As the Los Angeles City Council voted 13-2 on Friday to approve the new redistricting plan, the two dissenters, Bernard Parks and Jan Perry, reiterated their intent to file a legal challenge against the new maps on the basis that race was improperly used as a primary factor in creating them.

The maps produced by the Redistricting Commission, whose head, Andrew Westall, is an appointee of Council President Herb Wesson, enhanced Wesson’s 10th district and created five solidly Latino districts, including the 14th, which now includes all of the downtown central business district.

Wesson picked up Koreatown while bolstering his African-American support base by acquiring Baldwin Village and Leimert Park. He and 14th district Councilman Jose Huizar emerged the big winners, with Parks and Perry, who along with Wesson are the only three African-Americans on the City Council, on the other end of the leaderboard.

Perry lost much of downtown Los Angeles, with its donor-rich business and real estate interests, to the 14th district. Parks’ 8th district gave up some of its more valuable African-American neighborhoods to the 10th district, which also acquired Koreatown (much to the dismay of many Korean neighborhood activists, who prefer to be alongside other Asian neighborhoods and are also threatening a lawsuit). The 8th also lost the University of Southern California and Exposition Park to Perry’s 9th district.

The “consolation prize” given to the 8th and 9th districts in exchange for losing desirable real estate was to redraw them to be more African-American, with the intention of protecting African-American seats, and more cynically, incumbent African-American interests. The high priority placed on race in drawing the new districts forms the basis for Parks and Perry’s lawsuit against the Redistricting Commission, a lawsuit that is worth examining on its merits.

“The notion that ... the Voting Rights Act requires the balkanization of voters into districts based upon race in Los Angeles is meritless and unbecoming of our city,” wrote the two councilmembers’ lawyer Nathan Lowenstein, in a letter to City Attorney Carmen Trutanich opposing the plan.

The Voting Rights Act, a milestone in American history, is responsible for guaranteeing racial minorities the full constitutional protections they are entitled to with regard to participating in our democracy. Section 2 of the act prevents state and local governments from engaging in any type of activity or procedure that abridges minority voting rights. The Department of Justice has filed several lawsuits based on Section 2, alleging that certain instances of redistricting or at-large legislative structures unfairly denied minorities representation in government, and using historically racially polarized voting patterns to back up the discrimination claim.

Los Angeles is a majority-minority city, with only 28.7% identifying as non-Hispanic whites, and substantial Asian (11.3%) and African-American (9.6%) minorities. The city has elected, as its last four mayors, a Latino former labor leader, a white Democrat with strong African-American support, a white Republican businessman, and a popular African-American who served for 20 years. The diverse Los Angeles electorate has demonstrated the ability to cross over, electing officials of all races to citywide positions, so Parks and Perry’s argument that voters in this city did not need such acute attention paid to ethnicity in designing council districts to ensure minorities a voice in government is backed up with evidence.

Parks and Perry may be seeking to overturn a political defeat, but the degree and method in which legislative districts are gerrymandered on ethnic lines, and the effectiveness of this type of cartography in promoting the interests of the minority voters whom such a process is designed to help, is worth reviewing.

Council members should advocate for the interests of their local constituencies, but sometimes those constituencies can be, in a way, too local. Protecting symbolic minority representation by dividing districts in such an ethnocentric manner makes these districts not only less economically dynamic, but overwhelmingly likely to elect a series of assembly-line representatives that are at best, predictable and tied to the same special interests, and at worst, caricatures of their fiefdoms that make bigger-picture citywide compromise much more difficult.

Los Angeles used to elect its City Council on an at-large basis until 1925, when it went to a 15-person body with each member representing a unique geographic area. An at-large system wouldn’t work today, as the cost of running a citywide campaign would force candidates to focus on the rich Westside neighborhoods to the detriment of everyone living in the rest of Los Angeles, but going to the other extreme and gerrymandering in a way to tie councilmembers to hyper-local and hyper-entrenched power brokers also makes the City Council less inclusive of the interests of all Angelenos.

Herb Wesson’s 10th district has been represented by an African-American councilmember, uninterrupted, since 1963. Before joining the City Council, Wesson was an Assemblyman from the 47th district, which largely overlaps the 10th council district. Paul Koretz took over for Jack Weiss in the 3rd district, which has been represented by a Jewish councilmember, uninterrupted, since 1953. Koretz came from the California Assembly as well, where he represented the 42nd district, again, covering most of the same turf as his council district.

I was speaking recently with someone who spends a lot of time in the Netherlands, and he was telling me a story about his friend Marcel, who used to be on the Amsterdam city council as the “representative of the HIV-positive community.” Koretz in the “Westside Jews” seat and Wesson as the “Central L.A. African-Americans” representative are not that many degrees removed from Marcel.

There is also the small fact that neither racial geography nor race itself is a static thing. Los Angeles has more Asians than African-Americans, but Asians do not get a guaranteed seat on the City Council because they have settled in a somewhat more disparate fashion across Los Angeles. Many historically African-American parts of Los Angeles, such as Watts, have become majority-Latino, and we should not forget the 4.6% (and growing) of Angelenos who claim an ethnicity comprising two or more races.

Minority representation is essential in making American democracy more thoughtful and inclusive (as we have seen with the all-male contraception hearings), but building districts of such overwhelmingly ethnically-based architecture is not only insulting to Angelenos, in implying a higher degree of parochial voting patterns than is backed up by evidence, but counterproductive to both the constituents and legislators in those districts.

Jan Perry complained that removing multiracial downtown from her district took away a huge economic asset from its South Los Angeles residents. She has a point; it is hard to argue that lower-income African-Americans in South L.A. are better off with a really saturated African-American district, a guaranteed African-American councilmember, and no downtown, rather than a substantially saturated African-American district, an extremely likely African-American councilmember, and downtown. Perry’s district is now more racially homogeneous, but it loses its bridge between Grand Avenue skyscrapers and South Los Angeles families, and that does seem to negatively affect economic opportunities among the latter, which is kind of the point of minority representation in the first place.

Personal motivation aside, Parks and Perry are fighting the redistricting plan on grounds that its extreme sensitivity to racial concerns is unwarranted, and more importantly, that economic opportunities in a district is more important than the symbolic optics of the district. To quote their attorney in his letter to Trutanich, “Los Angeles today is not the Deep South in the 1960s.” It is not, and a city that has no majority ethnic group and a two-term Latino mayor does not need special protections in its legislative mapping to build in ethnic electoral fortresses.

Guaranteeing minority representation by creating minority-majority districts was and still is necessary in many cases to guarantee the democratic rights of those who might be disenfranchised by a unified majority voting bloc that acts counter to the interests of the minority. This is a huge concern in Alabama, but much less so in Los Angeles given its diversity and electoral history.

What started as a mechanism to empower African-Americans in the South has now been used to justify stripping two majority-African-American districts in South Los Angeles of economic assets. African-Americans and Latinos have repeatedly shown the ability to win elections across Los Angeles, and they should be able to continue to hold City Council seats without the Redistricting Commission stacking the deck demographically, particularly if it comes at the expense of further weakening these minority districts economically. Pyrrhic empowerment is no empowerment at all.

 

Update:

 

I had a long conversation with Jerry Gaines, the 15th district's representative to the Redistricting Commission, who graciously shared some of his insights into the process. 

All the following according to Gaines:

The 21-member commission was unable to convene as an entire unit for the detailed planning sessions because of technical limitations in the mapping software that precluded that many simultaneous inputs and adjustments to various districts. This required the commission to split into three working groups of seven members each, and there was little to no coordination between the groups, which met with the planning engineers separately. The commission members saw the final map the same day the public did.

Not only was this an inefficient and clumsy process, but the lack of publicly accessible meetings with all members present fueled suspicions of backroom dealings.

The Westchester Triangle firestorm was a simple case of the software inadvertently leaving that area out of the 11th district.

The commission tried to focus on keeping neighborhood councils together. A full 93 out of the 95 neighborhood councils in Los Angeles comprise around 40,000 residents, and are not hard to protect as unified blocs. Koreatown's neighborhood council represents over 100,000 people, making it almost impossible, given city geography and demographics, to keep it all together.

Gaines' 15th district gained in population since the last census, and given its uniqe geography as the San Pedro/Harbor tail of the city map, all redistricting processes have to begin with mapping the 15th district. Some of the 15th district's South Los Angeles communities were shifted into the 8th and 9th districts, which in turn gave up some real estate on their northern fringes.

The Voting Rights Act required the protection of certain minority seats and no improper attention or priority was given to race in mapping; it was focused on the "one-person, one-vote" population balancing of the fifteen districts and keeping neighborhood councils together.

(Note: head of the Redistricting Commission corrected to Andrew Westall from Christopher Ellison)

Reach Staff Columnist Matt Pressberg here.