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"There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now." --James Baldwin This essay is the response to the call of the song "Operation Snatchback" (listen) by Bambouche of the Vanguard Squad. It was born of inspiration from a song, an idea, a long-held belief of the Vanguard Squad: revolution in our lifetime. Bambouche resurrects Black Panther speeches and blends spoken word with homegrown rappers The Coup. What is "Operation Snatchback?" It is another call to action, a continued resistance to unequal systems. "Operation Snatchback" resists passive listening and incites us to end structural inequalities in our own homes, communities, and cities. This essay, a reflection upon Oakland, seeks to complement the funky beats and poetry of "Operation Snatchback." It examines social structures, education, crime, housing and poverty in East and West Oakland, as well as my own personal history in Oakland. Working in schools and community-based organizations in these two neighborhoods is the most important work I have ever done; I am a better person because of my service to others. It forced me to examine race, class, poverty and wealth and has demanded that I dedicate my life to the idea of hope. The question we must all ask ourselves, each day, is what are we doing right now to work out our salvations? We each must serve a greater cause, a greater belief. We must engage in civil disobedience. Rosa Parks rebelled when she refused to give up her seat. She once said that all she was trying to do was to get home from work. Rosa Parks stepped on a bus that day and changed the world. The Vanguard Squad provides a forum for all of us: the dissidents, the disenfranchised, and the revolutionaries. We can do great things in our own communities. This life isn t always just and the best we can do is to place one foot in front of another and live our lives filled with good intentions, love, compassion and bravery. This is most important: to be brave even when we our voices waiver and our bodies shake. You are a comrade in The Vanguard Squad. We are all comrades of The Vanguard Squad.
I was born at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. My paternal grandfather grew up in West Oakland. He and my grandmother met at the park at Jefferson and 7th. My grandparents lived at 599 7th Street in West Oakland when they were starting their families. Both of my grandmothers worked at the cookie factories in East Oakland: Mother's and Sunshine Biscuits. My grandfather worked at the shipyard and boxed in West Oakland. My grandmother fondly remembers her white gloves and hat for trips to Swan's Marketplace and date nights at the Grand Lake Theatre. Most of my family settled in Union City to raise their children. I returned to Oakland when I was twenty, and I have lived here for twelve years. I taught in Oakland schools for over five years and worked with community-based organizations throughout Oakland for the past four years. I grew up in the Central Valley, after a mass exodus of lower middle class families became BATS (Bay Area Transplants). I was one of the first children in my class who was brown. Children called me a wetback during my first week of kindergarten, but I received an education, which eventually translated into being one of seven of my large extended Latino family to have graduated from U.C. Berkeley. We live differently than our grandparents did; our standards of living have vastly improved. I am the only woman in my family that graduated from a four-year college. Unlike my grandmothers, I have the option of working, having children and being independent. Within one generation, our family dynamics changed, and we transformed from the working class into the middle class. However, for equal numbers of my family, there was no fresh start. My sisters barely made it through high school despite the vastly improved schools we were entering. By the time they graduated, they had experienced teen pregnancy, drug addiction and trouble with the law. The development of suburbia and the movement of the baby boomer generation to insulate their children from the social ills came full circle. It was only a matter of time before all of the problems that they intended to leave behind would catch up. The greatest feat the devil ever achieved was convincing the world he did not exist. Abandoning the cities for an imagined paradise in the sticks was the biggest lie of a whole generation. Now our generation, burdened with the task of rebuilding the cities left behind a generation ago, must deal with all the issues on a microscopic level.
While I was at Berkeley, I studied poverty, which became the backbone of my social politics. Understanding social structures is essential to understanding poverty. It was ironic that all this incredible information existed here in academia, but never translated to the streets where I lived. It made sense in a book, but that book would never get into the hands of the poor and working classes; it was for those of us lucky enough to have the privilege of sitting in classrooms to study poverty. You can read about poverty, but it is not until you live it that you truly understand it. Poverty can be defined through monetary values, such as household incomes and minimum wages. Poverty conjures up countless images and stereotypes. We discuss it over dinner and read about it in newspapers. We implement policies designed to target it. Free lunches are distributed according to poverty levels. Does poor translate over time? Was my single, non English-speaking grandmother with six boys any poorer than my sister with two kids? Was it harder for my father to raise his family on one income than it is for my sister to live on one income? According to Urban Strategies Council based on the 2000 Census:
This essay examines where I am from, where I live and where I work: East and West Oakland. My family is just like every other family in that we struggled with drug addiction, divorce, unwed mothers, teenage pregnancy, the cycle of addiction, recovery and relapse, unemployment, under-education, violence and every other social ill that plagues the inner city today. This essay asks two questions: Why did we leave and why must I stay? My parents left the Bay Area because of the heroin epidemic in Decoto/Union City. It was a bad scene. People were shot in churches, a prostitute named Sweetie was mutilated and thrown into Niles Canyon, family vendettas were carried out, and drug addicts overdosed. It was high Latino drama. I think the last straw came when my heroin-addicted aunt took me to the park where all the junkies shot up. Shortly afterward, my parents moved to the Central Valley. The baby boomers reaction to these urban ills was to abandon the cities for new housing developments away from the blight of the urban space. However, abandoning the cities did not solve the problem. The problems just spread across a greater geographical area. Rather, than existing in diverse neighborhoods in Oakland and Richmond, the cities social ills spread across the Bay Area into the Central Valley. Those who flocked to developed communities that excluded certain people discovered that their own children were drug abusers, criminals, teen mothers and high school dropouts.
We need to shift the focus from money, which matters but has been discussed in thousands of different ways, to the poverty of hope, vision and change that manifests in the Oakland streets in which I live and work. When hope is impoverished, our neighborhoods reflect this apathy. When vision is bankrupt, you can feel the stinging indifference in the flatlands. When change is most often heard from the mouths of men who are homeless, you understand the poverty of community. We must acknowledge the fact that the poverty of hope is a poverty of a people. The scarcity of hope, vision and change is an intangible poverty and has no real means of measure. It is seeing neighborhoods where boys die and kids will most likely be lost in a broken educational system. Where each year they will learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. while their neighborhoods become more segregated. It is in evening strolls where sex workers and drug dealers stand on street corners, where grandparents are tasked with raising children and people have to drive outside of their neighborhood to bank, shop, or find green open spaces. Somewhere, a young boy or man may be forced into a gang based on where he lives. Somewhere in the flatlands, there are children that are homeless, children that are hungry, and children whose educational level exceeds that of their parents. It is about the fact that, for many people, seeing a swat team in their neighborhoods is not out of the ordinary. It is acknowledging that here, where I am from, there are makeshift memorials for murdered teens, children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is acknowledging that some children here in Oakland are born into caste systems based on their neighborhoods and lack of access to alternative support systems.
It's understanding how systems, like the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration, the principle agencies in charge of implementing the federal state's housing policy, underwrote segregation through policies which defined black and mixed race communities as high risk and subsequently began the segregation of communities.2 Oakland, designed to become an industrial garden with the lure of affordable housing and fair paying industrial jobs, brought minorities from across the nation who discovered that the property owners, city merchants and real estate associations did not design it for all people. In the 1950s, nearly 90% of the city's African American population resided in 22% of its census tract concentrated in West & North Oakland.3 By 1950, people of color moved into East Oakland after struggling with Oakland's real estate policies, which restricted "mixed neighborhoods." Places like San Leandro and Fremont, where many of Oakland's middle class moved, had restrictive segregation policies. Planners conceived these cities to attract the middle class with the lure of homeownership, industry and commerce. These cities developed into commuter cities to house the middle class who worked in Oakland; these cities developed tax bases for their residents while creating their wealth in Oakland. These geographies produced steep differences in the distribution of economic development's local benefits. They produced both development and underdevelopment.4 It is important to evaluate the way in which this changed Oakland's dynamics. We must examine how communities are developed and designed intentionally through restrictive policies, such as segregation based on color or, in modern times, segregation based on economic class. It is essential to understanding the motivation of the suburbs, which eventually drained Oakland of its resources and diversity. We must recognize that, although middle and upper classes attempted to find better communities for their children, all they really succeeded in doing was creating unequal access for children in East and West Oakland. When a student once asked my sociology professor how he would eradicate poverty, he stated he would have diverse neighborhoods; neighborhoods rich with different races, classes, ethnicities and perspectives influence the conditions of any community.
Oakland's postwar Metropolitan Oakland Area Program (MOAP) sought to amplify and extend these patterns of industrial development. According to the MOAP, Oakland would remain the regions transportation nexus and largest center of employment, but new industry would increasingly locate in peripheral communities. In the metropolitan logic of the MOAP, the suburbs were home to both factory and neighborhood, and though residential and industrial districts were "distinct" from one another, their close proximity was an intentional design element of suburbanization. Practical concerns lay behind this rhetoric as well. By the late 1940s, more than 25% of Oakland's property was labeled "blighted," and there was almost no available land for new plants. Growth would have to come by either 1) expensive redevelopment of existing urban property or 2) suburbanization. In the concept of "metropolitan Oakland," business leaders sought a stable social and spatial order. Their program of East Bay industrial and residential dispersal was embedded in both the community planning theory and class anxieties of the first half of the century. In the growth of industry, from Oakland outward into suburban districts, the MOAP imagined not a middle-class hinterland of commuters, but a series of industrial nodes and mixed-class residential developments, mutually beneficial and reinforcing. Workers were suburban. At the same time, a "diversified local economy" would act as a bulwark against the return of Depression-era conditions. The availability of new homes and "garden living" for workers promised a more docile and less aggressive and antagonistic working class. These understandings of suburban city-building were strongly influenced by the modernist urban planning of Lewis Mumford and others in the Regional Planning Association of America. Believing in the coherence of the neighborhood, these urban theorists emphasized the decentralization of industry and residence in discrete units. At the same time, the promise that homeownership could be made available to ever larger numbers of workers through a combination of mass-produced tract developments and the conversion of inexpensive peripheral agricultural land promised a more stable class order. That homeownership could be an effective sedative for a potentially troublesome working class had been a prominent feature of urban sociology since the late nineteenth century.5 Rather than rebuild or redevelop Oakland, businesses and people abandoned the blighted city for the suburbs. I hardly recognize the vitality that once existed in East and West Oakland, where once these neighborhoods supported transportation, manufacturing and industrial jobs that brought half a million migrants to the Bay Area; where once stood auto factories, now stand McDonalds, Taco Bell, and a few small family-owned businesses. Once in West Oakland, the community was flush with locally owned minority businesses, social clubs, and a legendary nightlife. Now it is an area known for violence and crime. Both Mother's and Sunshine Biscuit have closed down; these large warehouses are rented out as studios. The Oakland Naval and Army Stations are closed and being converted to a reuse plan that includes business and commercial space as well as social services. The City of Oakland retains the right to nearly 700 acres of both these spaces.
The 1970s brought about the influx of transportation hubs into East and West Oakland. Highways and BART reconfigured the neighborhoods, as the poor were displaced and small businesses were closed. The vibrant Seventh Street in West Oakland was replaced with BART tracks. This did not bring prosperity to Oakland. It moved people through Oakland to San Francisco or towards the growing suburbs beyond. Populations in East and West Oakland declined because of the redevelopment of land; blighted housing developments were torn down and new housing projects were constructed. The chief problem for Oakland's Black population was that the city's public resources were diverted away from low-income neighborhoods to either downtown businesses or to white residents living outside the city. Over 50% of Oakland city jobs through the 1960s went to residents in places like Fremont, San Leandro and Milpitas--three nearby cities whose homeowners maintained strict racial covenants that prohibited sales to Blacks.6 Oakland was home to incredible political power: Oakland Black Caucus, the East Bay Democratic Club and The Black Panthers. Although, the Black Panthers promoted sexism and homophobia, I remain convinced that their community programming was a powerful vehicle for enacting local change. From 1966-1982, they created over 65 community programs, which included housing, education, employment training and arts and culture. Few know that the Panthers offered free ambulance service, free busing to prisons, free film series, and even free clothing and shoe programs. It was response-based community programming to serve its own community. In 1979, the African-American editor Robert C. Maynard assumed power over The Oakland Tribune, which was controlled for over sixty years by the Knowland family. The Knowland family was a conservative force that shaped the newspapers and slanted politics accordingly.
By the time Oakland elected Lionel Wilson as its first Black mayor in 1977, the debate over redirecting federal money to the Black community had become almost moot. The Nixon administration had abruptly retreated from concern over eradicating poverty in the ghetto, having halted new federal housing construction and greatly reduced spending on community-based economic development programs. Never again has America attempted anything close to a War on Poverty, and the nation's commitment toward spending sufficient money to solve the problems of the inner city was over almost as soon as it had begun. A year after Lionel Wilson became mayor, California voters passed Prop 13, which shifted millions of dollars from older, poorer cities like Oakland for the benefit of large corporations and white suburban homeowners. Combined with the federal cuts, Wilson and subsequent Oakland mayors would have far less resources to address the deepening problems of the city's long-neglected Black neighborhoods.7 The result, whether of white flight or redevelopment, was the idea of intentional communities based on class and race. The isolation of races and classes is no different from caste systems in other cultures, and this is most often reflected in East and West Oakland. Since the 1960s, Oakland's flatland neighborhoods are disproportionately comprised of lower class racial minorities, while white middle class and affluent residents of a variety of backgrounds reside in the hills and outer-ring suburbs.8
In 2002, Oakland Unified School District was bankrupt. In 2003, the state took over the Oakland schools, the eleventh largest school district in California. A recent study by the Harvard University Civil Rights Project and the Urban Institute Education Policy found that the dropout rate for Oakland students is 52%. Researchers described high schools with graduation rates lower than 60% as "dropout factories.'' In Oakland, 68% of the 50,400 public school students are poor enough to qualify for the federal lunch program. Their odds of getting a diploma are worse than the 50-50 chance of winning a coin toss. And that makes Oakland schools emblematic of one of society's most vexing dilemmas: how to educate children growing up amid violence, poverty, drugs, single parenthood, teen pregnancy and unemployment.9 These are not simple issues. Currently, Oakland Unified has 48,000 students in its system, and if we assume the 52% dropout rate, we discover that 24,960 students will not graduate. It is a shameful legacy we are creating for our future generations in this city. And what of us, those who will grow old and become dependent upon the existing workforce to create wealth in this city, to pay for school improvements and community resources? We need to understand our interconnectedness. We must understand that, even if poverty does not exist now in our own neighborhoods, someday it will affect everyone, whether through crime, violence, or lack of future resources. The cycle of poverty continues, sucking future generations into a vicious cycle. I was so young when I taught in the Oakland public school system. I could not separate my work life from my private life, and it mattered to me that these children had one safe space. I worried about them walking thirty blocks home after school. I worried about them sleeping in cars, and I wondered when their parents would return from jail. I worried that their grandparents would die and make these children orphans. I worried they would get lost in these schools, these neighborhoods, this social structure with all its mazes and dead ends. Now, I wonder which of those twenty bright children, each born with potential and dreams, might be among the ten dropouts. I wonder which of those twenty in either group will struggle with violence, drugs, unemployment, teen pregnancy or single parenthood. In my heart, I want to imagine their lives better than their parents or their grandparents. I envision these children enacting change in their neighborhoods. I want to see them succeed by their own measurements of what they hoped for themselves.
According to an Oakland Police Department Executive Summary published in 1998, the leading cause of death by age group in Oakland for 15-34 year olds is homicide.
"Operation Snatchback" reflects the poetry of a people. It is the frustration of people denied equal access to the resources of the suburbs: neighborhoods, jobs, schools, community resources, and crime prevention. "Operation Snatchback" reflects a very palpable emotion: anger. This funky anthem represents yet another call to action by Bambouche of the Vanguard Squad. I say this again: The Vanguard Squad is where the personal is political and the political is taken personally. Bambouche moves the masses with funky beats, he inspires through the force of the word. Samples of Black Panther speeches, Ice Cube and The Coup remixed into one important proclamation: reclaim what is rightfully ours.
It is only when we are sickened by the conditions of our cities and the dim future of our children will we fight. What we need is a non-violent revolution. We need our generation and future generations to revolt against the social structures that intend to segregate and confine classes and races. I love living in Oakland. It offers a cultural literacy that is rich and diverse. Over 81 languages and dialects exist in this city. My husband was the only Caucasian on our street when we first moved to our current neighborhood in East Oakland. Living and working next to people who are different from us demystifies stereotypes and connects us in shared experiences as a community. We see the interconnectedness. People are tired of being ignored, segregated, and isolated. Revolution in our lifetime is possible. In order to reform communities, we must build coalitions of like-minded people; if 40% of the wealth is concentrated with 1% of the population, then 99% of us have something in common that transcends race, color, class, and neighborhoods. There needs to be a realization of the current situation and a response to this situation. We must rise to this occasion. It is imperative to transform social structures on a micro-level in our own neighborhoods, demand that our representatives, our school districts, redevelopment agencies, mayor, city boards, and councils hear our voices. We must not waiver in our demand to revitalize our neighborhoods, schools and local economies. We must revitalize hope. Finally, a quote from Martin Luther King's 1967 Christmas Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church where he was pastor: "It really boils down to this," he said, "all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny, whatever affects one directly, affect all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality."11 --Kristy Alfieri
Endnotes:
1. Urban Strategies Council. Oakland Maps, Statistical Snapshots and Data Book. Urban Strategies Council. 31 January 2006.
Works Cited:
Asimov, Nanette. "Study puts Oakland dropout rate at 52% .Mayor decries crisis - district questions research accuracy." San Francisco Gate. 5 April 2005. 31 May 2006.
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