The recent revelation of the racist rant, irrational reasoning and inequitable reordering of the political map of Los Angeles by a group of Latina/o city council and labor leaders offers useful insights and lessons in racial, racialized and racist sentiments, thought and practice in American politics, regardless of the local and Latino context in which it occurred. Certainly, we who know them personally and politically from other contexts and times, and have worked to build Black/Brown alliances and support Latino interests even when they were small in number, share the shock of discovering they could be so crude, cruel and crassly racist in language and zero-sum conceptions of political planning and practice. But we are compelled by the undeniable evidence to accept that their personal positions are grossly different from their public self-presentations.
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