Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez at podium, and Mayor Eric Garcetti, standing to her ... [+]
Los Angeles citizens are demanding the resignation of three city council members following leaked audio in which one member made racist and offensive comments about a fellow council member's Black son and L.A. County’s District Attorney, as well as Latino, Jewish, and Armenian people.
Council president Nury Martinez, who is heard making the racist remarks, resigned from the Council yesterday. Exacerbating the crisis, two other council members allegedly involved in the recorded conversation are currently holding on to their positions. This led to an early adjournment of yesterday’s council meeting, disrupted by protester chants of “no resignation, no meeting” and “step down or we shut down.”
Resignation demands have extended beyond California. President Joe Biden on Tuesday called for the three councilmembers to step down.
This latest failure to properly address public outrage about racism isn’t exclusive to one city council. It presents a learning opportunity for leaders and organizations across industries.
Leaders stand a better chance of not permanently ruining their professional reputations and careers when they immediately acknowledge their wrongdoings, sincerely apologize, and hold themselves accountable. In some instances, accountability requires swift resignation. Voters elected Martinez and her bystanders to respect and serve all people in L.A., one of our nation’s most ethnically diverse cities. Irreparable harm has been caused by the leader who said such awful things and those who did nothing to stop, report, or otherwise hold her accountable in the moment.
The L.A. City Council scandal presents larger lessons for governments, corporations, and other organizations. When it becomes known that a leader made a racist statement, many colleagues and friends will say something like, “I don’t know that person to be a racist.” This doesn’t mean the leader isn’t, or that the person is entirely incapable of speaking the words they’ve been accused of (or recorded) saying.
In the audio first published on Reddit and obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Martinez is allegedly heard denigrating and dehumanizing the Black adopted son of Mike Bonin, a fellow councilmember who’s white. Specifically, she said the child is “Parece changuito,” which means “He’s a monkey.” Martinez also made a racist statement about Latino residents in the Koreatown section of the city, calling them “short dark people” and “ugly.” Additionally, “Fuck that guy, he’s with the Blacks,” is what she said about District Attorney George Gascón in that same conversation about redistricting. An L.A. Times article published yesterday reveals that the audio recording also captures Martinez saying offensive things about Jewish and Armenian people.
City Council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, as well as Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera were also present for the meeting in which Martinez made the racist statements. Herrera resigned Tuesday. Earlier this year, de León dropped out of the race to become the city’s next mayor. At this point, Cedillo and de León haven’t given up their council seats, despite receiving enormous pressure to do so.
In a statement, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti noted, “Stepping down from the Council would be the right response by these members in a moment that demands accountability and healing at a time of great pain and deep disappointment.” Congresswoman Karen Bass and businessman Rick Caruso – one of whom will succeed Garcetti as the city’s mayor following next month’s election – have both insisted that the involved councilmembers must be held accountable.
Twitter statement from Congresswoman Karen Bass, Los Angeles mayoral candidate.
The L.A. elected officials, unfortunately, aren’t the only leaders who have been caught making racist remarks. Last month, the NBA suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver and fined him $10 million for using racist and sexually inappropriate language. According to the NBA’s investigation, Sarver used the N-word at least five times.
In July 2020, Michael Lofthouse, then CEO of the tech company Solid8, resigned after being caught on video verbally attacking an Asian American family at a restaurant in California. “Fuck you Asians,” he exclaimed. “Go back to whatever fucking Asian country you’re from… you don’t belong here.”
Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf came under scrutiny in September 2020 for claiming it’s difficult to find “qualified” Black professionals in the financial industry. And then there’s John Schnatter, founder of Papa Johns, who was forced out of the pizza franchise after saying the N-word during a conference call. It wasn’t Schnatter’s first offense. These are just a few examples involving executives.
Regardless of whether they voluntarily resign or if they’re pushed out, leaders who choose to apologize must explicitly name the racial harm they’ve caused. Raceless apologies do little to restore confidence among the groups that were targets of those leaders’ racially derogatory statements. They must stand in front of the people, look them in their faces, and sincerely ask what they can do to repair the harm their words and actions inflicted. Through meaningful restorative actions, tarnished leaders must then make good on promises conveyed to those people during and long after the racial crises.
In many organizations, there are attempts to minimize the severity of colleagues’ racist remarks. “It depends on who you ask,” is the answer to the commonly-asked question, “was it really that bad?” White co-workers aren’t positioned to tell Black colleagues not to be offended by being likened to monkeys or by being called the N-word.
The L.A. City Council scandal confirms that it isn’t just white people who say racist things. The leaders involved were Latino. In their L.A. Times op-ed, University of Southern California professors Pedro Noguera and Manuel Pastor explain how anxieties about the loss of Latino political power resulted in a divisive zero-sum conversation that overflowed with racist remarks. Black and Latino tensions exist in many cities and organizations, but leaders don’t usually talk openly about them. There’s a chance that Martinez has long felt some version of what she expressed to Cedillo and de León. But how would we know?
Implicit association tests only go so far. More has to be done to explicitly and preemptively measure racist ideologies that leaders and elected officials bring to their roles. Waiting until they publicly make mistakes to put them into some sort of sensitivity training is irresponsible. Leaders, including people of color, need more upfront professional learning and coaching on confronting their implicit biases and racist perspectives about other groups. It ought not be presumed that leaders have anti-racist values, even if they are Latino, Black, Indigenous, or Asian American.
Most organizations find themselves scrambling to figure out what to do when it becomes known that their leaders said racist things. This is what happens when there are unclear, nonexistent, and raceless policies concerning leaders’ misconduct. Consequences for employees at all levels, including executives and elected officials, have to be more clearly spelled out before scandalous emails and audio recordings emerge. This has to be included upfront in policy documents, made clear in onboarding to leadership roles, and consistently reinforced.
In some contexts, leaders undergo extensive vetting prior to being appointed or allowed to stand for election. That vetting is typically raceless. “Does this person use the N-word and other racial epithets, have problematic views about other racial groups, or have a bad reputation among some communities of color,” aren’t questions normally included in vetting processes. They should be. So too should this one: “Is it entirely unthinkable that a recording or email could possibly exist in which this leader is saying racially offensive things?”
Lastly, there’s almost always a desperate desire to immediately move on when an organization receives significant attention for a racial crisis. Moving on too quickly denies workers and leaders opportunities to deeply unpack what occurred, why it happened, who and what parts of the organization remain susceptible to similar missteps, and how racial crises like these can be avoided in the future. For example, it would be a mistake to assume that Martinez, Cedillo, and de León are the only leaders in city government who would engage in such an inexcusably racist conversation. Hence, future coaching and professional learning experiences for elected officials in L.A. and leaders elsewhere should leverage this racial scandal as a case study.
