‘People don’t feel safe here,’ yet El Dorado County wants to disband human rights group | Opinion

Three of the five members of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors want to disband the county’s Human Rights Commission, which was formed in 2018 after a series of racial incidents. But if anything, their eagerness to walk away from the project shows why the commission is so needed.

“People don’t feel safe here,” says Susan Simpkin, a Placerville psychologist and current chair of the commission. Yet “I don’t think the board wants to hear that stuff. I’ve heard people say we don’t have human rights problems in this county. Really? Try being queer in this county. Try being Black in this county.”

After the 2016 election, reports of racial and other bullying spiked across the country. That was especially true in the districts supporting Donald Trump like El Dorado County, where voters preferred him to Hillary Clinton by 14 percentage points in 2016 and to Joe Biden by 9 percentage points in 2020. (If the president can disparage people for their nationality or disability or gender or appearance, his fellow offenders asked, well then why can’t I?)

Michael Saunders, who serves on the water board and co-chairs a local civil rights organization, said El Dorado County also saw more harassment of students of color, and not just by other kids. In one instance, he said, a local school staff member told a third-grader that Trump was going to send that child’s family back to Mexico.

In 2020, a local contingent of the Proud Boys crashed the Toys for Tots giveaway at the Placerville Christmas parade, where the county employee playing Santa Claus stopped to have his photo taken with members of the far-right hate group, and appeared to join them in making a white supremacist hand signal.

And have these incidents stopped? No. Last year, at a March Oak Ridge High School girls soccer championship game, students made animal noises when Hispanic and Black players from the visiting school kicked the ball.

Among those upset by the plan to do away with the commission are the Oak Ridge High students who belong to the school’s Amnesty International Club. Disbanding the commission would be “a slap in the face to all of those who need it,” said junior Aiden Chemmannure, who called the group “a necessity.”

So why kill the commission, which tried to keep supervisors informed about problems and held forums on important issues including homelessness and the discrimination that LGBTQ students face?

None of the supervisors who voted to do that responded to messages.

But everything the commission has done has been heavily criticized in a county where a noose was only removed from Placerville’s city logo in 2021. A dummy still hangs by a noose outside a business on Main Street there, in what’s still known as “Hangtown.”

At the Jan. 24 meeting at which Supervisor Lori Parlin made the motion to disband the commission, she said the group had been “very divisive. I just don’t think we should spend any more time — we have so many things on our plate at the county right now — on a very controversial one.”

“We need to look at something more constructive and positive,” she said, and added that the current group of supervisors might not have approved the commission in the first place.

Since the commission had failed to bring people together, according to Parlin, it would be better to send a couple of supervisors to work with a new group called Bridging Divides, which challenges political partisanship. No, she said, she hadn’t talked to anyone at Bridging Divides about that.

And extreme partisanship is not the problem that the commission has been trying to tackle.

Simpkin, who says she has a good personal relationship with Parlin, says that “her vision has been, ‘don’t make waves.’’’ The work of the commission, she said, “makes her nervous.”

Saunders, who is Black, said that since the supervisors don’t want to do anything about human rights violations, maybe it’s best not to even have a commission that raises people’s hopes.

The supervisors could cast a final vote on this matter as soon as Tuesday.

We hope they’ll think again before abandoning an effort that could be better organized but shouldn’t be jettisoned because it’s too difficult and upsetting.

This story was originally published February 13, 2023 at 5:00 AM.