Nov 16, 2025
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Dear Oakland, Part 2
by Doniphan Blair
The Oakland 'No Kings' protest in front of the mayor's office, April 5th. photo: D. Blair PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
Return to the beginning of Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?
AS IT HAPPENS, THE VAST MAJORITY OF
Oaklanders do support Ukraine, I was overjoyed to find out upon my return, albeit not enough to do so publicly, by flying a Ukrainian flag, for example. The flag in my window was the only one in West Oakland, in fact, and one of the few in the entire Bay Area, which would have devastated our progressive grandparents. Ninety years ago, the Bay Area was a crucible in the defense of democracy and mustered many men and women to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where the Lincoln Brigade provided an important military force (my father joined in Ohio, see his story). Just as peer pressure inhibits Oaklanders in tough hoods from talking to cops, it seems to me, supporters of Ukraine fear offending friends or neighbors who oppose US foreign policy or romanticize Russia. Oaklanders were famous for being PC-free straight shooters, when discussing crime, corruption or a perpetrator’s race, in the street or at parties, but that working-class honesty faded after the BLM and pro-Palestine demonstrations.
Many Oaklanders joined the scores of protests for Palestinians, starting before the blood dried at Israel’s Burning Man, the Supernova trance music festival, where 378 people were murdered. West Oakland was soon slathered in graffiti, even more than BLM summer, including two 100-foot-long slogans near my place. There were 8,000 Black Lives Matter rallies nationwide, according to Crowd Counting Consortium, but over 12,000 anti-Israel protests in the United States, as of June 2024, and many more since, making Palestinianism the most popular movement in history. In November 2023, an activist addressing Oakland’s City Council received loud applause after claiming that the Hamas attack was a false flag operation staged by Israel to cover their intended genocide, and the Council passed a motion supporting Palestinians.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of Oaklanders are moderates, center-left or even center-right, including a handful of Republicans (3.5 % of 280,000 registered voters). Oakland’s centrists often keep their own council, but they showed up en masse for the “No Kings” anti-Trump marches of April 5th and June 14th, which had surprisingly little Palestinian or BLM signage. In fact, Oakland has a large chapter of the century-old Socialist Workers Party, publisher of many important books as well as The Militant weekly newspaper, and is much more centrist than its name implies. Indeed, the Socialist Workers Party supports the right to self-defense of both Ukraine and Israel and even organized a few pro-Israel gatherings, albeit small.
Anti-Zionism in California, where colonialists with no local heritage committed an actual genocide and seized territory 15 times the size of Israel, smacks of hypocrisy and transference, but that’s an ancient proclivity, beyond the scope of this article, except to note it involves the liberal dilemma. In fact, Oakland and Israel share both elevated multiculturalism (Israel is about 63% POC, Oakland 70%) and the challenge of providing their citizens Roosevelt’s fourth freedom: the freedom from fear. After a century of unprecedented success, liberals have a hard time comprehending that they, their allies and their values are under existential attack—that gangsters and fascists find them weak, decadent and easy to deceive, rob or defeat. Hamas personifies this by embezzling billions from liberal institutions, building a vast bunker and arsenal, declaring a fight to the death in no uncertain terms, and performing pitch-perfect horseshoe politics propaganda, which attracts sympathy from liberals as well as solidarity from other fascists.
Oakland's first synagogue, Temple Sinai, started at 13th and Clay Streets in 1875 (shown here in 1889) and moved a few times before being built at its current location, 28th and Webster Streets, in 1914. photo: courtesy Temple Sinai The explosion of racism against Oakland’s Jews after 10/7 was unique since the founding of the Town’s first synagogue, Temple Sinai, in 1875. Although Orthodox, they were already lenient Californians who dropped the tradition of separating women and men in synagogue. That probably had some effect on one young parishioner, the avant-garde author, Paris salon leader and largely-out lesbian Gertrude Stein, who moved to Oakland three years later, age four. In addition to helping the Jews, America’s freedom of religion and California’s emerging tolerance encouraged the embrace of the Zen Buddhists, who arrived in 1892, and the Muslim Sufis, who came in 1907, a spirit that reigned supreme for almost 150 years. Hence, no security was needed at Temple Sinai until 2018 and America’s first pogrom, the murder of 11 Jews at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania’s Tree of Life Synagogue.
Security at Temple Sinai had to be increased again after 10/7 as Jewish students were belittled and bullied in Oakland schools and on Berkeley’s UC campus, sometimes abetted by teachers. Public menorahs were defaced or destroyed; synagogues were graffitied; insults were hurled and death threats made. About 30 Jewish families moved. I myself didn’t feel safe as a Jew for the first time in my life, including the seven months I spent busing and hitchhiking around Islam, from Turkey to India and back in 1972-3 (see my article), an odd inversion of Oakland’s traditional tolerance, intermarriage and Jewishness.
I was called a Nazi by some White anarchists in a van with a bullhorn at an anti-Trump rally because I was carrying a Ukrainian flag. Considering that animosity against Ukraine is minimal compared to the anti-Zionism—the anarchists were also blasting out vicious anti-Zionist slogans—and that virtue signaling and violence are popular, I would fear for my wellbeing carrying an Israeli flag. Ninety-nine percent of Oaklanders are not racist, to be sure, and even fewer violent, but they may not fully realize that tolerating antisemitism is tacit approval, that antisemitism is at the root of many conspiracy theories, or that many of their family, friends, favorite artists and professional service providers are of Jewish descent, affiliation or culture.
Eldridge Cleaver, here speaking to college students in 1968, evolved from prison writer to bestseller and head of the international Panthers and then Christian, clothing designer and Republican. photo: courtesy the PanthersOakland’s Black Panthers were not anti-Zionist. When they formed, in October 1966, the Left still supported Israel as an innovative socialist state replete with collectivized democratic kibbutzes, full medical and expanding civil rights for Arabs. That status flipped following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, when America began supplying Israel with arms.
Combining classical antisemitism with cultural Marxism and supposed realpolitik, post-Holocaust anti-Zionism provided a symbolically enormous, if physically small, scapegoat through which to channel virtue signaling on an industrial scale, both against American foreign policy and for the Middle East’s socialist states, movements or leaders. The Soviet Union voted for Israel in 1949, but its espionage agencies were masters of the magical powers of antisemitism, conspiracy theories and active measures, leading it to sponsor the UN declaration “Zionism is racism” in 1975.
At the same time, radical Islam was rocketing up, its advocates increasing their attacks on Muslim liberals, Sufis, women and artists as well as Jews, Christians and pagans. Radical Shi'a Islamists seized Iran in 1978, where they soon liquidated their leftist allies and declared holy war on the United States and Israel. Three years later, Sunni extremists murdered Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat, for the crime of making peace with Israel.
A few years earlier, the renown American leftist Eldridge Cleaver, third in the Black Panther triumvirate after Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the bestselling author of “Soul on Ice” (1968), visited or lived in most of the Middle East's socialist countries and met many of their leaders. After returning to the US, serving a modest prison term and embracing liberal democracy, he became an entrepreneur, Christian and designer but also a Zionist, which means supporter of Israel’s right to exist. Cleaver even had kind words for Oakland's cops, after dealing with the police in Algeria, North Vietnam and North Korea.
To save Oakland, if not the world, from the horns of the liberal dilemma, we need another Occupy-like, community-wide discussion as well as Cleaver's willingness to evolve. Despite the increasingly dire threat from the hard right in the Trump Era, we have to reinvent the Left simply to defang the Right’s empowerment through horseshoe politics, much as our progressive grandparents and parents did during the ‘50s and ‘60s, after the Left divided over the vast mass murders of the Soviet Union and China or Western radicals’ performative violence. In point of fact, we have to do this to insure the cultural and commercial viability of one of the planet’s most multicultural and creative cities, our Oakland. To this end, I would like to revisit my debate with Professor Davis, an Oakland resident as well as the eminence gris of the BLM movement, when her class visited my commune’s art gallery, Ancient Currents, in 1982. Professor Davis easily eviscerated my embryonic ideas about "abstract aborigine," but I was rescued by an Afro-Nicaraguan student, who agreed with me.
Angela Davis, the overachieving California activist, professor and former Black Panther, looks over a West Oakland corner. photo: D. Blair Professor Davis’s achievements in California are immense but not quite enough to renounce Marcuse’s critique or her own Soviet apparatchik comments, or to propose a fresh way of integrating social assistance, collectivism, free expression and capitalism, which is not that hard in our still fairly-free society. We did it at our commune; Avis and United Airlines were employee-owned for a while; and there are currently more than 50 collectives doing business around the Bay, notably Oakland’s popular Arizmendi Bakery.
A good first step would be to lower Oakland’s tax rate of 10.75%, about a fifth more than San Francisco’s 8.625% and a tenth more than suburban Orinda’s 9.75%, which punishes merchants and anarchists alike and repels investors, shoppers and young mothers. High sales tax burdens can be more easily borne by commuter residents ,who often do big shops elsewhere and whose elevated property taxes are offset by lower values.
The liberal dilemma now challenging Oakland, America and much of the West has been long in coming, although many of us, including me, missed the early signs. The hard left's "long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Rudi Dutschke, a German activist and friend of Marcuse, was succeeding spectacularly by the turn of the millennia, especially in the universities. The Obama Administration, to a modest degree, and the Occupy, MeToo, BLM, trans and pro-Palestine movements, to increasingly greater degrees, radicalized many people, especially the young, exacerbated by the liberal failure to solve skyrocketing rents, homelessness and immigration, which fueled horseshoe politics. Given America’s socio-political train wreck and Oakland’s frontline status, it won’t be easy to come up with new political concepts or coalitions, let alone revive the pre-Covid economy. But Oakland is known for Lazurus-like resurrections and, in the special election of April 15th, we got a brand-new mayor.
The stalwart, Oakland-based political figure, Barbara Lee during her whirlwind campaign to be mayor of Oakland, 2025. photo: D. Blair “I wouldn’t wish running Oakland on my worst enemy,” is a remark I’ve made more than once, but Barbara Lee comes as prepared as possible. Born in 1945 in El Paso, Texas, a tough town for a Black girl back in the day, she moved to Oakland in the ‘60s to attend Mills College (recently closed but reopened as part of Northeastern University) and UC Berkeley. After helping start a mental health clinic and working on Bobby Seale's 1973 mayoral bid, Lee interned with Representative Ron Dellums, got elected to the California legislature in 1990 and soon graduated to Congress. Taking over from Dellums as America’s most radical congressperson, she cast the sole vote against invading Iraq in 2003. Although Lee lost her 2024 Senate run, in a multiway contest against a savvy downstate player, Adam Schiff, and barely won Oakland’s special election—her leading contender was Loren Taylor, a UC graduate, business owner and City Council member, and only 36% of eligible Oaklanders bothered to vote—she seems suitable, if she can build coalitions across the aisle if not fashion a new, left-leaning worldview.
Mayor Lee’s capacity for political balance is suggested by her two sons, who work in the insurance industry (one for a Black owned company), and by Dr. Rajni Mandal’s assessment that “her political acumen is really good. She can definitely use that political capital to do things,” but not so much by her cabinet. Her chief of staff, Miya Saika Chen, worked for the very progressive Nikki Fortunato Bas, Oakland’s first Filipina-American councilmember, and her communications director, Justin Phillips, was a SF Chronicle columnist covering events and food but also DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Mayor Lee’s “100 days of listening” ended in July, but she didn’t come out strong on much, except for ending OPD’s federal oversight and abating violence.
“Based on the impassioned speech [Lee] gave to the federal judge, the judge was really impressed with her,” Dr. Mandal said during our July 12th interview. “There is great potential for her ending federal oversite.” Unfortunately, the powerful Police Commission “sent a letter to the judge that completely disparages the whole process. It said that the Chief [Mitchell] is against reform, that all he does is complain about the [oversight]… and he thinks it’s a sham… The chair of the Police Commission again outlined their far-fetched plan to be ‘co-compliance director’ [for the oversight, although] both the plaintiff's attorneys, Mayor Lee and the judge made inferences that they do not support that.”
Dr. Rajni Mandal was focusing on raising her two daughters until a shooting on her street in 2024, when she started bringing facts and figures to public forums, like this police meeting of July 12th, see her interview. photo: D. Blair “I had a pretty disappointing meeting with Mayor Lee, along with other rabbis,” I was told by Rabbi Jackie Mates-Muchin, the rabbi at Temple Sinai (a woman) on July 31st. “We were saying that a lot of people feel marginalized”—she later noted the recent graffito on a Jewish building, “Kill Jews”—“but I got the feeling she didn’t understand.” What the diplomatic rabbi didn’t mention but is obvious to many non-Jews as well as Jews: Once you break the sacred covenant that all humans are created equal, which ethnic Marxism does, you create space for racism and conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories often lead back to the Jews, first through religion, led by the Christians for millennia, then through race, the Nazi method, and now the unequal treatment of and libels against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, on which many Arab liberals depend. Indeed, there is a little known but surprisingly strong liberal tradition in the Middle East dating back to the Partisans of the Nude art movement of the 1950s, the Arab feminists of the '20s, the 19th century "Nahda," or Arab Enlightenment, and the tolerant, artistic Sufis, who were the spiritual leaders of Islam for centuries (see my article).
Of course, Mayor Lee must pay attention to the progressives, who are powerful in Oakland, and their leaders, sometimes called the “woke mafia." Indeed, the Police Commissioners, although they relaxed their opposition to police chases, are still intent on cutting the size of the OPD or preventing it from acquiring equipment like drones or a new BearCat armored vehicle. The police say it's invaluable for sideshows or hostage situations but, according to the Police Commissioners, the BearCat is not that effective and triggers people with PTSD.
I attended a public meeting at an East Oakland library on July 16th with four OPD officers, who explained the current situation and their needs, including a bearded, ponytailed Latinx Lieutenant Omar Cardona. Cameras have been installed all over Oakland, they said, but people have been destroying them. There’s usually one sideshow per weekend, against which the OPD uses a "containment strategy," including impounding dozens of vehicles of sideshow observers, which a new law made illegal, who are often from out of town. Guns were readily available on the street, starting around $300; shop owners were arming up; and 1574 rounds were fired in June. The Covid killing spree did finally dissipate, thankfully, and only 39 people have been murdered to the date of their presentation, compared to 51 in the same period last year, which puts Oakland on track for a decent annual rate, well below 100. One cop also noted that they do not assist, whatsoever, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This seemingly suburban scene transpired in the heart of West Oakland, three blocks from my live/work studio. photo: D. BlairIndeed, Oakland saw a 29% drop in violent crime thus far this year, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which Mayor Lee and Chief Mitchell have been crowing about, although the Chief said it followed a national pattern. Nevertheless, Mayor Lee claimed in July that "Our comprehensive public safety strategy is working. Crime rates are coming down even though we still face many challenges,” and added, “Let me repeat, President Trump is wrong.” Robberies and auto thefts have dropped the most, by 41% and 45% respectively, although arson, that unhoused favorite, was up by 9%. Mayor Lee also said her budget this year includes 678 cops, with the intention of reaching 700 over the next year or two, almost what Jerry Brown wanted 20 years ago, although the actual number is about 640 due to attrition and lack of recruitment.
Unfortunately, even if murders in Oakland were to drop to 2018’s historic low of 67, that’s still over one a week, meaning hundreds of family and friends traumatized annually. "We still have so much work to do,” Mayor Lee admitted candidly, after two people were killed and six wounded in multiple shootings, with no immediate arrests, a few hours after September’s First Friday (9/5/25).
At the police public meeting, the Police Commissioners asked tough questions, but things remained cordial until a member of Oakland’s large Chinese community got frustrated and started rattling off crime stats. Some stores have been robbed two or three times in one day, he said, and tax revenue is way down because businesses are fleeing. Dr. Mandal also made an articulate, politically balanced statement in favor of the police. In our interview, she told me that, “You can barricade all you want, in your house, in your neighborhood, whatever, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire city is hurting, right? And if you don’t fix the systemic issue, you’re not going to be able to fix anything.”
Like Dr. Mandal, who just wants her kids to grow up in a functional city, many Oaklanders are doing what they can. The home owners’ association of South Prescott, an area in West Oakland a mile from Raimundi Park, did a GoFundMe to buy traffic barriers to prevent RVs from parking on their streets. After the Wood Street encampment was dispersed, campers took over their children’s park, which they aggressively lobbied the city to clear. The people arguing on NextDoor, the neighborhood discussion app, sometimes get acrimonious over White privilege and how to help the homeless but everyone agrees: Encampments full of folks with mental issues, rats and fires are not sustainable. An Oakland fireman friend told me they were summoned to the Wood Street encampment about 250 times in 2022. Business people, meanwhile, have come up with “tax increment financing,” to help their neighbors pay tax burdens in installments in order to stay in Oakland.
Oaklanders, including a Yemeni-American, at First Friday, the monthly street fair on Telegraph Avenue, June 2025. photo: D. BlairOther than these problems and the liberal dilemma, however, Oakland is doing great, especially compared to Covid times.
“Oakland film may be down but it’s not out,” Debbie Brubaker, the legendary local indie film producer who grew up in the East Bay, told me on July 25th. In fact, the recently closed Holy Names University (1868-2023) in the Oakland hills reopened for film shoots in January 2025. “The guys running Holy Names are fantastic. They are really excited about having a film scene—they have my back! Commercials will always be shot here, they generally shoot in Oakland or SF, if cities are called for. Holy Names could be a full-on Hollywood set. The views up there are insane!”
The recently released feature, “Freaky Tales” (2025), is a funny, sometimes fantasy story about Oakland, which includes a cameo by Oaklander Tom Hanks (Skyline High, 1974) and was directed by Berkeley-born Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who did the excellent “Half Nelson” (2006). Also shot here is the upcoming dramatic thriller “Josephine”, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan and written, directed and produced by Beth de Araújo, a Brazilian-American San Franciscan. Although Boots Riley, of “Sorry to Bother You” fame, decamped for Louisiana to make the “I’m a Virgo” series for Amazon, Brubaker says, “It’s fabulous.”
“Oakland could revive as film center. There’s a consortium, the East Bay Film Collective, which meets every third Thursday at the Night Heron Bar [1780 Telegraph].” EBFC is dedicated to revitalizing Oakland’s “culture economy,” according to its site, #MakeItBay, and includes among its members comedian W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN’s “United Shades of America”. “There’s also the Worst Film Festival held at Mama Dog Studios," which is at 700 26th Street, eight blocks from my place. A very Oakland concept, "It celebrates learning from your mistakes. Submit the worst short or part of a feature, and talk about the process. I went last year and thought it was great—a lot fun.” The last WFF transpired on August 28th.
Oaklanders at First Friday enjoying the mural painting, which has been provided free for over a decade by Richard Felix, a friend from the SF Art Institute whose studio is five blocks from mine (see the mural archives on his site). photo: D. BlairCineMama, meanwhile, is “building a cultural hub in Oakland… for developing, producing, and exhibiting films for film professionals,” as per their website. They hold writers’ meetups, filmmakers’ happy hour and events like the “Reel Queer Flix” screenings at different locations. Another big booster of Oakland film, notably by backing EBFC, is Unanimous Media, the production company of Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ three-point king.
In the arts, Councilwoman Carol Fief got reinstated a municipal arts position by soliciting support from nine philanthropies. The Oakland Museum continues its Friday night fiestas until the end of October, featuring live music, DJs, food trucks and figure drawing, among other activities, as well as the opportunity to see great exhibitions like September’s “Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest”. Creative Growth, nationally known for its work with disabled artists, just celebrated its 50th anniversary and got a new director, Sunny A. Smith. The Joyce Gordon Gallery (also one of my graphic clients), which focuses on Black and Iranian art, recently received great coverage on ABC, while Johansson Projects, the premier gallery on the First Friday strip of Telegraph, is showcasing important art from all over California.
As usual, a better, more beautiful Oakland seems very much in reach, given our copious fundamentals of talent, housing stock and location. Oakland could revive not only as a film center, as Brubaker hopes, or a culinary cornucopia, as many chefs are attempting, but an important ideas workshop, as well as pleasant place to live, where a lot of artists, my old friends Wetback and Donna, and my new friend Rajni Mandal as well as little ol’ me, with my cineSOURCE magazine or JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM project, could cooperate and profit in harmony and happiness.
Convincing a majority of Oaklanders to join this endeavor won’t be easy. I have gotten to know the Yemeni-American community a bit over the last 30 years, largely by befriending Muhammad, who ran our corner store at 26th and Adeline, and observing and hearing about his colorful life. I sometimes talked to his first wife, who always wore a colorful Yemeni dress, although her father was an Oaklander, born here. Since their community’s main livelihood was liquor stores, their life was not easy, and Muhammad witnessed more than ten murders. A few followed the American immigrant dream of education, integration and upward mobility, but most did not. Indeed, many Yemeni-American women donned the black burka after 10/7, suggesting to me that Oakland’s elevated pro-Palestinian movement, as well as Yemen's decade plus of war, civil war and now war with Israel (which they initiated in support of Hamas), made a religious reckoning seem nigh.
On October 8th, Chief Mitchell tendered his resignation, after 18 months on the job, the 12th chief since 2000. Although Mitchell offered no explanation, he "tried to fix the system and was blocked at every turn," according to Dr. Mandal, in a recent email to me. "At some point, he realized, it was fruitless. The issue is not Mitchell, but the lack of mayor support and obstruction by all the oversight (Police Commission, Privacy Commission, NSA)." Indeed, the Police Commission ultimately nixed OPD's request for new rifles and a replacement BearCat armored vehicle, and the use of Flock cameras. Called "a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure" by the ACLU, Flock's gunfire locator and license plate reader systems were introduced in 2017, are currently used in over 4,000 cities nationwide, and were found effective in Oakland.
There's also Measure NN, approved by Oaklanders in 2024. Its over $45 million-a-year budget is completely controlled by a Mayor-appointed five-person commission, which will now dominate police and public safety decisions (see Dr. Mandal's article here or, to get involved, email her ).
Full moon over Oakland's Downtown, from my building's nice roof platform, generously built by the landlord, Francis Rush (1954-2023), who was also a large-canvas abstract painter and my friend. photo: D. BlairThe challenge is taking into account how people vote with their feet and pocketbooks not just words or at the ballot box. Almost everyone already abides equality-based multiculturalism in many things, like cuisine, since nothing is worse than eating your own tribe’s food, day after day, forever. In fact, honest people are inherently multicultural, since the theory of mind that allows us to communicate requires inferring other people's perspectives. This built-in quality of consciousness leads us to draw from diverse sources, regardless of ideological or traditional parameters.
Radical multiculturalists are, by definition, centrists—how else could we accept and empower so much difference?—and the opposite of horseshoe politics practitioners. Instead of the hard left and right bonding en extremis, the most aggressive members of each side becoming allies of convenience, moderates select on the merits and build more modest but honest cooperation between liberals and conservatives, socialists and capitalists, therapists and engineers, artists and warriors.
I see this happening a lot in Ukraine and Israel. Many of my leftist friends may find this hard to believe, but Ukraine and Israel are maintaining functional multicultural democracies, despite the extreme duress, and that is precisely what enables them to pull together nationally—unlike in the United States. In Ukraine's case, the inter-communal assistance started during the 2014 revolution on Maidan Square when rightwing soccer hooligans carrying sticks, a few wearing motorcycle helmets, defended the liberals from police attacks, a pattern now scaled society-wide. We need to learn from but also assist those fighting on the frontlines of democracy, as our grandparents did during the Spanish Civil War.
Young men and women looking to channel their proclivity for adventure and activism could join my proposed “Malcolm Nance Battalion.” Like the Lincoln Brigade, they would volunteer to defend democracy but this time in Ukraine, where Nance, an African-American Navy officer, cryptologist, intelligence operative and Arabic speaker, answered the call and served, shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion. On a more local level, I would like to help kids go camping, which provides an opportunity for adventure and skill building, starting in the Oakland hills but then graduating to California's spectacular wildernesses.
How do we address the gangs of youths on small motorcycles who like to roar through traffic or around a neighborhood, doing “wheelies” and blasting music, sometimes till midnight on weekdays, which annoys the hell out of some Oaklanders? Perhaps Oakland could organize parades, with competitions and prizes, as well as enforce more traffic law, as OPD did with sideshows. As it happens, my hood had a sideshow on September 26th at our local burger joint, Hyphy Burgers, because a famous YouTuber, IShowSpeed (AKA Darren Jason Watkins), was there and, naturally, West Oaklanders wanted to put on a show. Unfortunately, sideshows generate a tremendous amount of noise from the tires squealing, which had some of my neighbors tearing out their hair (and it was over five blocks away), until the cops showed up.
Or perhaps Oakland should tolerate some scofflaws and retain some of its traditional wildness?
Mexican-style sodas, fruit or food is often on offer from immigrant entrepreneurs on Adeline in front of my live-work studio. photo: D. BlairEither way, rationalism compels us to learn how to cooperate, the best platform for which is liberal democracy. Yes, it has been in crisis of late, but evolving an innovative, agile and strong center is a slow, arduous process, while quick fixes are often dysfunctional overreactions. We are all liberals of sorts, from conservatives to social democrats, even radicals and libertarians, because no one likes living under an authoritarian boot, Left or Right, and only liberal democracy has enabled diverse people, professions and ideologies to flourish simultaneously.
In fact, a big tent full of liberals will recognize the threat to democracy—eventually—and figure out how to defend it, as well as equality-based multiculturalism and artistic freedom—again eventually. If we didn’t, we’d still be in caves controlled by bullies.
Posted on Sep 23, 2025 - 06:16 AM
by Doniphan Blair
The Oakland 'No Kings' protest in front of the mayor's office, April 5th. photo: D. Blair Return to the beginning of Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?
AS IT HAPPENS, THE VAST MAJORITY OF
Oaklanders do support Ukraine, I was overjoyed to find out upon my return, albeit not enough to do so publicly, by flying a Ukrainian flag, for example. The flag in my window was the only one in West Oakland, in fact, and one of the few in the entire Bay Area, which would have devastated our progressive grandparents. Ninety years ago, the Bay Area was a crucible in the defense of democracy and mustered many men and women to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where the Lincoln Brigade provided an important military force (my father joined in Ohio, see his story). Just as peer pressure inhibits Oaklanders in tough hoods from talking to cops, it seems to me, supporters of Ukraine fear offending friends or neighbors who oppose US foreign policy or romanticize Russia. Oaklanders were famous for being PC-free straight shooters, when discussing crime, corruption or a perpetrator’s race, in the street or at parties, but that working-class honesty faded after the BLM and pro-Palestine demonstrations.
Many Oaklanders joined the scores of protests for Palestinians, starting before the blood dried at Israel’s Burning Man, the Supernova trance music festival, where 378 people were murdered. West Oakland was soon slathered in graffiti, even more than BLM summer, including two 100-foot-long slogans near my place. There were 8,000 Black Lives Matter rallies nationwide, according to Crowd Counting Consortium, but over 12,000 anti-Israel protests in the United States, as of June 2024, and many more since, making Palestinianism the most popular movement in history. In November 2023, an activist addressing Oakland’s City Council received loud applause after claiming that the Hamas attack was a false flag operation staged by Israel to cover their intended genocide, and the Council passed a motion supporting Palestinians.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of Oaklanders are moderates, center-left or even center-right, including a handful of Republicans (3.5 % of 280,000 registered voters). Oakland’s centrists often keep their own council, but they showed up en masse for the “No Kings” anti-Trump marches of April 5th and June 14th, which had surprisingly little Palestinian or BLM signage. In fact, Oakland has a large chapter of the century-old Socialist Workers Party, publisher of many important books as well as The Militant weekly newspaper, and is much more centrist than its name implies. Indeed, the Socialist Workers Party supports the right to self-defense of both Ukraine and Israel and even organized a few pro-Israel gatherings, albeit small.
Anti-Zionism in California, where colonialists with no local heritage committed an actual genocide and seized territory 15 times the size of Israel, smacks of hypocrisy and transference, but that’s an ancient proclivity, beyond the scope of this article, except to note it involves the liberal dilemma. In fact, Oakland and Israel share both elevated multiculturalism (Israel is about 63% POC, Oakland 70%) and the challenge of providing their citizens Roosevelt’s fourth freedom: the freedom from fear. After a century of unprecedented success, liberals have a hard time comprehending that they, their allies and their values are under existential attack—that gangsters and fascists find them weak, decadent and easy to deceive, rob or defeat. Hamas personifies this by embezzling billions from liberal institutions, building a vast bunker and arsenal, declaring a fight to the death in no uncertain terms, and performing pitch-perfect horseshoe politics propaganda, which attracts sympathy from liberals as well as solidarity from other fascists.
Oakland's first synagogue, Temple Sinai, started at 13th and Clay Streets in 1875 (shown here in 1889) and moved a few times before being built at its current location, 28th and Webster Streets, in 1914. photo: courtesy Temple Sinai Security at Temple Sinai had to be increased again after 10/7 as Jewish students were belittled and bullied in Oakland schools and on Berkeley’s UC campus, sometimes abetted by teachers. Public menorahs were defaced or destroyed; synagogues were graffitied; insults were hurled and death threats made. About 30 Jewish families moved. I myself didn’t feel safe as a Jew for the first time in my life, including the seven months I spent busing and hitchhiking around Islam, from Turkey to India and back in 1972-3 (see my article), an odd inversion of Oakland’s traditional tolerance, intermarriage and Jewishness.
I was called a Nazi by some White anarchists in a van with a bullhorn at an anti-Trump rally because I was carrying a Ukrainian flag. Considering that animosity against Ukraine is minimal compared to the anti-Zionism—the anarchists were also blasting out vicious anti-Zionist slogans—and that virtue signaling and violence are popular, I would fear for my wellbeing carrying an Israeli flag. Ninety-nine percent of Oaklanders are not racist, to be sure, and even fewer violent, but they may not fully realize that tolerating antisemitism is tacit approval, that antisemitism is at the root of many conspiracy theories, or that many of their family, friends, favorite artists and professional service providers are of Jewish descent, affiliation or culture.
Eldridge Cleaver, here speaking to college students in 1968, evolved from prison writer to bestseller and head of the international Panthers and then Christian, clothing designer and Republican. photo: courtesy the PanthersCombining classical antisemitism with cultural Marxism and supposed realpolitik, post-Holocaust anti-Zionism provided a symbolically enormous, if physically small, scapegoat through which to channel virtue signaling on an industrial scale, both against American foreign policy and for the Middle East’s socialist states, movements or leaders. The Soviet Union voted for Israel in 1949, but its espionage agencies were masters of the magical powers of antisemitism, conspiracy theories and active measures, leading it to sponsor the UN declaration “Zionism is racism” in 1975.
At the same time, radical Islam was rocketing up, its advocates increasing their attacks on Muslim liberals, Sufis, women and artists as well as Jews, Christians and pagans. Radical Shi'a Islamists seized Iran in 1978, where they soon liquidated their leftist allies and declared holy war on the United States and Israel. Three years later, Sunni extremists murdered Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat, for the crime of making peace with Israel.
A few years earlier, the renown American leftist Eldridge Cleaver, third in the Black Panther triumvirate after Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the bestselling author of “Soul on Ice” (1968), visited or lived in most of the Middle East's socialist countries and met many of their leaders. After returning to the US, serving a modest prison term and embracing liberal democracy, he became an entrepreneur, Christian and designer but also a Zionist, which means supporter of Israel’s right to exist. Cleaver even had kind words for Oakland's cops, after dealing with the police in Algeria, North Vietnam and North Korea.
To save Oakland, if not the world, from the horns of the liberal dilemma, we need another Occupy-like, community-wide discussion as well as Cleaver's willingness to evolve. Despite the increasingly dire threat from the hard right in the Trump Era, we have to reinvent the Left simply to defang the Right’s empowerment through horseshoe politics, much as our progressive grandparents and parents did during the ‘50s and ‘60s, after the Left divided over the vast mass murders of the Soviet Union and China or Western radicals’ performative violence. In point of fact, we have to do this to insure the cultural and commercial viability of one of the planet’s most multicultural and creative cities, our Oakland. To this end, I would like to revisit my debate with Professor Davis, an Oakland resident as well as the eminence gris of the BLM movement, when her class visited my commune’s art gallery, Ancient Currents, in 1982. Professor Davis easily eviscerated my embryonic ideas about "abstract aborigine," but I was rescued by an Afro-Nicaraguan student, who agreed with me.
Angela Davis, the overachieving California activist, professor and former Black Panther, looks over a West Oakland corner. photo: D. Blair A good first step would be to lower Oakland’s tax rate of 10.75%, about a fifth more than San Francisco’s 8.625% and a tenth more than suburban Orinda’s 9.75%, which punishes merchants and anarchists alike and repels investors, shoppers and young mothers. High sales tax burdens can be more easily borne by commuter residents ,who often do big shops elsewhere and whose elevated property taxes are offset by lower values.
The liberal dilemma now challenging Oakland, America and much of the West has been long in coming, although many of us, including me, missed the early signs. The hard left's "long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Rudi Dutschke, a German activist and friend of Marcuse, was succeeding spectacularly by the turn of the millennia, especially in the universities. The Obama Administration, to a modest degree, and the Occupy, MeToo, BLM, trans and pro-Palestine movements, to increasingly greater degrees, radicalized many people, especially the young, exacerbated by the liberal failure to solve skyrocketing rents, homelessness and immigration, which fueled horseshoe politics. Given America’s socio-political train wreck and Oakland’s frontline status, it won’t be easy to come up with new political concepts or coalitions, let alone revive the pre-Covid economy. But Oakland is known for Lazurus-like resurrections and, in the special election of April 15th, we got a brand-new mayor.
The stalwart, Oakland-based political figure, Barbara Lee during her whirlwind campaign to be mayor of Oakland, 2025. photo: D. Blair Mayor Lee’s capacity for political balance is suggested by her two sons, who work in the insurance industry (one for a Black owned company), and by Dr. Rajni Mandal’s assessment that “her political acumen is really good. She can definitely use that political capital to do things,” but not so much by her cabinet. Her chief of staff, Miya Saika Chen, worked for the very progressive Nikki Fortunato Bas, Oakland’s first Filipina-American councilmember, and her communications director, Justin Phillips, was a SF Chronicle columnist covering events and food but also DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Mayor Lee’s “100 days of listening” ended in July, but she didn’t come out strong on much, except for ending OPD’s federal oversight and abating violence.
“Based on the impassioned speech [Lee] gave to the federal judge, the judge was really impressed with her,” Dr. Mandal said during our July 12th interview. “There is great potential for her ending federal oversite.” Unfortunately, the powerful Police Commission “sent a letter to the judge that completely disparages the whole process. It said that the Chief [Mitchell] is against reform, that all he does is complain about the [oversight]… and he thinks it’s a sham… The chair of the Police Commission again outlined their far-fetched plan to be ‘co-compliance director’ [for the oversight, although] both the plaintiff's attorneys, Mayor Lee and the judge made inferences that they do not support that.”
Dr. Rajni Mandal was focusing on raising her two daughters until a shooting on her street in 2024, when she started bringing facts and figures to public forums, like this police meeting of July 12th, see her interview. photo: D. Blair Conspiracy theories often lead back to the Jews, first through religion, led by the Christians for millennia, then through race, the Nazi method, and now the unequal treatment of and libels against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, on which many Arab liberals depend. Indeed, there is a little known but surprisingly strong liberal tradition in the Middle East dating back to the Partisans of the Nude art movement of the 1950s, the Arab feminists of the '20s, the 19th century "Nahda," or Arab Enlightenment, and the tolerant, artistic Sufis, who were the spiritual leaders of Islam for centuries (see my article).
Of course, Mayor Lee must pay attention to the progressives, who are powerful in Oakland, and their leaders, sometimes called the “woke mafia." Indeed, the Police Commissioners, although they relaxed their opposition to police chases, are still intent on cutting the size of the OPD or preventing it from acquiring equipment like drones or a new BearCat armored vehicle. The police say it's invaluable for sideshows or hostage situations but, according to the Police Commissioners, the BearCat is not that effective and triggers people with PTSD.
I attended a public meeting at an East Oakland library on July 16th with four OPD officers, who explained the current situation and their needs, including a bearded, ponytailed Latinx Lieutenant Omar Cardona. Cameras have been installed all over Oakland, they said, but people have been destroying them. There’s usually one sideshow per weekend, against which the OPD uses a "containment strategy," including impounding dozens of vehicles of sideshow observers, which a new law made illegal, who are often from out of town. Guns were readily available on the street, starting around $300; shop owners were arming up; and 1574 rounds were fired in June. The Covid killing spree did finally dissipate, thankfully, and only 39 people have been murdered to the date of their presentation, compared to 51 in the same period last year, which puts Oakland on track for a decent annual rate, well below 100. One cop also noted that they do not assist, whatsoever, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This seemingly suburban scene transpired in the heart of West Oakland, three blocks from my live/work studio. photo: D. BlairUnfortunately, even if murders in Oakland were to drop to 2018’s historic low of 67, that’s still over one a week, meaning hundreds of family and friends traumatized annually. "We still have so much work to do,” Mayor Lee admitted candidly, after two people were killed and six wounded in multiple shootings, with no immediate arrests, a few hours after September’s First Friday (9/5/25).
At the police public meeting, the Police Commissioners asked tough questions, but things remained cordial until a member of Oakland’s large Chinese community got frustrated and started rattling off crime stats. Some stores have been robbed two or three times in one day, he said, and tax revenue is way down because businesses are fleeing. Dr. Mandal also made an articulate, politically balanced statement in favor of the police. In our interview, she told me that, “You can barricade all you want, in your house, in your neighborhood, whatever, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire city is hurting, right? And if you don’t fix the systemic issue, you’re not going to be able to fix anything.”
Like Dr. Mandal, who just wants her kids to grow up in a functional city, many Oaklanders are doing what they can. The home owners’ association of South Prescott, an area in West Oakland a mile from Raimundi Park, did a GoFundMe to buy traffic barriers to prevent RVs from parking on their streets. After the Wood Street encampment was dispersed, campers took over their children’s park, which they aggressively lobbied the city to clear. The people arguing on NextDoor, the neighborhood discussion app, sometimes get acrimonious over White privilege and how to help the homeless but everyone agrees: Encampments full of folks with mental issues, rats and fires are not sustainable. An Oakland fireman friend told me they were summoned to the Wood Street encampment about 250 times in 2022. Business people, meanwhile, have come up with “tax increment financing,” to help their neighbors pay tax burdens in installments in order to stay in Oakland.
Oaklanders, including a Yemeni-American, at First Friday, the monthly street fair on Telegraph Avenue, June 2025. photo: D. Blair“Oakland film may be down but it’s not out,” Debbie Brubaker, the legendary local indie film producer who grew up in the East Bay, told me on July 25th. In fact, the recently closed Holy Names University (1868-2023) in the Oakland hills reopened for film shoots in January 2025. “The guys running Holy Names are fantastic. They are really excited about having a film scene—they have my back! Commercials will always be shot here, they generally shoot in Oakland or SF, if cities are called for. Holy Names could be a full-on Hollywood set. The views up there are insane!”
The recently released feature, “Freaky Tales” (2025), is a funny, sometimes fantasy story about Oakland, which includes a cameo by Oaklander Tom Hanks (Skyline High, 1974) and was directed by Berkeley-born Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who did the excellent “Half Nelson” (2006). Also shot here is the upcoming dramatic thriller “Josephine”, starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan and written, directed and produced by Beth de Araújo, a Brazilian-American San Franciscan. Although Boots Riley, of “Sorry to Bother You” fame, decamped for Louisiana to make the “I’m a Virgo” series for Amazon, Brubaker says, “It’s fabulous.”
“Oakland could revive as film center. There’s a consortium, the East Bay Film Collective, which meets every third Thursday at the Night Heron Bar [1780 Telegraph].” EBFC is dedicated to revitalizing Oakland’s “culture economy,” according to its site, #MakeItBay, and includes among its members comedian W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN’s “United Shades of America”. “There’s also the Worst Film Festival held at Mama Dog Studios," which is at 700 26th Street, eight blocks from my place. A very Oakland concept, "It celebrates learning from your mistakes. Submit the worst short or part of a feature, and talk about the process. I went last year and thought it was great—a lot fun.” The last WFF transpired on August 28th.
Oaklanders at First Friday enjoying the mural painting, which has been provided free for over a decade by Richard Felix, a friend from the SF Art Institute whose studio is five blocks from mine (see the mural archives on his site). photo: D. BlairIn the arts, Councilwoman Carol Fief got reinstated a municipal arts position by soliciting support from nine philanthropies. The Oakland Museum continues its Friday night fiestas until the end of October, featuring live music, DJs, food trucks and figure drawing, among other activities, as well as the opportunity to see great exhibitions like September’s “Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest”. Creative Growth, nationally known for its work with disabled artists, just celebrated its 50th anniversary and got a new director, Sunny A. Smith. The Joyce Gordon Gallery (also one of my graphic clients), which focuses on Black and Iranian art, recently received great coverage on ABC, while Johansson Projects, the premier gallery on the First Friday strip of Telegraph, is showcasing important art from all over California.
As usual, a better, more beautiful Oakland seems very much in reach, given our copious fundamentals of talent, housing stock and location. Oakland could revive not only as a film center, as Brubaker hopes, or a culinary cornucopia, as many chefs are attempting, but an important ideas workshop, as well as pleasant place to live, where a lot of artists, my old friends Wetback and Donna, and my new friend Rajni Mandal as well as little ol’ me, with my cineSOURCE magazine or JUST SAY NO TO FASCISM project, could cooperate and profit in harmony and happiness.
Convincing a majority of Oaklanders to join this endeavor won’t be easy. I have gotten to know the Yemeni-American community a bit over the last 30 years, largely by befriending Muhammad, who ran our corner store at 26th and Adeline, and observing and hearing about his colorful life. I sometimes talked to his first wife, who always wore a colorful Yemeni dress, although her father was an Oaklander, born here. Since their community’s main livelihood was liquor stores, their life was not easy, and Muhammad witnessed more than ten murders. A few followed the American immigrant dream of education, integration and upward mobility, but most did not. Indeed, many Yemeni-American women donned the black burka after 10/7, suggesting to me that Oakland’s elevated pro-Palestinian movement, as well as Yemen's decade plus of war, civil war and now war with Israel (which they initiated in support of Hamas), made a religious reckoning seem nigh.
On October 8th, Chief Mitchell tendered his resignation, after 18 months on the job, the 12th chief since 2000. Although Mitchell offered no explanation, he "tried to fix the system and was blocked at every turn," according to Dr. Mandal, in a recent email to me. "At some point, he realized, it was fruitless. The issue is not Mitchell, but the lack of mayor support and obstruction by all the oversight (Police Commission, Privacy Commission, NSA)." Indeed, the Police Commission ultimately nixed OPD's request for new rifles and a replacement BearCat armored vehicle, and the use of Flock cameras. Called "a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure" by the ACLU, Flock's gunfire locator and license plate reader systems were introduced in 2017, are currently used in over 4,000 cities nationwide, and were found effective in Oakland.
There's also Measure NN, approved by Oaklanders in 2024. Its over $45 million-a-year budget is completely controlled by a Mayor-appointed five-person commission, which will now dominate police and public safety decisions (see Dr. Mandal's article here or, to get involved, email her ).
Full moon over Oakland's Downtown, from my building's nice roof platform, generously built by the landlord, Francis Rush (1954-2023), who was also a large-canvas abstract painter and my friend. photo: D. BlairRadical multiculturalists are, by definition, centrists—how else could we accept and empower so much difference?—and the opposite of horseshoe politics practitioners. Instead of the hard left and right bonding en extremis, the most aggressive members of each side becoming allies of convenience, moderates select on the merits and build more modest but honest cooperation between liberals and conservatives, socialists and capitalists, therapists and engineers, artists and warriors.
I see this happening a lot in Ukraine and Israel. Many of my leftist friends may find this hard to believe, but Ukraine and Israel are maintaining functional multicultural democracies, despite the extreme duress, and that is precisely what enables them to pull together nationally—unlike in the United States. In Ukraine's case, the inter-communal assistance started during the 2014 revolution on Maidan Square when rightwing soccer hooligans carrying sticks, a few wearing motorcycle helmets, defended the liberals from police attacks, a pattern now scaled society-wide. We need to learn from but also assist those fighting on the frontlines of democracy, as our grandparents did during the Spanish Civil War.
Young men and women looking to channel their proclivity for adventure and activism could join my proposed “Malcolm Nance Battalion.” Like the Lincoln Brigade, they would volunteer to defend democracy but this time in Ukraine, where Nance, an African-American Navy officer, cryptologist, intelligence operative and Arabic speaker, answered the call and served, shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion. On a more local level, I would like to help kids go camping, which provides an opportunity for adventure and skill building, starting in the Oakland hills but then graduating to California's spectacular wildernesses.
How do we address the gangs of youths on small motorcycles who like to roar through traffic or around a neighborhood, doing “wheelies” and blasting music, sometimes till midnight on weekdays, which annoys the hell out of some Oaklanders? Perhaps Oakland could organize parades, with competitions and prizes, as well as enforce more traffic law, as OPD did with sideshows. As it happens, my hood had a sideshow on September 26th at our local burger joint, Hyphy Burgers, because a famous YouTuber, IShowSpeed (AKA Darren Jason Watkins), was there and, naturally, West Oaklanders wanted to put on a show. Unfortunately, sideshows generate a tremendous amount of noise from the tires squealing, which had some of my neighbors tearing out their hair (and it was over five blocks away), until the cops showed up.
Or perhaps Oakland should tolerate some scofflaws and retain some of its traditional wildness?
Mexican-style sodas, fruit or food is often on offer from immigrant entrepreneurs on Adeline in front of my live-work studio. photo: D. BlairIn fact, a big tent full of liberals will recognize the threat to democracy—eventually—and figure out how to defend it, as well as equality-based multiculturalism and artistic freedom—again eventually. If we didn’t, we’d still be in caves controlled by bullies.
Posted on Sep 23, 2025 - 06:16 AM
