What’s in a Name
17th May 2009
Identity Politics has so corrupted our culture that we may not ever recover.
A dispute over the naming of a new southern California high school provides a glimpse of the country’s ethnic future. During a February 2008 hostage standoff, Los Angeles police officer Randal Simmons was slain by a gunman as Simmons tried to protect the gunman’s family members (three of whom the gunman had already killed). During off hours, Simmons, a 27-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a member of its elite SWAT unit, had mentored teens in Carson, a hardscrabble industrial suburb south of Los Angeles. As a minister in the Glory Christian Fellowship, Simmons tried to keep Carson’s youth away from the city’s thriving gang life.
This fall, the Carson City Council voted to name a new high school after Simmons in recognition of his service to the community. Since then, however, Latino residents of Carson have pushed to rescind the vote and to name the new school after César Chávez, the farmworker organizer. “I’m very upset,” resident Miriam Vasquez told the Los Angeles Daily Breeze. “This is a Latino area. It should be named after Cesar Chavez.” Simmons was black, but opponents of the Simmons resolution insist that race has nothing to do with their position. Rather, they protest that the community was not consulted and that members of Simmons’s church had railroaded the recommendation through the council.