity for immigrants and requiring an inflexible English-only schooling. At the same time, many others see in this reality a welcome opportunity for Los Angeles to become a genuinely global city--if the leadership is there.

During the 1980s, when Belmont Learning Complex, South Gate campuses and other contaminated sites were being chosen for largely Latino student populations, the LAUSD leadership was white and black. Then, in 1997, in a preview of the current leadership struggle, longtime district Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias was elevated to superintendent, replacing an African American.

Zacarias is to Mexican Americans what Tom Bradley was to blacks in L.A.

Affectionately known as Dr. Z among Latinos, Zacarias paid his dues during long years in the shadows of an insensitive bureaucracy. And like Bradley among blacks, Zacarias is largely immune to criticism from Latinos despite the failings of the district he heads.

The new district board majority, none of them Latino, clearly wants to replace Zacarias but doesn’t want to say so.

Instead, they have taken slow-motion action to severely undermine his powers, making this symbol of Mexican pride into a hollow figurehead.

Enter Polanco, whose primary passion is achieving power for Latinos. His case is bolstered by the evident under-representation of Latinos at high levels of the district. Only one of seven board members is Latino, and there is no Latino heir apparent to Zacarias in the district’s bureaucracy.

What most fuels Polanco’s attack, however, is the colonial manner in which the school board has maneuvered.

First, it chose a Westsider, Howard Miller, to take charge of the district’s dysfunctional construction program. A few days later, at an impromptu meeting at a Century City law firm, a plan was germinated to give Miller control of the entire district bureaucracy, leaving Zacarias with little more than his title.

The board subsequently voted 4 to 2 (with one abstention) for this unwieldy and unworkable arrangement, setting off the current confrontation.

Miller is serious and qualified, and he knows the district. He may desire redemption from his recall defeat in 1979 at the hands of white voters who opposed busing. Yet the politics of race has changed from the ‘70s. Now Miller faces the hostility of Latino leaders and voters who perceive him as a colonial administrator from Brentwood.

I know the feeling. For three years I have been investigating toxic hazards and barriers to equal education at inner city schools like the Belmont and South Gate sites and Jefferson Middle School in South-Central L.A. It takes time and results to gain trust from barrios that view the Westside as a gated Babylon.

District officials like board member Victoria Castro have played the race card to mobilize parents against an alleged conspiracy of “Westside environmentalists” who, she claims, are blocking Belmont because of exaggerated concerns over children’s health. Other Latino officials, while knowing that the toxic threat is real, have been absent from the battle for fear of crossing Castro and her parents’ group.

For the sake of polemics, one could say that Belmont’s Latino advocates have aligned themselves with the “white power” structure of law firms, contractors and campaign contributors that neglected environmental warning signs a decade ago. But the “truth” is that everything important in Los Angeles is perceived increasingly through the prism of race.

We have reached a dangerous turning point. On the one hand, the school board’s majority is poised to impose a Westsider, czarist solution on the district that is humiliating to Zacarias. They are quite right that new leadership to build clean schools is needed immediately, but their approach can only deepen the internal crisis.

On the other hand, Polanco is pursuing the classic goal of all ethnic machine politicians, power for la raza.

Given the historic powerlessness of the Eastside, who can blame him?

However, history also shows that the pursuit of such power for its own sake has its downsides.

One liability is that politics of racial representation polarizes others into taking the same path, leaving a damaged civic culture of code words and ethnic protectionism. A second problem is that appointing the right ethnic leadership does little to fix the educational crisis.

It is necessary that there be Latino and, better still, real multiracial, multicultural and multilingual leadership to act as role models to inspire kids. Yet those same children suffer from an institutional inequality reflected in a lack of credentialed teachers, advanced placement classes, first-class books and computers and sufficient after-school tutors. Qualified teachers leave the inner city, where student dropout rates approach 50%.

The issues of class and classroom inequality cannot be resolved simply by having a Latino superintendent. All of us will have to take responsibility.