The Stupidity of Identity Politics

If you would have asked me if the President of the California NAACP would be in favor of expanding the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors or against it, I would have guessed "in favor". And yet, Alice A. Huffman has a commentary in the Pink Transgender Lady (a.k.a. Los Angeles Times) advising against it, which means I agree Huffman!

State Constitutional Amendment 12, or SCA 12, would allow California voters to amend the state’s Constitution to require that L.A. County expand its Board of Supervisors from five to seven members and create an elected chief executive position with outsize powers and no accountability to the board.

That means voters all over California would get to decide the structure of the Los Angeles county leadership. The Amendment would not change things in any other county.

Currently, all legislative and executive power of the Los Angeles county government (other than whatever powers are retained by elected Department positions such as Sheriff) flows from the five-member board, and the last time an incumbent running for re-election was defeated was in 1980. Members of the board kept getting re-elected until they retired, until statewide term limits were put in place. It is those terms limits that have likely been a major inspiration for the proposed Amendment, as state legislators would very much like to have more elected positions in which to land when they are termed out of Sacramento. There are over ten million residents in the county of Los Angeles, so even if the board had two more members, each one would represent well over a million people, and there's no doubt that a new elected executive would be a Democrat staging position for Governor or President.

What caught my eye, though was that people are touting "diversity" to support and oppose the Amendment.

The proposal to expand the county’s board has been billed by its authors, including State Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia), as a populist measure that would increase diversity in government.

As an aside, I found this interesting:

If you’re going to let everybody in the state vote on what happens in your neighborhood, your own vote is rendered essentially meaningless.

Speaking of rendering votes meaningless, I wonder what Huffman's position on preventing voter fraud is?

SCA 12 is being pitched as a means toward greater diversity in government, but lack of diversity isn’t a problem in L.A. County. The Board of Supervisors is black, Latina and white; gay and straight; female and male. The current chief executive is an Asian American woman.

The board has four women and one man. I have yet to hear SJWs complaining that this is disproportional.

On making the executive position elected:

Conversely, minority and female candidates have often fared poorly in countywide elections, in part because of the county’s social and economic stratification. Turning the executive role into an elected position is likely to land a white man in the county’s top management job.

Sigh.

In response, sayitaintso1 left a comment that included:

Huffman is extremely disingenuous in her argument about diversity on the board. With only five seats, there are three white supervisors, while whites constitute only 30% of the population. Having 60% of the voting power of the board, while being a minority, is not true diversity. Blacks have 20% of the voting power of the board, and they are less than 10% of the population. Latinos and Asians make up more than 60% of the population yet have only 20% of the voting power of the board.

It is incredibly sad to see people think this way. A Latino-American, African-American, Asian-American, and white American each has the exact same voting power at the ballot box. (Although, a sizable percentage of the county population can't legally vote because they're not citizens.) People who vote for someone based on their skin color or ethnicity are racists and irrational. There are many whites who have voted for candidates who aren't. There are lot of people in one minority category who have voted for someone in another. In California, an African-American can represent someone well regardless of that person's skin color or ethnicity. The issues in the county are things like crime, public health, and infrastructure. We're not dealing with segregation or Jim Crow laws or systemic racism, unless you count the racism against Asian-Americans in educational quotas.

The current gerrymandering of supervisor districts effectively disenfranchised Latino and Asian residents,

What an allegation, considering the current district boundaries are largely the result of an overhaul designed to create a district with a Latino majority.

but the NAACP doesn't care because they only care about their own.

Let's all squabble, shall we?

Ridley-Thomas' own district is majority Latino, but you would never know it.

This person's assertion is apparently that only a Latino should represent a district with a majority of residents who identify as Latino (Ridley-Thomas is African-American).

Adding more members to the board would simply make government bigger without making it much more responsive, if it all. That's especially so if you add an elected executive. Each member of the board needs a sizable staff. Each county department, especially ones with an appointed, rather than elected, chief, seeks to keep all members of the board happy. In adding members to the board, you add time spent by staff in those departments doing things that really don't help the residents. In general, the county tends to run better than the city, which has a large council and a mayor. Granted, they do have some different things to deal with.

It may all be rearranging deck chairs, really, given how things are going in California.

The larger picture to me is that the best way to fight racism is to stop focusing on race and treat people as individuals, not favoring nor disfavoring someone because they would be categorized in the same category as you. Wanting an elected representative with the same "race" (I believe we're all one race... human... but I understand that's not considered an unacceptable statement on the Left) as you isn't quite as evil as committing a racist terrorist act by murdering and maiming people with your automobile, but it's part of the problem and not the solution.