Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. This is Melissa Harris-Perry. LA, our nation's second-largest city home to nearly 4 million. LA is a demographic harbinger of America's future because there's no one racial or ethnic group who constitutes a majority in this city, which means governing LA necessarily requires coalition politics. Let me make that a little plainer. Identity politics alone just ain't going to cut it in this city, power requires cooperation which is part of what made these moments so stunning.

Nury Martinez: What is with Bon? [unintelligible 00:00:42] don't think he's Black. He thinks it is Black. [crosstalk] during Black history month. It's an accessory. [foreign language] the kid bouncing off the walls on the floor, practically tipping it over. There's nothing you can do to control him. [foreign language]

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's the voice of now former LA City Council President Nury Martinez, who resigned from the council after her comments about the son of a fellow council member were made public. She spoke about, "Bringing his little Black child somewhere like an accessory," and referring to the son as, "Little monkey" in Spanish. This leaked audio originally published on Reddit is from a meeting Martinez held in October of 2021 with fellow council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin De Leon and Ron Herrera, the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Herrera has also resigned while Cedillo and De Leon have refused to go. On Monday, they were removed from a number of committees on which they serve, which is a sign of continuing pressure for their resignations. The derogatory remarks also extended to Jewish people, Armenians, and even Hawkins. Just as distressing as the cruel language used by the council members are the implications for power and for representation in the city. You see, this wasn't just mean member gossip. This was political plotting about how to draw city council lines.

Nury Martinez: It serves us to not give her all of K-Town because if you do that solidifies her renter's district and that is not a good thing for any of us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We taught with a current member of the LA City Council who was name-checked in these recordings.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: My name is Marqueece Harris-Dawson. I'm a member of the Los Angeles City Council, I represent District Eight.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Because all of this is in part about district. Before we even jump into this moment, tell me about District Eight so that listeners who are not in LA will know who your constituents are.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: District Eight is the historic African American district in Los Angeles. We represent the Crenshaw District. What's colloquial, commonly known as South Central LA. Our district is the only majority African American district among the 15 Los Angeles City Council districts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want you to help us to unpack because there's so much to unpack from the leaked audio. When you first heard it, what stood out most for you?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: What stood out most for me was the betrayal, the smile in your face. I think there's a song called Smiling Faces. the smile in your face and pretend like we're in coalition and then to find out that we're only in coalition when it benefits you as an individual. That is the top-line response, but there are so many layers to what we heard on those tapes and all of the fallout. You go back and you replay incidents or you replay conversations and you go, Oh that really meant this or, that little ping I had in my gut that this sounds racist, it turns out it actually was.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Council Member Harris-Dawson, I want to be as honest as I can be about because I worry about policing language, I want to get to the substance here. Look, when I am in conversation with my family, when I'm alone in the car singing hip hop from the early '90s, when maybe even angry and engaging in conversation, not every word that I say comes out in a way that I would want replayed on a tape.

Sometimes even if I'm not angry, even if I'm just relaxed and working with coworkers, and let me say I actually think that elected officials should have a little bit of room to just be human. If your pastor cusses it doesn't mean they don't love God. It just might mean that they're human. Now I'm not saying that that's where we are here but I want to ask about that aspect first before we dig into all of the content, because I want to ask you is this just about as someone on the right might call it council culture?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: Well, I think it's a good question that you pose. Definitely, all of us myself included say things that if they were released to the public I'd be embarrassed by or I'd be troubled by. The tricky part of this content is when you dig deep and you actually listen to the whole tape, it's actually more sinister than the top-line insults. The calling of Black child a monkey actually isn't the worst of it. By far it is the systematic programming to eliminate Black political representation. That's an outright strategy that's being laid out that isn't just someone misspeaking or lashing out in a moment of anger, That's deep seated sinister Mitch McConnell-style anti-black racism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's the part that I want to get to because I really want to get to the political and policy content here. Talk to me about this question of districts and about the black-brown or black-Latino divides which in certain ways are weird because of course, Black and Latino are not identities that are in separate boxes all the time. As part of this tape is revealing. There's an intersection there. Help us again those not in LA to understand the first thing.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: I think the first thing to say about what you hear on the tapes is the four people in that room don't represent Latinos. You can see with swiftness and with aggressiveness almost the entire Latino community came out within hours demanding their resignation and were very clear that this doesn't represent us. Those people were representing themselves and their personal political careers. That's what they were talking about.

How do we create circumstances where we as these people in the room have the best opportunity to attain personal power? This was not a concern for Latinos or Latinos against Blacks or anything else. You can see if you listen to the tape you'll see the Black people that they view as willing to go along with their program. They're trying to protect those Black people, and white people for that matter. Latinos who are progressives, who are standing in the way of their progress, they're opposed to those. What they're talking about isn't about Black Brown, it's about Martinez, De Leone, Cedillo, and Herrera.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How much is it also about income and wealth?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: It's a lot about income and wealth. I think the ability to have things in your district that, I'll just say plainly create the opportunity for you to have a job when you leave office. That's a very personal thing that politicians unfortunately many times pursue. That was definitely what you saw happening in that room. What you do after when you make your money as an elected official, and all of that was laid out and laid bare on those tapes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can the City Council get any work done at this point?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: I don't think the City Council can get any work done with any legitimacy until we have those resignations, that said things are moving so quickly. The people could be resigning while we're speaking. I hope that they are.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do resignations fix this problem?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: I think resignations are the beginning. They open the door to us being able to fix the problem. I think they allow the ambulance to leave and head towards the hospital. I think anything else is a non-starter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Even if these council members are not in their conversation revealing a black-brown divide, the question of identity of representation has been critical in Los Angeles for quite some time. How do you see what maybe has been revealed or at least maybe brought back out to the surface in these conversations? Is it completely irrelevant, or are we seeing something potentially even valuable in what this has surfaced?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: I think there's some value. It gives us an opportunity to talk about anti-black racism. Frankly, a term that wasn't even in the common lexicon just three, four years ago frankly, certainly not before George Floyd it wasn't. Black people knew about anti-black racism [laughs] but the world didn't know about anti-black racism. In Los Angeles, we definitely had these people of color rubric that would cover over or gloss over the particularities that Black people face.

I think that's gone away. I think a very, very good thing. I think the fact that we've uncovered these particular characters, because these characters as you might imagine Melissa, this isn't their first brush with controversy. They've been accused of being anti-black before, but generally speaking, it's been by the fringes. Now their anti-blackness is out for the public to see, and the city gets to take a stand. People can be silent, they can support them or they can oppose them and say they got to go. One of the things I love about this city is everybody, especially the Latino community, said, "Y'all got to go and y'all got to go now because you don't represent us."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is this having any effect on the mayoral race?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: It's hard to tell the impact on the mayoral race. What I'll say about that is this, this is the moment where you really get to see the difference between the candidates. You get to see who Karen Bass is and you get to see who Rick Russo is. You get to see if you want a lifetime professional healthcare provider, community organizer, and experienced politician, or you want a wealthy white billionaire mall developer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What can other cities all around the country learn from this moment?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: What I think they can learn from this moment is watch what you say when you're behind closed doors.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] The mic is always hot people. The mic is always hot.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: The mic is always hot, but I think for politicians, in particular, don't surround yourself with people who support you and your nonsense. Surround yourself with people who are going to push back, who are just going to disagree, who are going to say, "Hey, that doesn't make sense," or, "Hey, that sounds foul. You wouldn't say this somewhere else." All of us need that because all of us can be drawn into the trap at white supremacy lays. The trap at white supremacy lays is, it's us against everybody else.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've been hearing from any young people in your district? I mean really young people, kids, teenagers, have they talked about this at all?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: They are talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. They're absolutely gobsmacked. I have to say this, especially Latinos, especially Latinas. Incredibly embarrassed, ashamed, hurt, and feeling like the world tells us to distrust each other. We work so hard to live in a way where we can trust each other. In the space of an hour, these four people can ruin it and set us back 25, 30 years. Young people are talking about it. What I appreciate about that is they are intent on seeing the world a different way and running the world a different way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You at all worried about the overall trust in government that we know is at an all-time low, going even lower behind this?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: I am. I think what the City Council does going forward matters a lot. I think the situation we're in now with the City Council could literally be put out of business. That's how low in public trust the body is. I think all the moves we got to make now are the right moves. We can't afford any missteps. All of us got to lean all the way in to get these people to resign. Then we've got to figure out how we run the council in a way that increases transparency, decreases mystery, and eliminates many of the opportunities for this kind of corruption.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are we missing? Those of us who don't live in LA, who are covering this, what question are we not asking?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: Well, the question that you're not asking is what's the miracle of Los Angeles? While all this is happening, Black and brown people live together literally next door to each other. My district is upwards of 45% Latino. It's a little bit over 50% African American. People aren't fighting in the streets. People aren't shooting at each other. People aren't yelling at each other on the blocks. We figure it out. We operate small businesses next to each other.

We operate small businesses with each other. One of the best restaurants in my district is a Latino-owned soul food restaurant, where a family worked for a Black family for years, and that Black family helped them start a restaurant. That's the story of LA that gets obfuscated by the utter nonsense and embarrassment that these four people were on this tape.

Melissa Harris-Perry: LA, City Council member, Harris-Dawson, thank you for joining us today.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we come back, we're going to dig into something that the council member said to us. We're talking about Latino communities and anti-blackness. [music] We've been talking about the controversy, pain, and disappointment so many in Los Angeles are feeling after hearing leaked audio of their City Council President using racist, derogatory language while referring to Black and Indigenous folks on a call with other city leaders. A City Council member, Harris-Dawson just told me.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson: Especially Latinos, especially Latinas, incredibly embarrassed, ashamed, hurt, and feeling like the world tells us to distrust each other. We work so hard to live in a way where we can trust each other. In the space of an hour, these four people can ruin it and set us back 25, 30 years. Young people are talking about it. What I appreciate about that is they are intent on seeing the world a different way and running the world a different way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, to understand more about the historic and cultural context of these comments, and of the pain they've caused, I sat down with Danielle Cleveland, associate professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latino studies, and African diaspora studies. She teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

Danielle Cleveland: A lot of folks were surprised by what was said in that room and I think that Afro-Latinos were likely not surprised. Indigenous Latinos were likely not surprised because we've heard this language within our communities for so long. I think one of the more important processes to pay attention to is that anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity exist in Latin America throughout the region, in the Caribbean as well. These are attitudes that travel, they travel with folks that come to the US.

The racial hierarchies that we see here in the US are the same racial hierarchies in Latin America. There is some heavy anti-blackness in Latin America. The other part of this is that we have to recognize that a lot of this conversation was in company of work colleagues. This was obviously language that folks knew was going to be accepted as normalized language. People knew that folks were going to laugh about it. This is not an exception to the rule. These are the conversations that folks are having all of the time, and that they've obviously been having.

Melissa Harris-Perry: So much of what you said is a reminder that Black and Latino communities are not separate categories, they're overlapping categories, obviously Afro-Latino communities. I'm also wondering about the ways that not even national origin identity, but simply color phenotype, these kinds of almost barbaric biological. This notion that somehow race is carried in our blood. How does colorism plant all of this?

Danielle Cleveland: If we take it back to the context of Martinez, we see that she's not only talking about Black folks, she's also talking about Indigenous folks, and how they're darker and obviously much different from her as she perceives it. Colorism plays a great role in this. We have all kinds of sayings in Spanish in our communities that encourage people to marry lighter because then your children are going to be lighter. It's normalized language among many of our families.

The kind of colorism lives within our families. There are folks within families that receive more privilege than others because they're lighter skinned. All of this again is not only about the United States, it's rooted in Latin America where being lighter is seen as being more valuable, being more attractive.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's worth noting. Councilperson Harris-Dawson, who I spoke with earlier, pointed out that perhaps the most affirming aspect of this entire debacle has been that without pause, Latino communities within Southern California were like, "Oh no, you got to go. You cannot stand here and behave this way." In that sense, I am wondering if this moment for all the pain that it reflects is also suggesting that perhaps there is a willingness, an effort to address and to address with clarity the anti-blackness.

Danielle Cleveland: I think that there has to be a concerted effort to really address it. Folks can resign. I think often when there's tangible accountability that happens, then folks tend to leave it alone. She resigned. We showed everybody that this is not the kind of language that we want in our political communities, and that's that. Without the subsequent conversations and get real moments about what has happened, it's not going to change.

Folks are going to just continue their conversations, making sure that they're not being recorded or in private. We have to really talk about this, without a concerted effort to really address these issues within our communities, the resignation is not going to do anything to move us forward as far as anti-blackness is concerned. Not only because it exists within our communities, but also because it exists within our institutions. It needs to be a widespread effort to really recognize that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A final question for you. You said we need to have these conversations. We need to engage with one another. We need to really make this readily apparent. Talk to me about those talks. What those conversations sound like. Do you have any tools for folks who might want to broach this conversation, perhaps within their families, within their communities, within their classrooms?

Danielle Clealand: I think that one of the first things we have to do is challenge the language when it arises. Sometimes that can be difficult, but it's a lot easier to gloss over certain commentary or to ignore it because it's our family and these are difficult conversations to have. I think that if we're consistently challenging anti-black or anti-indigenous language, even if it's presented as humorous or even if we're going to be challenged for being too serious or always concerned about race or whatever, the accusation may be, we have to do it.

The other part of this is to have more public conversations. Certainly, the apology by Martinez did not acknowledge any of the things that we're talking about today. We certainly should start within our families. We should be challenging this kind of thing. Outside of that, media organizations, institutions really need to start addressing these issues.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Danielle Clealand is an associate professor in the departments of Mexican American and Latino Studies and African Diasporic studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Thank you so much for joining us.

Danielle Clealand: Thank you so much.

[music]

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