Two weeks ago, Los Angeles Council member Nury Martinez resigned, due to public demand, after audio surfaced of her racist remarks towards the Black son of fellow Council member Mike Bonin. Nury's unsavory comments were made during a private phone call between her and two other Los Angeles politicians named Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo. While making her discriminatory assessment, Nury also took aim at the Indigenous migrants from Mexico before offending the LGBTQ+ community by calling her homosexual counterpart, Mike Bonin, a "little b*tch."
The recorded phone call sparked outrage throughout Los Angeles, resulting in anti-racist protests outside of Nury's home and the Los Angeles City Council Office. The social and political dilemma became a national story, garnering commentary from local activists, Hollywood celebrities, and the U.S. President. Now that a precedent has been set in Southern California, Gil “American Cholo” Tejada wants to see the same standards upheld in Northern California with the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed.
On October 5th, Mayor London Breed singled out the Honduran community by stating that people of Honduran descent were the primary culprits behind her rising crime rates in a Latino neighborhood of San Francisco known as the Tenderloin. She also pushed back on the notion that Latinos in the area were being racially profiled.
“Why do people who deal drugs have more rights than people who try to get up and go to work every day and take their children to school?” Breed said during a live interview with KQED. “There are unfortunately a lot of people who come from a particular country, who come from Honduras, and a lot of people who are dealing drugs happen to be of that ethnicity, and when a lot of the arrests have been made for people breaking the law, you have the public defender’s office and staff from the public defender’s office who are basically accusing and using the law to say you’re racial profiling...And it’s nothing racial profile about this — we all know it, it’s the reality, it’s what you see, it’s what’s out there.”
Much like Nury Martinez in Los Angles, Mayor London Breed ignited outrage throughout the area as several LatinX social groups spoke out against the offensive rhetoric. Although Mayor Breed has since apologized for her remarks, Gil “American Cholo” Tejada is calling for her to resign in the same manner as Nury Martinez.
"So let me get this straight, the most powerful politician in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, can sit there and throw a whole nationality under the bus and say that the reason her fentanyl problem is as bad as it is in San Francisco is that hondureños are selling the drugs," Tejada said. "She's also saying that it is not racial profiling when you pull over these Latinos. How can a politician sit there and say that about a whole race of people with no backlash? By just apologizing? No, absolutely not! She should resign! She should be held to the same standards that everybody else is. If we learned anything in Los Angeles, we gotta keep it equal, and keeping equal means she resigns."
London Breed issued an apology to the Honduran American community four days ago during a public address in San Franciso's Mission District. Thus far, there is no indication that she will be forced to vacate her job as Mayor.
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Source: Instagram
