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Like many public land sales that come before the Oakland City Council, the Derby Street parcel sale was set to glide beneath public notice when it began its final journey of council approval in May, 2018–a perfunctory committee nod and a quick set of ayes at an unnoticed city council meeting seemed assured. But there […]
May 17, 2018
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf launched her current assault against District 6 Council Person Desley Brooks, in April–ironically, in the midst of “honoring” the work of fellow council person Annie Campbell Washington. Washington announced she was retiring, setting the stage for Schaaf’s attack with a subsoundbite against “the corruption” at city council. Schaaf picked up the […]
February 22, 2018
Like many viewers with a general awareness of recent African history, I was shocked quite early on in Black Panther by an inscrutable bit of dialogue. T’chala tells his escort that he has “spotted an old friend who works for the CIA”. The agent, Everett Ross, played by legendary second-fiddle Martin Freeman, turns out to […]
February 18, 2018
The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center were two ancient orgs slumping into the horizon with barnacled hulls and weather-beaten jackets, when antifascist fever took off around 2015. ADL’s rep as a right-wing organization that had spied on left of center organizations and Black political groups for years was common knowledge. Most of the […]
November 28, 2017
Many years ago, when people still read whatever was lying around to fight downtime boredom, I picked up and read a discarded copy of the biography of Charles Manson, Manson in His Own Words, by Nuel Emmons. Like almost everyone under 60 today, my knowledge of Manson up to that point came from cultural inheritance […]
September 16, 2017
There’s a scene in Peter Nicks the Force, the much hyped documentary by the director of the Waiting Room about the Oakland Police Department that is illustrative of the film’s foundational failure. Then-Captain Leronne Armstrong addresses an incoming police academy. He represents the intsitutional OPD that the young men and women are poised to enter […]
June 3, 2017
Though I’m not by any means an expert or anything, I was a historical consultant for one of the better documentaries out there on Wonder Woman, released long before there was even the hint of any hope for a Wonder Woman film—a role I began in 2008 for a film released in 2012. That’s not to […]
April 20, 2017
Dozens of reporters, videographers and photographers thronged around the yellow tape surrounding the block containing the Ghost Ship warehouse the morning after the tragic fire that killed 36 people in the center of Fruitvale. As the hour approached noon, a group of thousands of Latino Catholics began their scheduled annual procession for the Virgen […]
March 27, 2016
I’ll start by admitting this article is pointless. By this stage in the primary season, people who are backing Sanders will back him no matter what emerges about his past, his record, what current awful statements he makes, who he allies himself with. This all started out innocently enough. People despise Hillary Clinton, and […]
January 30, 2016
The standing room-only crowd at a recent community meeting to discuss the fate of St. Andrews Plaza on San Pablo Avenue, in Oakland, waited patiently as City Council Person Lynette Gibson Mcelheney and her accomplices outlined an unusual redevelopment plan. St. Andrews is a small parklet, literally a concrete container for a few trees on a […]
December 15, 2011
Photo by Enrique When police looked for a code that makes physical presence in OGP illegal, they decided on a novel interpretation of a local ordinance. On three separate occasions police officers claimed that standing still with an umbrella in the plaza makes you a structure and such novel umbrella-human hybrid forms would be subject […]
July 1, 2018
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