Alioto won’t be punished for epithet
The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee will not discipline attorney and former Supervisor Angela Alioto for repeatedly using a racial epithet at a public meeting last month.
DCCC Chairman David Campos said Wednesday that the organization, which acts as the governing arm of the Democratic Party in San Francisco, decided not to take action against Alioto.
The DCCC considered booting Alioto from the group last month after she used the word “n—” six times following a presentation on racial discrimination within city government.
The group’s rules were unclear about how to address such situations, Campos said, so instead the DCCC would use the April 24 incident to
clarify the organization’s code of conduct at a meeting scheduled for Wednesday evening.
“Instead of having a fight about what to do with this one individual incident, we want to have a conversation about what our expectations are for members so there’s a clear understanding of how we should engage with each other and members of the public who come to testify,” Campos said.
Several African American members of the SEIU 1021 union addressed the DCCC committee on April 24 to highlight racism, pay inequity and retaliation they endured while working for the city and to call on local, state and federal officials to take action.
Alioto says she used the word “n—” to underscore the corrosive, traumatic effects it can have in the workplace, referencing previous racial discrimination cases she handled as a civil rights attorney. She urged the SEIU workers to take their own cases to court, using the word to show that merely uttering it creates a hostile work environment.
Despite her attempts to contextualize the word to show its ugliness, many attendees were clearly disturbed and implored her to stop saying it.
Alioto apologized for offending anyone, but insisted that saying the word was essential to conveying how hurtful it is.
The situation, she said Wednesday, was “a dose of reality for those who were shocked. Wake up. This is what my clients hear. They don’t put a cute little name on it like ‘the n-word.’ There’s no other slur in our vocabulary that has a nickname,” she said.
“The intensity of the word to the person is what matters in the workplace. This DCCC just got a little lesson on what really is going on in the real world, as opposed to the political world.”