I’m not sure you guys read Dr. Melina Abdullah’s piece in the LA Sentinel about the Barrio Athletics backlash from Leimert Park. I did. Went through it a couple of times. And for someone calling for courageous conversation, a lot in here isn’t courageous and comes off as simply dishonest.
I made a post earlier in the week clarifying the misinformation around the backlash because nobody was speaking from a factual base. Everything I touched on was easy to gather from simple observation and a Google search. There’s no excuse for anyone, especially an academic professor who claims to be about Black and Brown unity, to not be speaking from those facts.
I’m writing this in frustration — as someone who is sincere about Black and Brown unity, has been a long-time BLM supporter, and who has sacrificed years of work, trials, and tribulations to get real Ws for the African American community, especially in Venice, Santa Monica, and West LA, which has arguably the oldest Black and Brown coexisting communities in any part of Los Angeles. I struggle for those Ws because, as someone actually focused on dismantling white supremacy and all its manifestations, I clearly understand that what happens to Black people systemically happens to Brown people, and vice versa.
“Latinx”
One thing about her article that stood out like a sore thumb was how she used the term “Latinx” throughout — the headline, the body, all of it — for Barrio Athletics and the young runners who are clearly Brown Mesoamerican diaspora people from South LA. Insisting on the Latin terminology is how you distance the Indigeneity out of the people you’re critiquing, and I believe she knows exactly what she’s doing with that.
The “takeover”
Melina insists the runners announced a takeover, but what they actually announced was a 5K. A young woman in a promo reel said the words “take over the streets” — common marketing language that she turned into the centerpiece of an entire Sentinel column, Black LA’s newspaper of record.
She sticks with it because “takeover” evokes street takeovers, chaos, and lawlessness — and she knows it. She puts quotation marks around the word like she’s creating distance while reinforcing the trigger word throughout the piece. By my count she uses it about five times, making sure it sticks.
Insisting on using incorrect language doesn’t sound like someone who wants to build on Black and Brown unity.
Disingenuous Headline
- August 31 — Barrio Athletics publicly offers to move their warm-up so the market isn’t touched.
- Early September — They meet with a Leimert Park delegation. Henry goes further and moves the entire run out of the neighborhood.
- September 6 — The run happens at Elysian Park, by Dodger Stadium. Nobody sets foot in Leimert.
- September 10 — The Sentinel headline reads “Attempted ‘Takeover.'”
Four days after he held the event at Elysian Park, and 10 days after he said he was going to move it.
Also, check out her little quotation trick. She puts “takeover” in quotes because Barrio Athletics used that word in their promo — even though it wasn’t the title or the slogan of the event. She does this to remind the audience it was their word, not hers. But she couldn’t put “attempted” in quotations because that one is hers. “Attempted” means somebody actually tried to do something. So in the same breath that she’s acting like she’s being measured and fair, she’s reanimating the exact inflammatory language she’s pretending to distance herself from. The quotation marks are the cover. “Attempted” is the indictment.
By the way, if you actually watch the promo video where that young woman says “take over the streets,” anyone who saw that and felt threatened is either not serious or just looking for an excuse to be anti-Mexican. There’s no other way to read it.
Continued Misinformation
She writes about their DJ and music carrying through the neighborhood when the run was advertised 9 to 11am—two hours —while the actual run lasted 30 to 45 minutes. She doubles down on the vendor claim as if they were coming to set up shop and compete with the Leimert Park market. They had one smoothie vendor for their own runners. One. That’s not a fact you have to dig for — it’s right there in the promo. An academic professor writing for the Sentinel has no excuse for not checking that before printing it.
And somewhere in the middle of all these inaccuracies, she ( and many others) stops to make fun of how the kids pronounced Leimert Park and their grammar. A professor publicly mocking how young Brown people from South LA talk. Think about what that is and who it’s aimed at.
All of this was easy to confirm with basic observation and a Google search. The fact that she didn’t — or chose not to — says a lot about what this column was actually for.
More false equivalency
“I never heard of Black people taking over Olvera Street. We visit.”
Easily debunked with basic logic. Olvera Street is a cultural marketplace downtown. Nobody lives there. Nobody’s raising kids on Olvera Street. Leimert Park is a residential neighborhood inside South Central, which is about 70% Latino. Leimert itself is about 25% Latino. Barrio Athletics is a South LA club, and Henry lives in the same district he was told to stay out of.
Comparing a neighbor to a tourist at a marketplace is not the same situation, and she’s smart enough to know that. Again, just more reason for me to feel that she’s not serious about Black and Brown unity unless it requires Brown people being subordinates in that effort.
And for what it’s worth — El Pueblo, the district Olvera Street sits in, hosts the Origin Awards every year honoring the African American founding families of Los Angeles. Black history is literally celebrated at the site she’s using as her example. Nobody told them they were taking over. Nobody asked if they were invited. Because that’s how shared space is supposed to work.
Who actually started this
She mentions a member of the Africa Town Coalition who “sounded the alarm” but conveniently doesn’t name her. It was Brandy Kane — Brangela Davis — who has a documented history of anti-Mexican commentary on her social media and is the same person who called for ICE on street vendors in her own neighborhood. Brandy and the Africa Town Coalition still refuse to acknowledge or apologize for those racist calls for ICE — which is also anti-Black, because ICE doesn’t just come after Brown people. They come after Black immigrants too.
Dr. Abdullah denounces ICE in her other posts. She had the platform, the column, and the moment to name the person who actually lit this whole “hostile takeover” fire and hold her accountable — even just to acknowledge that Kane was the instigator and disagree with it, the way a righteous peacemaker of Black and Brown unity would. Instead she gave Brandy Kane a pass and put the onus back on the Brown kids who got burned by it. She’s covering for the person who started this while landing the blame on the people who reacted to it, and that tells you everything about where her solidarity actually sits.
“Uplifting Black and Brown solidarity”
She describes her social media comments as uplifting the need for Black and Brown unity and encouraging the runners to rethink their plans. She says she read all three back and wouldn’t change a word.
Here’s one of them.
That’s Melina’s “uplifting Black and Brown unity,” and she “Wouldn’t change a word.” No acknowledgment that the language was inflammatory, no humility, no self-reflection from someone who’s supposed to be an elder in this work.
Filing us out of our own identity
In her list of who belongs in Leimert, she names “Brown cousins” in one breath and, separately, “Indigenous folks who welcome the descendants of Black captives to the land.” Read that again. Brown people in one category. Indigenous people in a different category, doing the welcoming. We’re the cousins. Somebody else is Indigenous.
We are a majority Indigenous-descended and cultured people. That’s just facts. Our food, our families, our medicine, our relationship to land all predominantly trace to this continent, not to Spain. Spain invented the casta system specifically to reclassify Indigenous people as “mixed” so we’d lose our land and our standing as nations. That system has been running for four hundred years, and it shows up in places you wouldn’t expect — like a Pan-African Studies professor who’s allegedly serious about Black and Brown unity, and who is casually sorting Mexicans out of their own Indigeneity in a column about unity.
That leads directly into her next move.
“Summoning Native heritage”
Her word for Brown people asserting their Indigenous identity is “summoning.” That’s a low-key condescending jab. When Black folks reference slavery and Jim Crow, nobody calls that summoning. We understand it as history that shapes the present. But when we assert our Indigenous roots — roots that go back thousands of years on this continent — it gets reduced to a rhetorical move. Something we pull out to win an argument.
And look at who she’s aiming at. She’s not talking about all Brown people generally. She’s talking about the Mesoamerican reclaiming community specifically — the ones who actually know their Indigenous identity and aren’t afraid to assert it. That’s who she’s describing when she says people are “summoning Native heritage.” The ones who are awake to who they are. And she uses “Latinx” to file them as the ones using racist language. Think about that. The people most connected to their roots are the ones she’s painting as the problem and pinning the threats and racism on.
She pairs it with the claim that we used that heritage to call Black people colonizers and tell them to go back to Africa. I’ve been monitoring this situation very closely — hundreds of posts, threads, and videos across multiple platforms. Are there people saying racist bullshit? No doubt. Mostly bots and fringe clowns. But characterizing the whole backlash as that is a lie, and she knows it. I replied to Melina directly. The overwhelming majority of what Brown people were saying was “we’re not outsiders here” — because they were being told they were.
The MAGA campaign
While all this was going on, people started posting that Henry — the leader of Barrio Athletics — is MAGA and a Trump supporter. No evidence, no receipts.. People asked for receipts. Nothing came. And Melina’s in those comments cheering it on, boosting people who are trying to smear a young man in his twenties who was organizing morning runs in his own community.
Henry asked the young lady who was slandering him for a conversation. She said she doesn’t have time to debate.
How is a social justice leader — let alone any regular adult — egging on these low-frequency antics from kids trying to harm another kid’s reputation with absolutely nothing to back it up? And then refusing to sit down and talk when he asks? That’s not leadership. That’s not courageous conversation. That’s someone who knows they’re wrong and doesn’t want to be in a room where they have to answer for it.
“A few”
Second to last paragraph, she writes that she’s aware of “a few” Black folks advocating for ICE intervention. A few?
She names every threat that came her way — and I’m not dismissing any of them. But she’ll detail all of that and then reduce the ICE calls to “a few”? Calls to ICE are not internet comments. That’s calling a federal agency that detains, deports, and separates families. Our community was flooded with those threats across every platform, and she boiled it down to “a few” in a single sentence with no names attached.
She’s referencing the same threads and comment sections where anti-Brown sentiments were everywhere — calls for ICE, “go back to East LA,” open hostility toward Brown people just for existing in the conversation. She saw all of that. She was in those threads. That’s where she’s pulling her own grievances from. But somehow the only vitriol worth naming in her column was what came at her.
She could have named them — Brandy Kane, the Africa Town Coalition, and everyone else who still won’t acknowledge it was said, won’t say it was wrong, and won’t apologize. If this were the other way around, there’d be a protest outside somebody’s house or business by now, and we all know it.
I went through those threads myself — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Yes, a good chunk is bots, and I’d like to think that revolutionary thinkers and organizers understand by now that online vitriol gets manufactured specifically to get Black and Brown people swinging at each other. That’s not new and it’s not subtle. But real people said real things too, on both sides, and what I watched over days across four platforms was far more of it aimed at Brown people from the Black community than the other way around — from accounts I know for a fact are real people.
Anti-Brownness. We need to stop hesitating to use the word.
“Lessons to be learned”
She closes by saying there are lessons about settling our quarrels. There are.
Settling anything starts with being honest about facts. Having the humility to admit when you overstepped, when your words were unskillful, when you handled a moment badly — instead of reading your own comments back and deciding you nailed it. It starts with naming the person who actually lit the match instead of covering for them. It starts with having a radar for anti-Brownness that’s at least in the same neighborhood as your radar for anti-Blackness.
It’s hard to take leaders seriously — especially intelligent ones, especially ones who clearly know better — when they’re not trying to be sincere about how white supremacy manifests in both our communities. When the accountability in a piece about accountability only runs in one direction.
Where are the real leaders with humility who are sincerely trying to get to real Black and Brown unity — because the leader of the most prominent pro-Black organization in Los Angeles clearly isn’t one of them.
