Los Angeles City Council candidate Joe Bray-Ali came under fire Wednesday for a bevy of comments he made online in which he used a racial slur and disparaged transgender and obese people.
Online postings surfaced in which Bray-Ali uses the term “n*****,” comments on videos of black people fighting, shames obese people and criticizes transgender people.
Bray-Ali appeared to have made the comments more than a year ago in the online discussion forum Voat, using the handle ubrayj02. The postings have been taken down, but screenshots were brought to light by the Los Angeles online news outlet LAist.
Bray-Ali, a bicycling activist and businessman, is locked in a heated battle with incumbent Councilman Gil Cedillo for a seat representing Council District 1, which stretches from northeast Los Angeles to MacArthur Park. The runoff election is May 16.
Bray-Ali confirmed his authorship of the remarks to LAist and apologized for them.
“Looking back on the comments, I’m embarrassed and ashamed,” he told the outlet.
Cedillo condemned the comments Wednesday afternoon as “disgraceful.”
“His assault on people from all walks of life clearly demonstrates that he is not fit for public office, and particularly unsuited to represent a district as diverse as Los Angeles’ (Council District 1),” Cedillo added. “This pattern of behavior is not acceptable in the Los Angeles City Council.”
Bray-Ali made many of his remarks in forums with offensive titles such as v/N*****S or v/FATPEOPLEHATE. The screenshots also appear to show him commenting in discussion threads that use racially derogatory terms such as “sheboon,” a slur against black women.
In a thread discussing whether comedian Rick Gervais is “transphobic,” Bray-Ali wrote that he feels gender-reassignment surgery “doesn’t seem like something worthy of praise, but instead, of being criticized as a shameful excess.”
In another discussion thread, about a woman accused of assisting in the rape of a minor, Bray-Ali wrote, “if they keep her on her diet, that won’t be a long lifetime.” A photo included in the article being discussed shows a woman who appears to be obese.
On a thread titled “Cuck, it’s what’s for dinner,” Bray-Ali pontificates on whether a group of people in a photo could be categorized as “Africans” or “n*****s.”
He writes, “The dark-skinned people in this image are not Africans except in the most sweeping historical sense that we are all Africans. Seems to disqualify a group as a ‘n*****’ to me, but I am not an expert.”
The comments revealed by LAist were not the only ones that have emerged online that could potentially damage Bray-Ali’s campaign. Last week, the candidate apologized for a nine-year-old YouTube video in which he asks, “Dear Mexican, I’d like to know why all my neighbors think the doorbell is their car horn. They wake up my baby.”
The question was addressed to Gustavo Arellano, the author of “Ask a Mexican,” a satirical OC Weekly column that lampoons white people’s ignorance of Latinos and Latin culture.
Bray-Ali, who is Indian American, was himself recently on the receiving end of a racially-charged attack, when an audience member shouted “Go back to India” during a debate.
