Oakland's Vibrant Street Economy

(Photo taken by reporter Sarah Gonzalez at Youth Alive in Oakland)

For the third installment of our series, reporter Sarah Gonzalez explores the unique entrepreneurial spirit that is still alive and well in Oakland, despite the almost 16% unemployment rate there. The street economy is all about hustling, and Gonzalez finds that even though many hustles are innocent and "legitimate," the conditions of the street economy make it easy to slide into the criminal and violent hustling game.

Five Years of Measure Y Part 2: Street Outreach

For part 2 of Sandhya Dirks' report on Oakland's Measure Y, now five years since it was passed, Sandhya took a closer look at another integral part of the violence prevention initiative: street outreach teams.  The teams are made up of ex-gang members and ex-convicts that are using their street cred to stop the violence where it starts.  They go out at night, and will reach out to "loved ones," basically anyone that they think could use their help, which means they refer them to Measure Y service providers.

These outreach teams were tapped to join a new initiative that is called the Oakland Gang Reduction Intervention and Prevention Program, or O-GRIPP.  The program is modeled after Ceasefire, a very hands-on, and focused approach to dealing with violence already tried in cities like Boston and Chicago.  Ceasefire gets mixed reviews, and in Oakland's case, some wonder why a new initiative is being partly funded by Measure Y, without voter approval.

Listen in on Sandhya's piece, and let us know YOUR thoughts.  How do you feel about a program like O-GRIPP?  What would you propose as a possible approach?  Comment here at this blog, or by calling in at (415) 264-7106.  You can also email us at news@kalw.org.

The one where we go out at night...

The one where we go out at night—and learn we shouldn’t go out at night.

So we’ve acquired some guides through this project—guides who are giving us access passes to areas of Oakland I wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t, normally set forth in. On this particular night we go out to meet our guide, let’s call him Dusty. Dusty is going to introduce us to residents of the neighborhood—friends of his, neighbors, people he knows from his thirty-eight years in this neighborhood. We get into Sarah’s car- and head in deep past International. In front of a house, a car idles while a women leans into the passenger window having a private conversation. In the meantime, guys are hanging out on the stoop and the sidewalk. Night is falling, and the dark makes things feel both more connected and more tinged with danger.

Sarah and I walk up, and instantly everyone is paying attention. A little hyper guy who says his name is Leon starts in at us. He’s got a pint of Hennessey in one hand, and he is smoking a joint with the other. Standing next to him is a tall gentle giant that everyone calls Slim. His dark, wise face is kind—like a monk or a Buddha. He is the person we gravitate towards, even as Leon does most of the talking.

First comes the flirting. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Flirting has subtlety to it, Leon isn’t trying to be subtle; he is trying to rattle us.

“Ooh you are fine… fine... you ever been with a black man...? But was he from the street? Cause I’m from the street. The street, you hear me?” He says he likes me cause I’m white. Really.

Okay, that’s preliminaries. We try to brush off the heavy come-ons, which don’t seem to even be geared towards getting anywhere except proving something. Leon, he’s a fire-wire, a short man, and the term Napoleon complex, yeah, that is floating somewhere in the back of my mind.

Dusty tells us to say what we are doing. We’ve memorized the standard introduction by now… a project about violence in Oakland. Reporters. But Leon’s hide raises up.

First thing he says… “Yeah sure I will give you a story, but what you gonna give me. Yeah, if we HAVE SEX, I’ll talk.” And yes, I am paraphrasing. Also cleaning it up. But it wasn’t suggested, it was said outright. “You know reporters got to do all sorts of crazy things to get a story.”

Again we try to laugh it off. To make light. To not take it too seriously. But Leon is angered, and he’s trying to get a reaction out of us.

“What you want to talk to me, you want to RECORD me. You gotta come to my level, you can’t just come out here, you got to drink with us, smoke with us…”

That is fair, in its way—we are outsiders and as much as Leon is trying to get to us with his sexual suggestions, he is trying to make us feel outside.

We try to tell Leon more about the project and he gets rowdy. We say we want to hear his stories, and ask him some questions… all of a sudden his eyes get dead serious and his voice gets loud and terrifying.

“What the F*&%. I ain’t gonna tell you S*%@.” He stares at us directly. On the last word he looks crazy, unhinged. Then he breaks into maniacal laughter. Lunging right towards us.

We jump. The man is trying to scare us. And it works. I stay a little too cool, taking not flinching to a level that might be dangerous. But I am determined not to show weakness.

He is enjoying the fact that he’s made two young women break a sweat. But there is a threat to him, an implicit threat that he is trying to put off. He’s set to scare us because we have come to stare. It’s almost that simple. Listening is not always initially an act of love—its can be an act of intrusion. And we have to walk that subtle, snaky line.

It’s time to leave. The temperature has turned and night has cast its close-knit dark over the streets of the Deep East. We can’t forget that it is dangerous here. But we are Dusty’s ride, and he’s lingering with his friends, not afraid.

We’ve recorded nothing of this night—which is bad, because this is a moment a reporter looks to as telling. But which is actually good when Leon looks at us with crazy eyes and says, “Are you recording right now, ARE YOU?” We aren’t. Right before we leave, Sarah and I hear a gun shot go off. It’s loud, like its right next door. Sarah stays cool as a cucumber, and we look at each other, a tacit acknowledgment that, yeah a gun just got shot. Because no one else even bats a lash.

We get back in the car, and drive off. We are rattled. Not just because they were trying to scare us. Not because they did scare us. Or maybe a little bit of both.

Dusty laughs it off. He says that no one will threaten us when he is near, he says Leon was just playing a role. I believe him. Still, fired up on drink and smoke Leon was trying to get a reaction from us. Maybe he got the exact reaction he wanted. But it goes to the point—we influence the situation. We can be part of people fitting into the roles they think they are supposed to play. Like they are putting on a show, putting up a front. And it has to do with race and fear and gender too. It’s confusing. It’s difficult. We are trying to break down stereotypes, and here is a man who is purposefully trying to enforce them. And for us, in that moment, no matter what, it was terrifying.

I couldn’t shake the sense that the role he was trying to play was the role he thought we cast him in. Like he was trying to live up to what he thought we expected.

But at least, after tonight we feel closer to Dusty, who in his way is testing us too. Seeing what we can handle—showing us just how deep the layers can go.

Dusty tells us that in the period after we got in the car and he stayed out there, Leon calmed down. He tells us that “he was just playing a role of that belligerent dude that you run across in the street, that want to act like he’s hard, and scare you.”

And Dusty thinks this is an important lesson for us to learn. Because even though Leon is harmless, “here we call him Napoleon Bonaparte,” Dusty tells us with a laugh, the role he was playing is a familiar one in this neighborhood. “It was relevant, like I said, sometimes we gonna go places and you might run into that cat, that’s really like that.”

There is this whole thing about having to act hard here. A deep pride that comes from being tough, of the street, and even more a pride to being crazy, sometimes. Of course most people we meet are actually, once you break it down and spend enough time, truly sweethearts. Dusty for one. But it is important to remember that we are outsiders, and that as such we are viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. One thing I learn here, in the simple act that no one wants to give us their name, and that many refuse to talk, is that trust is a rare commodity in the Deep East. It’s something you have to earn. Dusty’s earned his through a long history here. He was in the game once, and he still has the street cred that he won the hard way, with time in prison and murders to his name. But now he is known as the hood Unc—the hood Uncle. And to us, he is a guide.

The thing about difference I am learning is that the more you challenge it, the more you have to face its multi-layered frequencies.

 

Five Years of Measure Y Part 1: Community Policing

Yesterday, we aired Sandhya Dirks' first part in the second installment of our series. 

In this two-part story, she takes a look at the violence prevention initiative, Measure Y, approved by Oakland voters five years ago.  Her first part looks at the community policing element of Measure Y through a profile of Problem Solving Officer Clay Burch as he patrols his beat in East Oakland.

Difference is the Watchword

Difference is the watchword

Right outside of Mills college, where the 580 meets Macarthur as it winds its way out of the lovely Laurel District and into East Oakland, there is a word painted on the walls beneath the overpass in gigantic white letters. The word: Difference. I think about those giant letters a lot these days.

I don’t consider myself a white girl—I was raised by an Indian mother and think of myself as fundamentally Desi. But all of my feelings of multi cultural ethnic identity get thrown out the window in deep east Oakland. Here, I don’t really know what else to call myself-- I am a white girl, no matter how much Indian blood might roil in my veins at that description. I am aware that I am the only light face for miles. It really is remarkable how segregated parts of Oakland are. (Other parts of Oakland are incredibly mixed, so it’s not just about race, but this part of East Oakland is primarily African American, and increasingly Latino, so it IS also about race).

My partner Sarah—with her gorgeous deep, dark skin bearing her Mexican heritage, only increases my feeling of being the thing that doesn’t fit. Still both of us are clearly outsiders and difference is the watchword.

I note this because as someone once (briefly) trained in the academy as an anthropologist, I was taught that ethnography was about being an observer. We talked theoretically about the way in the observers presence can change everyone’s behavior. But there was a fundamental drive to attempt objective observation. Part of this was made possible through deep immersion. A kind of making the self invisible through time. Okay, all very academic. But… A lot of the reporting we are doing is about asking questions and maybe in a perfect world we could be flies on the wall. Yet here, we can’t.

And in a perfect world places like the deep East wouldn’t exist as segregated, economically disinvested locales where violence is too often the norm.

In this, very real world, we are young, reasonably attractive women, and we change the reactions. We cause reactions. But this doesn’t mean that what we learn from these interactions isn’t telling, or true. But there is, especially at first, a Schrödinger's cat effect happening when we try to engage people. Reporting is not a one-way street. And just because Deep East Oakland is not a place where you live, or work, or even visit, its creation is not apart from us. It is much more a part of us. It didn’t just spring up from a vasty nothingness.

Neighborhoods like this one were made by history. A great part of the disinvestment of East Oakland occurred when the Macarthur Freeway, our great 580, was built. It effectively destroyed the commercial strip that is now Macarthur Blvd. There are still stores here, but in the Deep East, these are few and far between. Then came the crack epidemic, and government’s top down response to that manifestation of desperation and poverty—the war on drugs, which in many ways was a political policy that criminalized an entire neighborhood and its residents. These are things I try to not forget, communities are made, by outside forces as well as interior ones. We helped create this world. So I am not just an outsider visiting a foreign space. I am visiting a place that I helped to create by the very fact of being an American.

For me there is also this question: Should I not be going into a primarily African American neighborhood to try to document and tell stories? Do I have the right? This is big. I have to wonder this. Again and again.

It’s a question every journalist asks at some point, when you are engaged in the act of telling someone else’s story. But as I noted before, while these are other peoples stories, they are by dint of a common humanity, our stories too. The may be spatially isolated here, but they are so for a reason, and we can’t peel ourselves away from that.

I have come to believe as long as one doesn’t gloss over difference, as long as one is honest and aware of the underlying issues of race at play, it is not a wrong act to work here. For one, we get to know people personally. The creation of relationships, the engagement in conversation is the only way to truly reach across the fault-lines. And spending time with people who live here allows us to begin to understand first hand the issues people live with.

There was one time we went with our friend Tay Peezy to MacDonalds. He drove. Sarah and I got into the backseat and Peezy reminded us to put on our seat belts, “you’re driving with us now, that means you driving while black, so you better buckle up…” It was a joke. But it wasn’t. So we put on our seat belts.