Dave from Spot.us and I finally met, totally by accident, at a meeting regarding the permits for the Bay To Breakers race. You know, that infamous meeting where protesters came to express their frustrations with the race organizer because the race people wanted to officially ban public urination and drunkeness, which I already thought was illegal.
Whatever.
My take I gave Dave was I expressed concern over how Oakland has become racially fragmented in a way I've not seen in a while. Perhaps then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown considered it noble to take on the Black Power structure as he said he did, but I considered the act racist. Sorry I did.
A lot of people of various backgrounds were excited to have Ron Dellums as Mayor, but he's failed to live up to the promise his own legacy established.
Now we have an Oakland that's the home of a kind of "downer mentality" that is in the very DNA of the culture. There are places too where Oakland is almost all White and nothing else. That's not the Oakland I knew, but it's what we have. The City Council and Oaklanders need to make diversity an official objective of the city and inact policies to maintain and encourage a diverse culture.
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