Race & Racism (News)

By Glenn Wohltmann

If you're among those who are still scratching their heads over the new federal and state legislative districts in California, help is on the way.

A number of groups are offering seminars, webinars and even luncheon presentations in the coming days to help people make sense out of what the 14-member multipartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission accomplished.

Voters went to the polls to make sure elected officials couldn't have another crack at redistricting, which is required every 10 years based on the new national census. But even before the commission released its new maps of the 177 newly created legislative, congressional and Board of Equalization district, complaints started coming from Latino, African-American and politically focused organizations as well as sitting politicians who suddenly found the district they were elected to serve was no longer where they live.

By Dan Bilefsky

In Deborah Brown’s family lore, the American South was a place of whites-only water fountains and lynchings under cover of darkness. It was a place black people like her mother had fled.

But for Ms. Brown, 59, a retired civil servant from Queens, the South now promises salvation.

Three generations of her family — 10 people in all — are moving to Atlanta from New York, seeking to start fresh economically and, in some sense, to reconnect with a bittersweet past. They include Ms. Brown, her 82-year-old mother and her 26-year-old son, who has already landed a job and settled there.

The black population of Oakland has declined nearly 25 percent in the past decade, and for children the rate is even higher. The decline of African-Americans in cities is a national trend. Why are African-Americans leaving, and what does it mean for Oakland?

As part of Forum's "Our Changing Communities" series on the results of the 2010 census, we take a close look at Oakland.

By Joe Rodriguez

A few years ago, Laurie Jones Neighbors wanted to know whether the Bay Area's rich cultural diversity was reflected on local boards and commissions, the sort that deal with apartment rents, public buses, air pollution and other realities of everyday urban life.

"There was very little representation of people of color and low-income people," she said after canvassing dozens of agencies. "We're not going to arrive at a just society that way."

By Christine Joy Ferrer

On November 11, at the Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, Youth Speaks in partnership with Urban Peace Movement, AYPAL, Ella Baker Center and Raw Talent presented the Youth Town Hall on Police Brutality. This was done in memory of Oscar Grant and one week after Johannes Mesherle’s sentencing. These youth rolled deep. With standing room only, at least a hundred youth from all around the San Francisco Bay Area rose up to speak on police accountability and civil rights–pissed off at the injustice of our criminal justice system and frustrated at the misuse of the badge supposedly meant to protect us. I hope you are all moved by the spoken words of these amazing youth as they bust a verse. Their time to remain silent is over. They chant, “Ain’t no power like the power of the youth cuz the power of the youth don’t stop.”

 Listen to the Eyes Opened Blog podcast on the Youth Town Hall on Police Brutality.

San Francisco. One dot represents 25 people. Red dots represent Whites, Blue is Black, Green is Asian and Orange is Latino. Images: Eric Fischer

When is a map worth a thousand words? Bill Rankin, who maintains a website called Radical Cartography, has generated buzz with his racial and income maps of Chicago, which can test stereotypes Chicagoans have about the boundaries of their neighborhoods.

Rankin notes, for instance, that the boundaries of neighborhoods are always drawn as stark lines on informational maps, yet people in cities traversing their communities don’t always delineate the end of their neighborhood by the same streets (some streets, like Houston Street in New York City or Cesar Chavez Street in San Francisco, however, tend to mark a consensus change in neighborhood for those living near them).

Rankin found when he used dot mapping (one dot represents 25 people, for instance), the demographics can both reinforce those boundaries and blur them.

“There are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries… and Chicago has more of these stark borders than most cities in the world,” writes Rankin on his website. “But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult — in a good way.”

By Margot Roosevelt

Environmental justice, a movement to focus attention on pollution in low-income communities, is a burning cause for Lisa Jackson, the first African American to head the U.S. Environmental Protection agency.  Over the last several months, Jackson has toured poor white, black and Latino communities with a message: Eco-issues aren't just for rich folks.

On Saturday, the EPA chief took a bus tour of low-income neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area, stopping at a Superfund site where the federal government is coordinating toxic chemical cleanup, and an urban food cooperative.

When: Saturday, October 23

Where: Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland

What: Rally for justice for Oscar Grant

Contact: justice4oscar@gmail.com

Oscar Grant was shot in the back by BART Policeman Johannes Mehserle while lying face down on a BART platform. Mehserle will be sentenced on November 5th and we need to get out on the 23rd to show the sentencing judge that we mean business. It took video evidence AND a massive outpouring in downtown Oakland to even get the District Attorney to charge Mehserle. It will take people in the streets to get the killer cop jailed.

By Robert Rogers

Like many African American families, Mary “Peace” Head and her brood migrated to the Bay Area from Louisiana just before WWII in search of work and opportunity.

She would go on to work as a welder in the Richmond shipyards during the war. Head, who is now 83, later became one of the early residents of Parchester Village.  She’s been a leader in this small housing development since the 1950s, playing an instrumental role in securing funding for a neighborhood community center and acting as a quasi-guardian to generations of local kids.

She is called “Mary Peace” by neighbors and others throughout the city, a name she earned by flashing her customary “peace sign” with her right index and middle fingers.

In 1950, Parchester Village, named for wealthy developer Fred Parr, opened on land beyond the border of northwest Richmond.

It was billed as a community for “All Americans,” but the idea was ahead of its time.

By Lois Beckett

Some people face unemployment. Some people fight it.

In San Francisco, a battle starts every morning on a street corner in the Bayview, where a crowd of people gathers around a white pickup. On a Thursday in June, there are about 15 people there, mostly black men, with a handful of women and Latinos. They're waiting for James Richards to give them the morning pep talk. He calls it "the breakfast of champions."

Richards is a big man in his 60s, eyes inscrutable, though seldom seen behind his sunglasses. There's a marijuana bud on his gold front tooth. In conversation, Richards' voice can be soft, his responses vague. But when it's time to make a speech, he can preach social justice with the fire of a Civil Rights–era crusader, railing against chickenshit unions and lying politicians."What I hear," Richards begins, slowly, "is you all were acting like real warriors."

Richards is the leader of the Aboriginal Blackmen United, a group that's part direct-action organization, part job placement agency, and all business when its members think employers are abusing their right to work. Its only headquarters is this street corner in front of the Double Rock Baptist Church. Nearly everyone here, including Richards himself, is jobless — not surprising in a neighborhood where the unemployment rate during the Great Recession is thought to be 50 percent higher than that of the rest of the city, and an estimated one in every 3.5 African-Americans is out of work.