Los Angeles Burned, Now They’re Coming for Karen Bass 

By Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier, Word in Black

It was a perfect recipe for a disaster in Los Angeles: 10 months of drought after a summer of record-setting heat. Bone-dry scrub grass and vegetation — near-unlimited wildfire fuel. Hurricane-force winds barreling down from mountains, packing gusts of up to 90 miles per hour. 

But apparently Karen Bass — the first woman and second-ever Black person to serve as mayor of Los Angeles — was supposed to snap her Black Girl Magic fingers and stop the massive, Santa Ana wind-driven, climate change-fueled fires in her city that have killed at least 10 people and burned entire neighborhoods to the ground. On TV, in social media and in the newspapers, conservatives are blasting Bass for an environmental disaster that’s out of her control. 

The devastation in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood — as well as other parts of Los Angeles County, like Altadena and Pasadena, where Bass isn’t even in charge — is unprecedented. 

Even if Bass personally stood in the middle of Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades with a massive fire hose it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Los Angeles doesn’t have a leadership crisis; it has a truth crisis. 

Fires don’t care about your politics. They don’t check your bank balance or your zip code before they jump across Pacific Coast Highway. And until we get real about urban planning, budget realities, climate change, and our addiction to fossil fuels, we’re just rearranging flaming deck chairs on the Titanic.

Instead of mobilizing to help Angelenos, or starting an honest conversation about climate change, however, the usual lineup of right wing trolls — including Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Libs of TikTok to name a few — are leading a misinformation-filled, racially coded pile-on against Bass. They paint her as an irresponsible and incompetent affirmative action mayor who was galavanting around Africa, partying on the taxpayer’s dime when the fire broke out.

Along with other misinformation about the worst fire in Los Angeles history, Musk has been busy boosting tweets that refer to Bass as a DEI hire. Instead of using his considerable wealth and newfound political power to help, Musk would rather use it to hurt Bass and pour fuel on a still-raging disaster. 

Read more.

Learn about the black history that leads to current discrimination.

More stories like this.