How a city that celebrates inclusion keeps inventing new gatekeepers.
Recently, Planning Commissioner Alfredo Camacho posted a photograph of his Master of Public Policy degree from UC Riverside alongside a message suggesting people should not argue with him unless they possessed a similar credential from an accredited university. It was a weird message.
Not because education is unimportant. Education matters. Expertise matters. Knowledge matters. The strange part was where the message was delivered and who it was delivered to.
Pomona is not a city of policy experts and graduate seminars, although I wish people would read more. It is a working-class city. It is a city of warehouse workers, mechanics, caregivers, teachers, retail employees, immigrants, small business owners, and families trying to navigate crime and rising costs and shrinking opportunities. Many residents never had the opportunity to pursue graduate education. Some were the first in their families to graduate high school, and or college. Others spent their lives working instead of collecting credentials.
Yet these residents understand their city intimately. They know which businesses disappeared, what rent used to cost, which promises were kept and which were forgotten, which neighborhoods changed while others remained neglected, and which blocks still carry the weight of gang violence. Their expertise does not come from a classroom. It comes from experience. That reality is not a weakness, it is one of the city's greatest strengths. Which is why the degree post felt less like a celebration of education and more like a symptom of something larger.
For years, Pomona’s political culture has spoken the language of inclusion. We hear about representation, lived experience, community participation, and bringing new voices into public life. Those are worthwhile goals. Cities become stronger when more people participate in shaping their future.
Yet participation often arrives with invisible conditions attached. The right credentials, the right affiliations, the right introductions, the right permission from the right people. Before long, the conversation stops being about ideas and starts becoming a contest over who is qualified to have them. That is where credentialism enters the room.
Camacho was not appointed to the Planning Commission because he possessed a master’s degree. The argument made by supporters was that he brought a different perspective into local government. He spoke about being a renter. He spoke about public health. He spoke about experiences often absent from rooms historically dominated by homeowners, developers, and established political networks.
His value was supposed to come from perspective, not pedigree. Yet somewhere along the way perspective became credential and the degree became the argument. The outsider became the gatekeeper. It is a familiar transformation in local politics: people who once challenged barriers eventually find themselves defending new ones. The contradiction becomes even more apparent when criticism enters the conversation.
This is not the first time Pomona has wrestled with questions of belonging, identity, and who gets to participate in civic life. In a previous Pomonan essay examining the city’s insular tendencies, I argued that criticism is often judged less by its accuracy than by the identity of the person delivering it. The residency argument is simply another version of the same instinct.
Increasingly, criticism is dismissed not because it is inaccurate but because the critic supposedly lacks the proper qualifications to offer it. Sometimes those qualifications are academic. Sometimes they are political. Sometimes they are social. Sometimes they are geographic.
One of the more revealing examples is the argument that a non-Pomona resident possesses less standing to question a public official than someone who lives within city limits.
That idea collapses under its own logic. Journalists routinely report on cities they do not live in. Researchers study communities they were not born in. Consultants advise municipalities across the country. Police officers patrol neighborhoods in which they do not reside. Public accountability has never been confined by municipal boundaries.
A campaign contribution does not become more ethical because the person questioning it lives elsewhere, just as a public vote does not become less public because a journalist lives across a city line. Facts do not recognize municipal boundaries, no matter how badly local gatekeepers wish they did.
What makes these arguments so revealing is that they shift attention away from the substance of criticism and toward the identity of the critic. The question stops being whether something happened. The question becomes whether the person asking possesses the proper degree, the proper address, the proper affiliations, or the proper standing to ask.
The criticism itself almost becomes secondary. The real discussion shifts to credentials, residency, qualifications, and whether the speaker belongs to the right friend group.
What makes the entire episode so strange is that the standards themselves never seem to stay still. A graduate degree becomes evidence of authority. A commission appointment becomes evidence of authority. Residency becomes evidence of authority.
Yet when those same standards become inconvenient, they quietly disappear. The standard keeps moving because the standard is not really the point. The point is deciding who gets to speak and who is expected to remain silent. Education should expand a conversation, not narrow it. A diploma can strengthen an argument, but it cannot substitute for one.
A master’s degree does not make someone immune from criticism. It does not make someone automatically correct. It does not transform disagreement into ignorance.
The healthiest cities are not the ones where the most credentialed people dominate the discussion. They are the ones where expertise and experience meet each other with enough humility to recognize that neither possesses a monopoly on wisdom.
Public life is not a résumé competition. It is a conversation. And the moment a city begins deciding who gets to speak before deciding whether they are right, it stops expanding participation and starts protecting status.
The purpose of learning is not to elevate ourselves above our neighbors. It is to better understand the world we all share.
Editor's Note: This commentary references public Instagram posts made by Planning Commissioner Alfredo Camacho. Screenshots of the posts referenced are included so readers may evaluate the statements for themselves.
Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer, and publisher of The Pomonan. He holds a B.A. in Social Science and an honorary doctorate in observing local Pomona political nonsense.
