Posted on July 23, 2009 - by Rasham

Oakland; East of Racial Equality, West of Political Justice

East Oakland; a place where garbage blows like pollen in the wind, where the topic of conversation at a bus stop is the most recent death by drive-by, and houses are designed to look like prison cells, so as to protect the inhabitants from stray bullets and burglaries. I board the number 57 bus at Mills College, a beautifully landscaped campus set near the borders of East Oakland. The driver stops me before I am able to feed the money machine my two dollar bus fare: ‘are you sure you’re on the right bus?’ he asks me. ‘Yeah’, I respond immediately, a bit thrown off by the question. I took my seat amongst my fellow public transportation users and wondered about the operator’s inquiry. As the vehicle snaked through the ghetto avenues of a scorned society, I took a careful look around: I was definitely a minority, the only ‘white’ on board. This realization spawned this puzzling inquiry: is segregation still encouraged in the 21st century?

The East Bay prides itself on cultural and ethnic diversity, and racial discrimination is widely unaccepted. How is that I find myself a minority in a majority of minorities? Why was my pseudo-Anglo presence on this number 57 bus so startling that the driver assumed I had made a careless mistake?

Arriving at Eastmont Transit Center in the heart of East Oakland, the truth is no longer deniable: our cities are still racially divided, and are encouraged to be so. Minorities are offered section 8 and affordable housing within certain politically drawn boundaries, forming communities which are so neglected by civic patrol and service units they have become danger zones, boasting degradation and crime, drugs and gun wars. Public education is a disgrace, with cemented playgrounds and portable classrooms, significantly smaller and fewer in number than the encompassing graveyards and liquor stores. Public parks are littered and unkempt, as if the soil and the life spawned from the estuaries and ponds are as devalued as the members of society surviving within the forbidden land. Within the imaginary walls of east Oakland is a lurking enemy; the stereotypes associated with East Oakland are beginning to haunt me, and I quiver as I begin to accept the possibility that perhaps this isn’t a place I should be exploring. I take a moment and glance towards the hills, where mansions rest beautifully upon the golden hillsides, windows catching the last rays of the departing sun, sparkling as if to show off their extravagant construct. Money seems to flow upwards from the California Coastline, leaving the valley bleak and impoverished, perpetuating the human struggle to survive injustice and suffer on behalf of the inequalities of political representation.

And just as I have a thought to retreat to the embrace of my suburban dwelling, I see a mother pushing her small child who is sleeping comfortably in his stroller.  Despite the despair and isolation of this land, East Oakland is a place she knows as home, and that this child will forever call his hometown. I write about East Oakland not in rejection of its population, or in a manner of disgust and repudiation. I write about East Oakland because I want to tell the world that it is not a living horror fest featuring crack heads and gun slinging high schoolers. Perhaps these elements do exist in East Oakland, as they exist in other parts of the world. The Bay Area is advertised as one of many diversity epicenters of the United States, and it baffles me that such a blatant disregard for equality goes unnoticed and undocumented. Segregation is continuously practiced within the Minority Mecca of the world; the racial divide is very obvious, and very sad.