Op-Ed: D.A. Gascón: Yes, I’m ‘with the Blacks’
It’s interesting to see that people are starting to think about this subject less than we used to, and not in the way we did. So when I saw the headline “Black voters say No to ‘white only’ primary” by Dan Arikian, a former Democratic member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, I thought it would be a good time to talk about it. The idea is not completely new. A couple of years ago, the Southern California News Group ran a story about what they called the “new Dixieism” and pointed out that it was a thing that wasn’t really seen as much before. I was thinking that Dan had done a good job with this piece with a lot of nuance. After that story ran, Dan had an interview with Andrew Anglin, one of the readers of the Southern California News Group. I found that interview in Salon.com, where he spoke about his article and how he felt it had been misrepresented. He wrote a follow-up piece which focused on people who voted against the proposal in the state Proposition 187, which would have put strict voter ID laws on the books in California.
In the end, Dan was right to say that there was a lot of conversation around the topic, and that it would continue to grow as more news outlets continue to report on the issues surrounding the primary.
One thing I would add about the argument that the election is a choice between one group of people who don’t want to change anything, and another, that will, is that my grandfather is white and my grandmother is Puerto Rican. As a whole, they were more than satisfied. And their only issue was that the other group, the black voters, were not satisfied. They wanted change. So what they were really saying was, “No, our lives aren’t worth change.”
As I think back to everything I’ve learned throughout my life, it’s interesting that I haven’t really come across
