![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberSo, I've been living in Oakland for nearly 3 years, now. When I came, this was a neighborhood I guessed was about 80% black, 10% white, 7% hispanic, and 3% asian. There was trash from the McDonald's two blocks away drifted onto the verges of lawns, and about 10% of the parked cars had been seriously hit, but the houses were mostly without peeling paint, and I got the impression that it was mostly a neighborhood of people who worked jobs and got by, with some punks coming in from other places.
Now, lately, house price pressures (I think the average house in the Bay Area now sells for $500K) have been changing the character of the neighborhood... Tons of black people are painting their once-forest-green house beige, selling it to white people for $350-$400K, and moving away. I wondered where they went; recently I've been talking to a guy across the street who owns two houses, the one across the street, which he's fixing up to sell in March or so, and one about 15 blocks south in the distinctly sketchier areas of town, where there are broken windows and appliances left on the streets as trash, and police signs about how there is to be no drug dealing or prostitution... Anyway, so apparently people are moving from here into the sketchier areas.
Right outside my window, there's a 4-way stop that people blow through at about 70 mph all the time... It's on a 4-lane street without speedbumps, unlike most of the streets that cross it. A couple years ago, someone was in the process of blowing through this stopsign in broad daylight, while someone else who had stopped was going again as was their right. There was the screeching of person A's brakes, and then he smashed the hell out of person B, and at the noise I looked out to see there was no one at the crossing aside from those two cars. By the time I got down to the street, there were about 20 people (middle of the day on a weekend, right?), calling 911 on cellphones and helping the hit lady. By the time the cops showed up there were about 40, clumped on the corners talking about what had happened. A lady cop, white and tall, started going around to the corners asking if anyone had witnessed the accident; everyone was shaking their heads. She left our corner briskly with an exhalation of frustration.
"She thinks we're lying," said a middle aged black guy with a kind of quiet resigned anger. "She thinks we just don't wanna go to court."
There was a case, I think in West Oakland, about a group of four cops (the "Riders") who were doing the "beat people up until they confess to something or implicate someone" thing; maybe also the "plant drugs on someone and either haul him in or make him implicate someone else so he won't get hauled in" thing. The three that didn't flee the country were tried; the jury hung. It hung because a couple of the jurors just wouldn't believe, despite all the evidence, that police officers would do such things. The witnesses were to a man black, the jury was entirely white.
I cannot believe they tried that case with an all-white jury. Oh, my, god. Pisses me the fuck off.
About 5-6 years ago... Hell, maybe 7... Lessee, 6? I was going to a Valentine's-Day-Massacre party of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
obadiah's up in the Oakland hills. This was before I'd brought Buffy to join me in Berkeley, so I was reliant on public transit, which was a bus from the BART station. So I was sitting on this bus with nothing but black people in a kind of fancy dress, after having sat on it going the wrong direction the first time and having the black driver roll his eyes at my stupidity, and I look down and there's a $5 bill lying on the floor. I don't think it's mine, though who knows, maybe it fell out of the pocket of my coat after the fumble for fare money. I pick it up and turn around to the 30ish black guy behind me and say, "Did you drop this?"
"Yeah, that's mine!" he says almost angrilly and grabs it away like I was trying to steal it from him. ~Maaaaan...~ I'm thinking, completely uncomfortable.
There are a couple across the 4-lane street from me who are, frankly, bitches. The guy has shouted at his kids right out where god and everyone can watch, and there have been 2-3 occasions when one or the other has knocked on the door to demand that I move a car parked in the street in front of their house. Often they don't listen when I tell them that it's not my car. The first time it was my car, with the lady emphasizing that her husband had to park there because he worked... I was doing the conciliatory "I'm in house clothes and barefoot, is it ok if I just move it tomorrow when I go to work?" thing. Oh, it might do, sure, but first I had to listen to a polemic about how renters don't respect the neighborhood. The lady from a couple houses down from me came down to join in. I'd sinned by leaving a car in front of her house for weeks! Weeks! She had to call the cops to get it tagged!
Right, so you knew whose car it was, but instead of asking me to move it, you had the cops give me a $60 ticket?
Would you have done that if I was black? Are you bitching about "renters", or about white people?
That's the thing with being a minority. You don't know if people are being bitches because that's just what they are, or because of something you can't change about yourself. There was an article in the paper a couple years back, maybe about a book, but about the many benefits a person gets for being in the majority. One I remember was that you get to chew your food with your mouth open without having to worry that you're labelling your entire race as slobs. I also remember that there were letters post-article with such themes as "what kind of 'benefit' is chewing with your mouth open?! How ridiculous!"
When I moved in, several of the people I had helping commented on the shoes dangling from the telephone wire above my corner. "Oh, I dunno about this place, Madeline... I think dangling shoes like that are a sign that a drug dealer lives there..."
Sidenote: The shoes are still. fucking. there. Why doesn't the wind wear through the laces? For fuck's sake, what are they made of, wire? Why didn't the people stringing new wires on the telephone poles take them down? They're right in the middle of my view! If I was Legolas those shoes would be so gone... The day those shoes fall is going on my calendar. I'm going to bring them in, put them as a centerpiece, and have a "the shoes have fallen!" party.
UC Berkeley, when I went, was I think 35% white, 40% asian. I'd met about 2 asians in my life before I went to Berkeley; I notice now that I don't think, "Oh, there's an asian person," I think "Oh, there's a person." I went back to Colorado a few years ago and my uncle was talking at dinner about how orientals come here and steal jobs from Americans and have a ton of children... I was trying to tell him that that wasnt my experience, that yeah, maybe the people who immigrate are not entirely like born-here Americans, but their children are totally American... Man, that was weird.
I went back to Colorado in November and it was strange seeing no asians. I'd be driving down the highway in Pueblo, and it'd be like, "Ha! There's an asian!... No, wait, that's a hispanic. But there! That one's asian! ...No, hispanic, too." Old hispanic people look exactly like old asian people through the windows of passing cars.
Eh, I ramble. When Buffy was dying, in the morning before I went to work I had to move her across the street so I wouldn't pick up yet another street sweeping ticket. I'm capable of moving a stalled Volvo by myself... But not up the slight incline that makes water drain from the center of the street. I was near to crying from frustration when the black lady who lived in the forest-green house across the street (the one that's now beige) sent over her two sons to do it for me. That evening I brought them all half of the Christmas sugar cookies I'd baked. They were hippopotamus-shaped cookies, since that was my only cookie cutter; I hope that wasn't something they thought was odd.
Anyway. So that's why I support affirmative action. Not for the minority, but for the majority... If you've only met 3 black people in your life, how are you going to grasp on a gut level that they come in all types? How are you going to get around the powerful stereotypes? I figure, people are all alike. You just gotta get it so you can grasp it on a gut level. And that's maybe hardest with the whole black/white thing, with all the powerful warnings and stuff you get from society. I still don't know if I'm there; but I think I'm in the process of getting there.
Now, lately, house price pressures (I think the average house in the Bay Area now sells for $500K) have been changing the character of the neighborhood... Tons of black people are painting their once-forest-green house beige, selling it to white people for $350-$400K, and moving away. I wondered where they went; recently I've been talking to a guy across the street who owns two houses, the one across the street, which he's fixing up to sell in March or so, and one about 15 blocks south in the distinctly sketchier areas of town, where there are broken windows and appliances left on the streets as trash, and police signs about how there is to be no drug dealing or prostitution... Anyway, so apparently people are moving from here into the sketchier areas.
Right outside my window, there's a 4-way stop that people blow through at about 70 mph all the time... It's on a 4-lane street without speedbumps, unlike most of the streets that cross it. A couple years ago, someone was in the process of blowing through this stopsign in broad daylight, while someone else who had stopped was going again as was their right. There was the screeching of person A's brakes, and then he smashed the hell out of person B, and at the noise I looked out to see there was no one at the crossing aside from those two cars. By the time I got down to the street, there were about 20 people (middle of the day on a weekend, right?), calling 911 on cellphones and helping the hit lady. By the time the cops showed up there were about 40, clumped on the corners talking about what had happened. A lady cop, white and tall, started going around to the corners asking if anyone had witnessed the accident; everyone was shaking their heads. She left our corner briskly with an exhalation of frustration.
"She thinks we're lying," said a middle aged black guy with a kind of quiet resigned anger. "She thinks we just don't wanna go to court."
There was a case, I think in West Oakland, about a group of four cops (the "Riders") who were doing the "beat people up until they confess to something or implicate someone" thing; maybe also the "plant drugs on someone and either haul him in or make him implicate someone else so he won't get hauled in" thing. The three that didn't flee the country were tried; the jury hung. It hung because a couple of the jurors just wouldn't believe, despite all the evidence, that police officers would do such things. The witnesses were to a man black, the jury was entirely white.
I cannot believe they tried that case with an all-white jury. Oh, my, god. Pisses me the fuck off.
About 5-6 years ago... Hell, maybe 7... Lessee, 6? I was going to a Valentine's-Day-Massacre party of
obadiah's up in the Oakland hills. This was before I'd brought Buffy to join me in Berkeley, so I was reliant on public transit, which was a bus from the BART station. So I was sitting on this bus with nothing but black people in a kind of fancy dress, after having sat on it going the wrong direction the first time and having the black driver roll his eyes at my stupidity, and I look down and there's a $5 bill lying on the floor. I don't think it's mine, though who knows, maybe it fell out of the pocket of my coat after the fumble for fare money. I pick it up and turn around to the 30ish black guy behind me and say, "Did you drop this?" "Yeah, that's mine!" he says almost angrilly and grabs it away like I was trying to steal it from him. ~Maaaaan...~ I'm thinking, completely uncomfortable.
There are a couple across the 4-lane street from me who are, frankly, bitches. The guy has shouted at his kids right out where god and everyone can watch, and there have been 2-3 occasions when one or the other has knocked on the door to demand that I move a car parked in the street in front of their house. Often they don't listen when I tell them that it's not my car. The first time it was my car, with the lady emphasizing that her husband had to park there because he worked... I was doing the conciliatory "I'm in house clothes and barefoot, is it ok if I just move it tomorrow when I go to work?" thing. Oh, it might do, sure, but first I had to listen to a polemic about how renters don't respect the neighborhood. The lady from a couple houses down from me came down to join in. I'd sinned by leaving a car in front of her house for weeks! Weeks! She had to call the cops to get it tagged!
Right, so you knew whose car it was, but instead of asking me to move it, you had the cops give me a $60 ticket?
Would you have done that if I was black? Are you bitching about "renters", or about white people?
That's the thing with being a minority. You don't know if people are being bitches because that's just what they are, or because of something you can't change about yourself. There was an article in the paper a couple years back, maybe about a book, but about the many benefits a person gets for being in the majority. One I remember was that you get to chew your food with your mouth open without having to worry that you're labelling your entire race as slobs. I also remember that there were letters post-article with such themes as "what kind of 'benefit' is chewing with your mouth open?! How ridiculous!"
When I moved in, several of the people I had helping commented on the shoes dangling from the telephone wire above my corner. "Oh, I dunno about this place, Madeline... I think dangling shoes like that are a sign that a drug dealer lives there..."
Sidenote: The shoes are still. fucking. there. Why doesn't the wind wear through the laces? For fuck's sake, what are they made of, wire? Why didn't the people stringing new wires on the telephone poles take them down? They're right in the middle of my view! If I was Legolas those shoes would be so gone... The day those shoes fall is going on my calendar. I'm going to bring them in, put them as a centerpiece, and have a "the shoes have fallen!" party.
UC Berkeley, when I went, was I think 35% white, 40% asian. I'd met about 2 asians in my life before I went to Berkeley; I notice now that I don't think, "Oh, there's an asian person," I think "Oh, there's a person." I went back to Colorado a few years ago and my uncle was talking at dinner about how orientals come here and steal jobs from Americans and have a ton of children... I was trying to tell him that that wasnt my experience, that yeah, maybe the people who immigrate are not entirely like born-here Americans, but their children are totally American... Man, that was weird.
I went back to Colorado in November and it was strange seeing no asians. I'd be driving down the highway in Pueblo, and it'd be like, "Ha! There's an asian!... No, wait, that's a hispanic. But there! That one's asian! ...No, hispanic, too." Old hispanic people look exactly like old asian people through the windows of passing cars.
Eh, I ramble. When Buffy was dying, in the morning before I went to work I had to move her across the street so I wouldn't pick up yet another street sweeping ticket. I'm capable of moving a stalled Volvo by myself... But not up the slight incline that makes water drain from the center of the street. I was near to crying from frustration when the black lady who lived in the forest-green house across the street (the one that's now beige) sent over her two sons to do it for me. That evening I brought them all half of the Christmas sugar cookies I'd baked. They were hippopotamus-shaped cookies, since that was my only cookie cutter; I hope that wasn't something they thought was odd.
Anyway. So that's why I support affirmative action. Not for the minority, but for the majority... If you've only met 3 black people in your life, how are you going to grasp on a gut level that they come in all types? How are you going to get around the powerful stereotypes? I figure, people are all alike. You just gotta get it so you can grasp it on a gut level. And that's maybe hardest with the whole black/white thing, with all the powerful warnings and stuff you get from society. I still don't know if I'm there; but I think I'm in the process of getting there.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 07:45 am (UTC)Quote from C.S. Lewis (_The Horse and His Boy_)that's stuck with me for a long time: "For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, wheras I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays." :)