Oct 8, 2025
Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Can Oakland Save the World?
by Doniphan Blair
Oakland's 'First Friday' gallery and club crawl now has over 25,000 attendees, from all races, classes and neighborhoods. photo: D. Blair THIS IS MY TENTH ANNUAL OAKLAND
survey for cineSOURCE and, after a decade of delivering downers, I'm honored to announce: Oakland’s doing HELLA well! In fact, it's developing some tricks and techniques that just might save the world!
But what about all those murders, police scandals and homeless encampments, you ask? Well, they've been dropping, precipitously, particularly the kill rate and rogue police, although we're now confronting new plagues: gentrification, rampant hipster infestations and the eviction of long-term residents.
In terms of art, Oakland is booming. Indeed, our filmmakers just enjoyed their greatest season EVER, starting of course with the monster hit “Black Panther”, now one of the top 25 grossing films of ALL time, inflation adjusted. Directed by Oakland-native Ryan Coogler—I recently chatted with his cousin, who works media for the Oakland Police Department (OPD), “Black Panther” opens and closes with scenes in Oakland. Read our article "Black Panther Rules Cinema Earth".
Closer to the earth, there's the spectacular "Sorry to Bother You", by Oakland rapper Boots Riley, which we cover in "Sorry to Bother Busts Open Oakland Cine". A rollicking good and incisive satirical ride, it opens July 6th across the country at a Regal Cinema or United Artists theater near you.
'Sorry to Bother You', the biggest new film out of Oakland, since 'Black Panther' is really Hollywood, stars Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, whose love anchors the aggressive satire. photo: courtesy B. RileyAlso very enmeshed in Oakland identity and issues is "Blindspotting", see our article, starring native Daveed Diggs, straight off his award-winning Broadway run with "Hamilton". It will have its nation-wide release on July 20th.
On a less stratospheric but still substantial level, the Oakland International Film Festival showed a bunch of insightful documentaries, features and shorts. Dominating the latter category: the shocking but spot-on "Pretty Ass White Woman".
Even a cursory glance at cineSOURCE's first survey in 2009, “Oakland on the Brink… of a Creative Explosion”, shows the city in better shape than any time since the 1940s. Back then, it was flush with shipping, manufacturing and music, as nicely detailed in this month's feature, “Cheryl Fabio Makes Masterful Oakland Blues Movie”, written by a new cineSOURCE contributor, Jerry McDaniel, a local musician and actor (the fabulous "Everything Strange and New", 2009).
Other interesting docs at the Oakland International's 16th iteration included the personal and artistic "My People Are Rising". About Aaron Dixon, the Black Panther who started a chapter in Seattle, the first outside of California, it was directed by local cineaste and teacher, as well as cineSOURCE writer, Rafael Flores (see his fascinating "Towards a Rasquache Cinema").
There was also "Futbolistas 4 Life", a poignant piece by Jun Stinson, about a scrum of undocumented Oakland high schoolers, their dedicated soccer coach and how they worked together to create their own soccer field. "Surviving International Boulevard", by Sian Taylor Gowan, provides a penetrating look into the very human lives behind the horror of child prostitution and sex trafficking that goes down daily on Oakland’s longest street.
That's a tough row to hoe, as it were, and hardly one embodying Oakland's deepest dreams and aspirations, but that's the whole damn point.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf defended the legitimacy of tipping off her undocumented citizens to immigration sweeps. photo: Oakland Mayor's OfficeOakland is diverse. Diversity is messy. Oakland is obliged to accept everyone, from spoiled, rich, techie brats to the desperate, the impoverished and the undocumented.
Indeed, the honorable Mayor Libby Schaaf (2015-) has been doing just that, standing up against anti-immigrant xenophobia and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's attempt to crack down on Sanctuary Cities, which Oakland most certainly is.
"Mr. President, I am not obstructing justice, I am seeking it," Schaaf wrote Trump in a May 18th op-ed in The Washington Post. "As a leader, it's my duty to call out this administration's anti-immigrant fearmongering for what it is: a racist lie."
If Oaklanders can't crack the code of multi-tribalism—which has to include tribes you may not totally adore—who can?
Which is why I'm so honored to have survived in West Oakland for 29 years, ten with cineSOURCE, and to be making my tenth attempt to shed some light on it.
The numbers don’t lie. Last year 76 people were butchered on our streets, BUT that's a full forty percent less than 2012’s 127 people—fantastic news, whatever the haters may say.
Indeed, not a SINGLE person was killed by the OPD last year and only one person next to my building: brother Mario—recent calls to the cops still couldn't ferret out his last name (see cS article). In fact, in the entire year of 2016, the OPD didn't discharge a SINGLE weapon (see Oakland Magazine article).
Many Oaklanders are very vocal about their rejection of gentrification. photo: D. BlairExcept for a two-year lull at the end of the Clinton Years, these are homicide rates not seen since the ‘60s, when they rose from about twenty a year to almost ninety at the end of the decade, topping out in 1992 at 165.
Since then, there's been an endless stream of police, city, civic and church initiatives attempting to address this forty-year-old crisis, all largely ineffectual. Which leads me to conclude that much of the improvement that Oakland is enjoying today parallels the prosperity that trickled down in the Clinton Years. In other words, hard cold cash, particularly from gentrification.
Sounds crazy, I know. And, to be sure, gentrification is pushing people onto the streets, out to the suburbs or from their favorite clubs and restaurants.
Indeed, gentrification has Oakland natives as well hipsters, just off the Jet Blue red-eye from Brooklyn, outraged and expostulating loudly about the benefits of arson or muggings. Gentrification is also a central theme in "Sorry to Bother You", "Blindspotting" and many other pieces, like the excellent and locally-produced web series, "The North Pole".
But be real. Like the tourism that finances San Francisco, gentrification is a legit biz, despite the requisite soul-selling—cities involved would be well-advised to institute rent control ordinances, which Oakland lacks (signatures gatherers are currently trying to qualify one for the November ballot).
"I will permit 10,000 live/works, apartments or condos," now-governor Jerry Brown told us many times, when he was Oakland's mayor from 1999 to 2007.
“That’s nothing, we are going for 100,000," claimed Mayor Ron Dellums (2007-11), who was raised in West Oakland and represented the region in Congress for THIRTEEN terms, from 1971 to 1998.
An Oakland Occupy subgroup deliberates how to improve the city in front of City Hall, 2011. photo: D. BlairMeanwhile Mayor Jean Quan (2011-15), herself a ‘60s-era activist, could have easily walked downstairs from her office to the Oakland Occupy, which was in front of City Hall in the fall of 2011, set up a tent and organized some form of housing relief.
Sadly, Oakland's black population has been pushed out, dropping drastically by about 40%. But that was mostly in the naughts, when the Dot Com Boom's second wave exploded real estate values and speculators offered quick cash to building owners tired of comparatively-high property taxes, notably-high violence and notably-low performing public schools.
To be precise, the 1970 census counted Oakland as 35% black, 60% white and the remaining 15% split evenly between Asian and Latino. 20 years later, it was 44% black and 32% white, a "white flight" of almost half. According to the last census, 2010, Oakland's 425,000 residents were 26% African-American, 27% white, 16% Asian (one third Chinese), almost one quarter Latino (the majority Mexican) and 7% multiracial.
Although this makes Oakland less of a "chocolate city," it is now not only one of the most diverse but EVENLY divided urban centers on the planet. A fantastic asset for the city's psychology and culture, this makes Oakland the perfect laboratory for the town's enormous non-profit presence, led by many people but notably Obama advisor Van Jones and his Dream Corps, founded in 2014.
Yes, gentrification has destroyed the vibe of some corners, cafes or neighborhoods AND it is going to get much worse, given the construction going up all over town.
To be sure, Oakland was the seed bed for great black culture, starting with the above-mentioned blues and Black Panthers (see cS article), and a lot of less well-knowns, from "side shows" and "ghost riding the whip" (ghetto street performances using cars) to too many rappers to mention, not to mention the dancers, writers, painters and more.
Unfortunately, old Oakland was hardly a wonderland. In fact, it was ravaged by crack, crime and neglect. Even the downtown development named Old Oakland had to go begging to San Francisco for a "bridge" loan while West Oakland remains a Mecca for illegal dumping, ugly tagging and other blight.
Oakland's Fox Theater anchors the vibrant, new downtown scene of cafes, craft beer halls AND schools, including the nationally-known Youth Radio and the High School of the Arts. photo: D. BlairIn point of fact, some of the new arrivals are Asian-Americans who grew up as the children of immigrants in Oakland and are finally eschewing parent-ordered professional servitude to move back to their now-cool home town and have a little fun, just like all the other kids.
Admittedly, the many homeless encampments are a crisis of large proportions, but they are also perfectly understandable.
The 2011 Occupy Movement proved to anyone with eyes that you could camp out anywhere, including RIGHT IN FRONT of city hall. Although Oakland has large anarchist and vagabond populations, this was true up and down the West Coast. Once the Occupies ended, the encampments began in 2012. LA now has 48,000 sleeping on its streets nightly and almost every other town has people camping under its freeways, on its meridian strips or in its alleys.
"Oakland is solving the crisis in a unique way," Mayor Schaaf claimed recently. "We're bringing together corporate partners, community volunteers, and city staff to move people off sidewalks and into services."
Although Oakland just opened its second Tuff Shed Shelter, at 27th and Northgate, site of the city's oldest and largest encampment, the 20 cabins, with dead-bolted doors and low-voltage electricity, sleep only two people each. With three to four thousand on Oakland's streets nightly, there's a long way to go.
Nevertheless, Schaaf also acquired a single residency occupancy hotel and has lobbied many times in Sacramento, recently winning an additional $1.5 billion and announcing an incentive program to encourage landlords to accept Section 8 welfare vouchers.
Presumably some of the gentrifiers will be taxed, inspired or cajoled to do their part. In addition to the billions they've injected into real estate, construction and supply sales, they have sparked a lot of service-provider and some tech jobs, albeit not as many as once claimed.
The behemoth ride service Uber passed on its much ballyhooed HQ, a refurbished Sears, the size of a city block, in the center of Oakland's Uptown neighborhood. Sold in October, 2017, to the Oakland-based CIM Group, they intend to finally open it as an upscale mall, in late 2018.
Some techies are voluntarily donating funds and labor to Oakland's many youth-oriented media hubs, business incubators and schools, starting with the nationally-known Youth Radio, which began in Berkeley in 1993 and moved to Oakland in 2007. Some hubs are even financing young artists and entrepreneurs (see cS article “People Power Media Expands in Oakland”.
The street music, magic and other performances at Oakland's Murmur are often excellent, as this drum, base and rapper indicated on May 4th. photo: D. BlairLegal weed has also generated some hefty new incomes, for growers and distributors but also the city and state, which taxes it at almost 33%. That makes a quality eighth of an ounce of Gorilla Glue, say, over $70—not your grandmom's 40 buck bag of kind bud.
And weed is yet another Oakland unifier, given its popularity across the entire demographic, as any trip to Harborside, the biggest marijuana dispensary in the United States, will tell you: black, white and Latino; young, old and middle-aged; hipster, square and non-descript. Only the Asians are notably absent.
The best exemplar of the Oakland Boom is the fantastically-popular and fully integrated—save the still-recalcitrant Asians—Oakland Murmur, a street fair and gallery-pub crawl which has transpired the first Friday of almost every month since 2006.
Although it was only a half-a-dozen galleries and few hundred people for a few years, the Murmur now includes over 50 galleries, plus "collectives, street artists, culinary artisans, performers, musicians, dancers, DJs, and poets," according to the First Friday site.
A lot of the work is excellent, like that of my old friend Richard Felix, who sets up large boards and pots of paint for the public to wale away. Or the outsider street artists, like the painter who presents some fifty, reggae-flavored canvases monthly, taking up about ten times the average vendor space, or the many musicians and performers, not to forget all the artists on display in the galleries.
Then there's the 25,000 attendees, many bridge and tunnel folk but also from all over Oakland and growing. Indeed, the policewoman I asked at May 4th's Murmur indicated that the official estimate might be low.
Blowing up in 2012, First Friday eventually went wild in the streets, replete with oil can fires, drum circles and intoxicated men, which inevitably led to a tragic killing, in 2013, of a young man by the name of Kiante Campbell. After that the city shut it down, but only for a month. Now The Murmur is properly policed, has almost no crime and everything closes, in an orderly fashion, at 9 pm sharp, whereupon the action shifts to the restaurants, bars and clubs.
While Oakland can seem pretty tribal, with people periodically labeling each other gentrifier, racist, thug or worse—especially in print, on the streets the vibe is usually fairly mellow, quantum leaps better than New York City in the '60s when I was growing up.
With apartments going up all over Oakland, this development is trying to get an edge with its name, Brooklyn Basin, and location, only four blocks from Harborside, the US' largest marijuana dispensary. photo: D. BlairYes, a lot of residents have reason to complain, either about the gentrification and skyrocketing rent or the car break-ins and cafe computer grabs, but cities need to integrate not just genetics and politics but class.
Oakland has long achieved this, with its wealthy hill and impoverished flat dwellers often encountering each other at the notoriously-contentious city supervisor meetings.
And the barriers between the two distrcts are comparatively permeable. From Black Panther party members, like Elaine Brown, to my neighbors in West Oakland, people periodically retreat to the Oakland hills, some of which seems like parts of Big Sur. There they share mutli-million-dollar houses, some with beautiful Bay views but teetering on the edge of cliffs, for about the same per-roomie cost as flat-land loft space.
Given this, perhaps Oakland can pioneer an advanced form of class compatibility by proving that it is both more fun and an economic necessity for urban communities.
New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are also very diverse but they are much larger, wealthier and more polarized. While Chicago shares Oakland's work-a-day spirit, NY and LA are rich and elitist, which bars entry to some of a city's most vital inhabitants. Being the poor relative at the Bay Area's ridiculously rich table, Oakland is more open and has fostered not only The Murmur but Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Occupy, Hyphy and more.
Along with the equal distribution of the racial big four—black, white, Latino and Asian plus a large First People cohort (see "There There", by Tommy Orange), this makes Oakland an elevated incubator of what can be called is Rainbowism, given multiculturalism is so bland and tribalism so deadly.
Although Rainbow Panthers might have made sense in the '70s, today it would be a travesty against that innovative group, which was such a hard act to follow. You never see anyone wearing black leather jackets and berets around West Oakland, although that would be a normative continuation of the Panthers in the 'hood where they started.
The eternal tension of almost all societies is between tribe and civilization. As much as some feel it is necessary to review and prosecute long-standing crimes—and it is absolutely necessary, simply to function you still need Rainbowism, where all tribes operate to their best ability within the context of rule of law and a level cultural playing field (see cS article, "Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto).
Town Park skate board park was started in 2009 by Keith ‘K-Dub’ Williams (left), without permits in DeFremery, the old Black Panther, park; now it's one of the area's most popular AND ethnically mixed. photo: D. BlairAn admittedly hard balancing act, it is easier in Oakland, which was a well-known city in the history of the West, but often wilder, more open and less pretentious than Berkeley and San Francisco.
Moreover, we are now blessed by equal race representation, a growing film scene, the popular Oakland Murmur and, of course, the twice-in-three-years—with another on its way—National Basketball League champions, the Golden State Warriors, fronted by the charismatic Stephan Curry. Indeed, his name has become a verb on local B-ball courts: "Snap, I just Curried you," (ie nothing but net).
Into this fecund setting is now stepping a lot of mature filmmakers, artists, activists, politicians and nonprof directors.
From my position, in my tenth Oakland survey, they seem to have as good a crack as anyone in history of resetting the imbalance in privilege, prosperity and power (from street to city hall), as well as hipster status, that little reported but widely adored right, to make Oakland the shining city in the flats as well as on the hill.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 25, 2018 - 02:28 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Oakland's 'First Friday' gallery and club crawl now has over 25,000 attendees, from all races, classes and neighborhoods. photo: D. Blairsurvey for cineSOURCE and, after a decade of delivering downers, I'm honored to announce: Oakland’s doing HELLA well! In fact, it's developing some tricks and techniques that just might save the world!
But what about all those murders, police scandals and homeless encampments, you ask? Well, they've been dropping, precipitously, particularly the kill rate and rogue police, although we're now confronting new plagues: gentrification, rampant hipster infestations and the eviction of long-term residents.
In terms of art, Oakland is booming. Indeed, our filmmakers just enjoyed their greatest season EVER, starting of course with the monster hit “Black Panther”, now one of the top 25 grossing films of ALL time, inflation adjusted. Directed by Oakland-native Ryan Coogler—I recently chatted with his cousin, who works media for the Oakland Police Department (OPD), “Black Panther” opens and closes with scenes in Oakland. Read our article "Black Panther Rules Cinema Earth".
Closer to the earth, there's the spectacular "Sorry to Bother You", by Oakland rapper Boots Riley, which we cover in "Sorry to Bother Busts Open Oakland Cine". A rollicking good and incisive satirical ride, it opens July 6th across the country at a Regal Cinema or United Artists theater near you.
'Sorry to Bother You', the biggest new film out of Oakland, since 'Black Panther' is really Hollywood, stars Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, whose love anchors the aggressive satire. photo: courtesy B. RileyOn a less stratospheric but still substantial level, the Oakland International Film Festival showed a bunch of insightful documentaries, features and shorts. Dominating the latter category: the shocking but spot-on "Pretty Ass White Woman".
Even a cursory glance at cineSOURCE's first survey in 2009, “Oakland on the Brink… of a Creative Explosion”, shows the city in better shape than any time since the 1940s. Back then, it was flush with shipping, manufacturing and music, as nicely detailed in this month's feature, “Cheryl Fabio Makes Masterful Oakland Blues Movie”, written by a new cineSOURCE contributor, Jerry McDaniel, a local musician and actor (the fabulous "Everything Strange and New", 2009).
Other interesting docs at the Oakland International's 16th iteration included the personal and artistic "My People Are Rising". About Aaron Dixon, the Black Panther who started a chapter in Seattle, the first outside of California, it was directed by local cineaste and teacher, as well as cineSOURCE writer, Rafael Flores (see his fascinating "Towards a Rasquache Cinema").
There was also "Futbolistas 4 Life", a poignant piece by Jun Stinson, about a scrum of undocumented Oakland high schoolers, their dedicated soccer coach and how they worked together to create their own soccer field. "Surviving International Boulevard", by Sian Taylor Gowan, provides a penetrating look into the very human lives behind the horror of child prostitution and sex trafficking that goes down daily on Oakland’s longest street.
That's a tough row to hoe, as it were, and hardly one embodying Oakland's deepest dreams and aspirations, but that's the whole damn point.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf defended the legitimacy of tipping off her undocumented citizens to immigration sweeps. photo: Oakland Mayor's OfficeIndeed, the honorable Mayor Libby Schaaf (2015-) has been doing just that, standing up against anti-immigrant xenophobia and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's attempt to crack down on Sanctuary Cities, which Oakland most certainly is.
"Mr. President, I am not obstructing justice, I am seeking it," Schaaf wrote Trump in a May 18th op-ed in The Washington Post. "As a leader, it's my duty to call out this administration's anti-immigrant fearmongering for what it is: a racist lie."
If Oaklanders can't crack the code of multi-tribalism—which has to include tribes you may not totally adore—who can?
Which is why I'm so honored to have survived in West Oakland for 29 years, ten with cineSOURCE, and to be making my tenth attempt to shed some light on it.
The numbers don’t lie. Last year 76 people were butchered on our streets, BUT that's a full forty percent less than 2012’s 127 people—fantastic news, whatever the haters may say.
Indeed, not a SINGLE person was killed by the OPD last year and only one person next to my building: brother Mario—recent calls to the cops still couldn't ferret out his last name (see cS article). In fact, in the entire year of 2016, the OPD didn't discharge a SINGLE weapon (see Oakland Magazine article).
Many Oaklanders are very vocal about their rejection of gentrification. photo: D. BlairSince then, there's been an endless stream of police, city, civic and church initiatives attempting to address this forty-year-old crisis, all largely ineffectual. Which leads me to conclude that much of the improvement that Oakland is enjoying today parallels the prosperity that trickled down in the Clinton Years. In other words, hard cold cash, particularly from gentrification.
Sounds crazy, I know. And, to be sure, gentrification is pushing people onto the streets, out to the suburbs or from their favorite clubs and restaurants.
Indeed, gentrification has Oakland natives as well hipsters, just off the Jet Blue red-eye from Brooklyn, outraged and expostulating loudly about the benefits of arson or muggings. Gentrification is also a central theme in "Sorry to Bother You", "Blindspotting" and many other pieces, like the excellent and locally-produced web series, "The North Pole".
But be real. Like the tourism that finances San Francisco, gentrification is a legit biz, despite the requisite soul-selling—cities involved would be well-advised to institute rent control ordinances, which Oakland lacks (signatures gatherers are currently trying to qualify one for the November ballot).
"I will permit 10,000 live/works, apartments or condos," now-governor Jerry Brown told us many times, when he was Oakland's mayor from 1999 to 2007.
“That’s nothing, we are going for 100,000," claimed Mayor Ron Dellums (2007-11), who was raised in West Oakland and represented the region in Congress for THIRTEEN terms, from 1971 to 1998.
An Oakland Occupy subgroup deliberates how to improve the city in front of City Hall, 2011. photo: D. BlairSadly, Oakland's black population has been pushed out, dropping drastically by about 40%. But that was mostly in the naughts, when the Dot Com Boom's second wave exploded real estate values and speculators offered quick cash to building owners tired of comparatively-high property taxes, notably-high violence and notably-low performing public schools.
To be precise, the 1970 census counted Oakland as 35% black, 60% white and the remaining 15% split evenly between Asian and Latino. 20 years later, it was 44% black and 32% white, a "white flight" of almost half. According to the last census, 2010, Oakland's 425,000 residents were 26% African-American, 27% white, 16% Asian (one third Chinese), almost one quarter Latino (the majority Mexican) and 7% multiracial.
Although this makes Oakland less of a "chocolate city," it is now not only one of the most diverse but EVENLY divided urban centers on the planet. A fantastic asset for the city's psychology and culture, this makes Oakland the perfect laboratory for the town's enormous non-profit presence, led by many people but notably Obama advisor Van Jones and his Dream Corps, founded in 2014.
Yes, gentrification has destroyed the vibe of some corners, cafes or neighborhoods AND it is going to get much worse, given the construction going up all over town.
To be sure, Oakland was the seed bed for great black culture, starting with the above-mentioned blues and Black Panthers (see cS article), and a lot of less well-knowns, from "side shows" and "ghost riding the whip" (ghetto street performances using cars) to too many rappers to mention, not to mention the dancers, writers, painters and more.
Unfortunately, old Oakland was hardly a wonderland. In fact, it was ravaged by crack, crime and neglect. Even the downtown development named Old Oakland had to go begging to San Francisco for a "bridge" loan while West Oakland remains a Mecca for illegal dumping, ugly tagging and other blight.
Oakland's Fox Theater anchors the vibrant, new downtown scene of cafes, craft beer halls AND schools, including the nationally-known Youth Radio and the High School of the Arts. photo: D. BlairAdmittedly, the many homeless encampments are a crisis of large proportions, but they are also perfectly understandable.
The 2011 Occupy Movement proved to anyone with eyes that you could camp out anywhere, including RIGHT IN FRONT of city hall. Although Oakland has large anarchist and vagabond populations, this was true up and down the West Coast. Once the Occupies ended, the encampments began in 2012. LA now has 48,000 sleeping on its streets nightly and almost every other town has people camping under its freeways, on its meridian strips or in its alleys.
"Oakland is solving the crisis in a unique way," Mayor Schaaf claimed recently. "We're bringing together corporate partners, community volunteers, and city staff to move people off sidewalks and into services."
Although Oakland just opened its second Tuff Shed Shelter, at 27th and Northgate, site of the city's oldest and largest encampment, the 20 cabins, with dead-bolted doors and low-voltage electricity, sleep only two people each. With three to four thousand on Oakland's streets nightly, there's a long way to go.
Nevertheless, Schaaf also acquired a single residency occupancy hotel and has lobbied many times in Sacramento, recently winning an additional $1.5 billion and announcing an incentive program to encourage landlords to accept Section 8 welfare vouchers.
Presumably some of the gentrifiers will be taxed, inspired or cajoled to do their part. In addition to the billions they've injected into real estate, construction and supply sales, they have sparked a lot of service-provider and some tech jobs, albeit not as many as once claimed.
The behemoth ride service Uber passed on its much ballyhooed HQ, a refurbished Sears, the size of a city block, in the center of Oakland's Uptown neighborhood. Sold in October, 2017, to the Oakland-based CIM Group, they intend to finally open it as an upscale mall, in late 2018.
Some techies are voluntarily donating funds and labor to Oakland's many youth-oriented media hubs, business incubators and schools, starting with the nationally-known Youth Radio, which began in Berkeley in 1993 and moved to Oakland in 2007. Some hubs are even financing young artists and entrepreneurs (see cS article “People Power Media Expands in Oakland”.
The street music, magic and other performances at Oakland's Murmur are often excellent, as this drum, base and rapper indicated on May 4th. photo: D. BlairAnd weed is yet another Oakland unifier, given its popularity across the entire demographic, as any trip to Harborside, the biggest marijuana dispensary in the United States, will tell you: black, white and Latino; young, old and middle-aged; hipster, square and non-descript. Only the Asians are notably absent.
The best exemplar of the Oakland Boom is the fantastically-popular and fully integrated—save the still-recalcitrant Asians—Oakland Murmur, a street fair and gallery-pub crawl which has transpired the first Friday of almost every month since 2006.
Although it was only a half-a-dozen galleries and few hundred people for a few years, the Murmur now includes over 50 galleries, plus "collectives, street artists, culinary artisans, performers, musicians, dancers, DJs, and poets," according to the First Friday site.
A lot of the work is excellent, like that of my old friend Richard Felix, who sets up large boards and pots of paint for the public to wale away. Or the outsider street artists, like the painter who presents some fifty, reggae-flavored canvases monthly, taking up about ten times the average vendor space, or the many musicians and performers, not to forget all the artists on display in the galleries.
Then there's the 25,000 attendees, many bridge and tunnel folk but also from all over Oakland and growing. Indeed, the policewoman I asked at May 4th's Murmur indicated that the official estimate might be low.
Blowing up in 2012, First Friday eventually went wild in the streets, replete with oil can fires, drum circles and intoxicated men, which inevitably led to a tragic killing, in 2013, of a young man by the name of Kiante Campbell. After that the city shut it down, but only for a month. Now The Murmur is properly policed, has almost no crime and everything closes, in an orderly fashion, at 9 pm sharp, whereupon the action shifts to the restaurants, bars and clubs.
While Oakland can seem pretty tribal, with people periodically labeling each other gentrifier, racist, thug or worse—especially in print, on the streets the vibe is usually fairly mellow, quantum leaps better than New York City in the '60s when I was growing up.
With apartments going up all over Oakland, this development is trying to get an edge with its name, Brooklyn Basin, and location, only four blocks from Harborside, the US' largest marijuana dispensary. photo: D. BlairOakland has long achieved this, with its wealthy hill and impoverished flat dwellers often encountering each other at the notoriously-contentious city supervisor meetings.
And the barriers between the two distrcts are comparatively permeable. From Black Panther party members, like Elaine Brown, to my neighbors in West Oakland, people periodically retreat to the Oakland hills, some of which seems like parts of Big Sur. There they share mutli-million-dollar houses, some with beautiful Bay views but teetering on the edge of cliffs, for about the same per-roomie cost as flat-land loft space.
Given this, perhaps Oakland can pioneer an advanced form of class compatibility by proving that it is both more fun and an economic necessity for urban communities.
New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are also very diverse but they are much larger, wealthier and more polarized. While Chicago shares Oakland's work-a-day spirit, NY and LA are rich and elitist, which bars entry to some of a city's most vital inhabitants. Being the poor relative at the Bay Area's ridiculously rich table, Oakland is more open and has fostered not only The Murmur but Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Occupy, Hyphy and more.
Along with the equal distribution of the racial big four—black, white, Latino and Asian plus a large First People cohort (see "There There", by Tommy Orange), this makes Oakland an elevated incubator of what can be called is Rainbowism, given multiculturalism is so bland and tribalism so deadly.
Although Rainbow Panthers might have made sense in the '70s, today it would be a travesty against that innovative group, which was such a hard act to follow. You never see anyone wearing black leather jackets and berets around West Oakland, although that would be a normative continuation of the Panthers in the 'hood where they started.
The eternal tension of almost all societies is between tribe and civilization. As much as some feel it is necessary to review and prosecute long-standing crimes—and it is absolutely necessary, simply to function you still need Rainbowism, where all tribes operate to their best ability within the context of rule of law and a level cultural playing field (see cS article, "Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto).
Town Park skate board park was started in 2009 by Keith ‘K-Dub’ Williams (left), without permits in DeFremery, the old Black Panther, park; now it's one of the area's most popular AND ethnically mixed. photo: D. BlairMoreover, we are now blessed by equal race representation, a growing film scene, the popular Oakland Murmur and, of course, the twice-in-three-years—with another on its way—National Basketball League champions, the Golden State Warriors, fronted by the charismatic Stephan Curry. Indeed, his name has become a verb on local B-ball courts: "Snap, I just Curried you," (ie nothing but net).
Into this fecund setting is now stepping a lot of mature filmmakers, artists, activists, politicians and nonprof directors.
From my position, in my tenth Oakland survey, they seem to have as good a crack as anyone in history of resetting the imbalance in privilege, prosperity and power (from street to city hall), as well as hipster status, that little reported but widely adored right, to make Oakland the shining city in the flats as well as on the hill.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .
Posted on May 25, 2018 - 02:28 AM
