Opinion: In Oakland, we are building and loving

Editor’s Note: Community Voices features first-person narratives from Oakland residents and leaders. These essays represent the author’s perspective and experiences. Oakland educator Michele Hamilton shared this video and personal essay about the Town with Oakland Voices. Ahead of 510 Day, we share it with you.

When you are immersed in a place, you come to understand it differently. People talk about Oakland as a place of violence or suffering. The crack epidemic, the helicopters, the sideshows. And yes, some of those sideshows were incredible to watch as a kid. But Oakland is far more than that, and it is also all of that. 

All of it sits inside a much larger history, a history shaped by oppression and by community. Earlier this month, I shared a short video about Oakland in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 60s, when Black owned businesses thrived, when my grandparents and even their parents lived there, when my mother was growing up.

There was an intentional disruption of that when eminent domain was declared and a freeway was built through the heart of the Black business district.

In the 1980s , during the height of the crack epidemic – a crisis fueled by federal counterintelligence measures and crack cocaine flooding into Black and Brown communities – our neighborhoods were devastated. Our communities were met with the Just Say No campaign while California built prisons at a staggering rate. The state went from twelve prisons in nineteen eighty to thirty three by two thousand.

At the same time, school funding and youth programs declined. The so called No Child Left Behind campaign sought to radically change education. What quickly followed was teaching to the test, and curriculum that supported divergent thinking, creativity, and the arts and sciences was dramatically reduced in classrooms. This seemingly positive campaign, much like the Just Say No to Drugs campaign, functioned as a campaign against our children and youth.

Oakland resists

But these things did not simply happen TO us. We organized. We resisted. Young people were in the streets demanding ethnic studies, protesting police brutality, educating our communities about the HIV and AIDS epidemic. In the nineteen nineties, that fire continued. Students made their own Black history pamphlets because schools would not teach it. We walked out after the Rodney King rebellions. We protested Proposition 187, an anti immigrant attack that looks painfully similar to the politics we see today.

We resisted Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, which was really a contract ON Black, Brown, and poor families, not unlike the current attacks on SNAP benefits. The attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion is nothing new. We resisted Proposition 209 and saw a sixty percent reduction of Black students in the University of California system after it passed. Research from MIT and the UCs showed that many of the Black students rejected in the years following 209 had extremely high GPAs and test scores.

In the Town, we are not just fighting. We are building. We are loving. We are here, and we are not going anywhere. Michelle Hamilton

And yes, our communities in Oakland still endure attacks and gentrification. Since two thousand, Oakland’s Black population has fallen from about forty seven percent to under twenty three percent, one of the fastest declines in the nation. But even that cannot erase us. Our art became our textbook. When our stories were not placed in curriculum, youth and adult muralists painted them on walls. Graffiti artists wrote them across the city. Our hip hop artists, born and raised in Oakland, filmed videos that showed our hills, our forests, our rivers, our joy, not just yellow tape stretched across crime scenes.

Oakland is creating organizations that care for us

Oakland is building the Black Cultural Zone, a community effort to protect Black families, Black businesses, and Black art from displacement. Spaces like Liberation Park show what happens when the community holds the land. Culture thrives. People stay rooted. Oakland is still creating phenomenal youth. It is still producing compassionate, creative, brilliant, engaged, and protective adults. We still raise thinkers, artists, warriors, caregivers, organizers, creators, people who fight, who build, who imagine, who love.

And more than that, we continue to create the organizations that care for us. We have groups that feed our neighbors, protect our children, defend our elders, fight politically for our rights, offer healing and resources, uplift our youth, and create our culture.

In the Town, we are not just fighting. We are building. We are loving. We are here, and we are not going anywhere.

Michele Hamilton is the founder of Pear Tree Community Schools & Seeds to Roots Oakland. She is the author of “The Children Are Always Ours: Parenting for Wholeness in a Broken World.”