SOMEBODY'S MAKING SOME NOISE

July 2, 2009

One of the iconic call-and-response chants of the hip hop world comes when a rapper shouts out to the audience “somebody make some noise!” It’s a phrase so often overlooked by both the hip hop youth themselves as well as any adult observers who might come across such an event while flipping channels, but it has a deep and profound meaning. Almost every human born to this world wants to be noticed, wants to make some noise. In many cases, that is all they ask of society and the people around them. And when they cannot get recognition for their place in the world in the accepted ways, they find other—less acceptable—means to make the point.

It is a point so often overlooked in human relations, as we pointed out in last week’s column, when we said that the discussion of violence in the East Bay was running on two distinctly different and parallel tracks, the official discussion on one line, the one by the area’s young people on a second. There is actually a third line running, which we will bring that up in a moment.

Despite the fact that they constitute the largest group of victims of violence in the East Bay, youth of color are largely left out of the official discussions of the causes and cures of the epidemic.

It’s not as if these youth are indifferent. In fact, if spoken word and rap lyrics are any key, the effect of the East Bay’s violence appears to dominate a good part of their thoughts. While the young people of my generation spoke of racism and the Vietnam war, the young people of this generation speak often of the funerals of classmates and relatives and neighborhood friends shot down in the East Bay’s bloody street wars, or confrontations with police, the inevitable incarcerations, or the plaintive wails of spirits lost amidst our neighborhood’s clutter and broken family structures. [More...]

 

TWO TRAINS RUNNING

June 25, 2009

We seem to be running on parallel tracks on this ongoing discussion of the East Bay’s nagging street violence, like the words from the Longfellow poem: “Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness. So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

…or, perhaps more accurately, from the old Muddy Waters blues standards: “Two trains running, ain’t not one going my way.”

Earlier this month, the Berkeley City Council received its quarterly crime report, during which the Council discussed both the drug trade and the related cross-border disputes between South and West Berkeley and North Oakland neighborhood gangs that have contributed so much to the area’s violence. Everyone on Council sincerely wanted to slow down or stop the city’s violence. None of them had a clear idea how. There was the usual collection of suggestions about more guns off the streets and more lights on the streets, each one of them important in its own right, but nothing adding up to an overall plan. We’ve been down this road many times before.

Oakland City Council has had similar discussions over the years, the rhetoric rising or falling depending upon some sudden spike in the violent crime rate, or a rash of restaurant takeover robberies or street burglaries in one of the “safe” sections of Oakland, or following the commission of some particularly heinous event. [More...]

 

THE CHIP'N'DON SHOW

June 18, 2009

Expressions of relief and joy from supporters of Don Perata were both understandable, expected, and proper in the wake of the decision by the United States Attorney’s office to drop their years-long corruption investigation of the former California State Senate President. Had an indictment gone forward, Mr. Perata faced, at the worst, possible jail time and heavy fines if convicted and, at the least, the end of any plans to run for mayor of Oakland in 2010. This is not a “full vindication” or “a complete affirmation … that I've acted appropriately in both my professional life and my career in public service,” as Mr. Perata asserted in a statement released immediately after the announcement, since U.S. Attorneys—or federal juries, for that matter—cannot prove innocence of charges, they can only prove and decide guilt. Until then, by U.S. law, innocence is presumed, and needs no proof. Still, this is an enormous victory for Mr. Perata, and he and his supporters have earned the right to gloat.

That being said, we have to point out that the, um, giddiness with which the Chronicle’s East Bay columnist Chip Johnson approached the matter went a ways over the top, since Mr. Johnson moved immediately from a discussion of the dropped indictment to an interesting assumption on the state of the upcoming Oakland mayoral race.

“With the dark cloud of a lingering federal probe behind him,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “there is nothing standing between former state Sen. Don Perata and the Oakland mayor's office but time, opportunity and blue skies.” (“With Probe Over, Perata Primed To Lead Oakland” May 29, 2009)

Not to equate Mr. Perata with either of the dark lords, Sauron or Voldemort, but this does have a sort of Tolkienish or Potteresque ring to it, with the boldness and rashness of the followers increasing as the time of their master’s promised return grew closer. But even Mr. Johnson—if you could have poked a hole in his cloud of euphoria on the day he wrote his “blue sky” column—might have admitted that well, yes, there is actually something else besides blue skies which comes between Mr. Perata and the Oakland mayor’s office and that is, of course, the necessity of actually being elected by the voters to serve in that office. But such little details sometimes get overlooked in the swirl of celebration. [More...]

 

IN CASE YOU WERE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT RACISM REALLY SOUNDS LIKE

June 11, 2009

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been subjected to various conservative commentators and Republican officials charge United States Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with “racism” because Ms. Sotomayor indicated that all things being equal, a Latina woman judge might be better able to rule on a sex-race discrimination case than a white male judge.

As Inigo Montoya said to Vizzini in “The Princess Bride,” “You keep using that word [meaning “racism,” in this case]. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

So as a reminder for my many conservative friends, I thought for this column, I might simply reproduce some quotations out of United States history that showed was racism in speech and writing actually was and is, in the event they had forgotten:

A People Not Fit To Govern Themselves

“The condition of slavery with us is, in a word, Mr. President, nothing but the form of civil government instituted for a class of people not fit to govern themselves. It is exactly what in every State exists in some form or other. It is just that kind of control which is extended in every northern State over its convicts, its lunatics, its minors, its apprentices. It is but a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves. We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.”

United States Senator Jefferson C. Davis (Mississippi)
Former U.S. Secretary of War and later the first and only President of the Confederate States of America
Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 29, 1860 [More...]

 

 

CONSERVATIVE CORRECTNESS AND SOTOMAYOR

June 4, 2009

You have to admire the ability of our conservative friends—don’t you?—to continually create these rice-calling-cotton-pale moments in order to deflect attention from their own transgressions and, thus, to avoid criticism.

It is always fascinating how conservatives have tagged liberalism with the smear of “political correctness,” that doctrine of pushing a certain party-line way of thinking, to the active denigration and exclusion—by any means necessary—of all others. Liberalism, after all—as opposed to progressivism—tends almost always to look inward first for internal flaws in its thinking, taking criticism to heart and conceding that the other guy might, after all, have a point that needs listening to before rejecting. It is conservatism that believes it holds doctrines writ by the hands of God and Mr. Jefferson, and in our collective lifetime, the most glaring misuse of “political correctness” was the McCarthyist and House Unamerican Activities Committee anti-Communism witchhunts and purges, for which the nation’s conservative right-wing was the driving force.

And, of course, it must be noted that political correctness, like violence, is as American as apple pie, sometimes working interchangeably. Much of the violence of the American Revolution came not between blue-coat and red-coat armies, but by American patriots burning out, tarring-and-feathering, and lynching their neighbors who professed loyalty to the English king. Lynching is most commonly associated with white terrorist mob murders of Southern African-Americans in the 19th century, but the term goes back a hundred years before, and is most often attributed to the practices either one or another Virginian named Lynch. [More...]

 

ON THE DAY THE OFFICERS DIED, WHAT DID THE POLICE COMMANDERS DO?

May 28, 2009

We are so easily distracted, aren’t we, so often allowing the trivial and the unimportant to take the center stage of our attention while serious issues are left unattended on the outer wings of our collective consciousness, often to die without even a comment.

And when that happens, and the solutions to the most serious of our problems go unexplored, the problems themselves left to fester and grow, who do we have to blame except ourselves, my friends?

In the afternoon of March 21 of this year, a young man named Lovelle Mixon shot and killed two Oakland motorcycle officers during a traffic stop in the East Oakland foothills, and then later shot and killed two Oakland SWAT officers—and was killed himself—in the shootout that occurred when a SWAT team stormed the apartment where Mr. Mixon was hiding.

In the immediate aftermath of the violent death of five men in an East Oakland neighborhood in the space of two hours—four of them police officers—there are a number of serious questions that we might have pursued. Why are some parts of Oakland so violent? Why was Lovelle Mixon considered a folk hero in some parts of the city and, as Joseph Anderson wrote in an April 2 Daily Planet reader commentary, his killing of four police officers “karmic justice” (“The ‘Karmic Justice’ Of Lovelle Mixon’s Act)? What is actually happening between police and young African-American people in the mean streets of Oakland that might have led to the events of March 21? And, finally, was there anything in the training, attitude, performance, or command within the Oakland Police Department itself that might have led to the four police officers’ deaths, the question not to place blame, but to determine if and where any police mistakes might have been made, the purpose to correct those mistakes so that similar mistakes—and similar police deaths—do not occur in the future? [More...]

 

MAKING THE BART CONNECTIONS

May 21, 2009

The battle over Bay Area Rapid Transit’s Oakland Airport Connector gives us a rare chance to look into the heart of our public transportation policies and priorities, so long as we are able to clear the inevitable political hyperbole out of the way.

BART—if you missed the news—is proposing building a $550 million automated overhead transit line to connect its Coliseum Station with the Oakland Airport, making it possible for patrons to use BART to get directly to the airport without having to transfer down to surface street transportation.

Is that a good project for BART to spend $550 million on? We’ll get to that question in a moment. But first, the hyperbole.

In a BART PowerPoint presentation handout given out at the recent meeting where the BART Board of Directors gave the latest go-ahead to the project, the agency included a list of reasons why the airport connector would be a benefit (short trip time, extremely reliable, easily expandable) along with a satellite picture of the area surrounding the Coliseum Station and the Oakland Airport. Superimposed on the satellite picture were close-up photos of four developments within the area: the Lions Creek Crossing residential development (formerly Coliseum Gardens) at 66th and San Leandro Street and the Hegenberger Gateway Shopping Center, both already in existence, along with the proposed Coliseum Transit Village scheduled to go up just east of the Coliseum Station, as well as the proposed Coliseum Towne Center, a Hegenberger Road retail center scheduled to be put in just south of the Coliseum athletic complex.

Although the BART handout gave no reason for picturing these four particular developments in its Airport Connector PowerPoint, they are there, presumably, because BART wants us to believe that the connector will provide some benefit to them. [More...]

 

DEFENDING MR. DELLUMS

May 14, 2009

From time to time, when some of my blogging and columnizing friends want to dismiss my various writings about Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums without actually having to respond to my arguments, they resort to simply calling me a “Dellums defender.”

I freely admit the offense. I have sometimes come to Mr. Dellums’ defense at the times I feel such a defense is warranted. This is not so much for the sake of Mr. Dellums himself, who is able to defend his own self without my help, if he wishes, but more so because I feel it is the Dellums policies that are ultimately under attack, and I feel that the Dellums policies—if not always the Dellums practices, which I sometimes disagree with—are important for the future of Oakland and the folks who currently live here.

It should be no mystery why Mr. Dellums is under such relentless attack. For the people who had a fairly free hand in running Oakland in the years before Mr. Dellums returned, the Dellums Administration posed two specific threats. The first threat to the Old Oakland Establishment was that Mr. Dellums would stop (or significantly slow down) the economic looting of Oakland that has been going on, unchecked, since the decline of the city’s progressive movement sometime in the 1970’s. The second threat to the Old Oakland Establishment was that the Dellums Administration would spark a revival of that progressive movement, restoring it as a major player in Oakland city life, and bringing back to power the idea that Oakland ought to exist for the benefit of Oaklanders and not for the outside interests who daily carry the cities wealth and resources back to their home communities for their own enrichment. [More...]

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