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Oakland Unwrapped Point Of Personal Privilege By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor I interviewed a black Stanford hospital worker one time. He told me how he'd gone into the room of an older white woman, and she got on his case because her bed pan needed to be taken out. You know what's in a hospital bed pan, don't you? Anyway, the black fellow didn't say anything, he just smiled and said okay, and got the bed pan and took it out, and on his way out the door, he passed a doctor coming in. And the doctor gave him this strange look ... watched him walk all the way down the hall ... and then turned around and asked the woman why she'd gotten her brain surgeon to empty her bed pan. Brain surgery, you see, was the job this black fellow did at Stanford Hospital. But there are some people around, you see, who still think that black folks are too dumb to do certain things. Like understand scientific stuff. Or follow complicated discussions. Or write a newspaper column. Sorry to surprise you, cap, but after the corn done finished shucking, some of us snucked out the back and was reading in your books by the light of the lamp. Me, I don't pretend to know much of nothing. I just walk around the city, listen to folks talking, read the papers, see things going on, and at the end of the week, I write it all down. For whatever reason, the fellow who owns this paper publishes it all in this column, and pays me for the trouble. Dogonned if I can figure out why. But as long as he pays me I'll keep on writing the column, and I'll try to do it without calling people out of their names, or using personal attacks, or hiding behind some anonymous email cover. All that ain't really necessary. But "willweatherstorm", whoever he (or she) is, wasn't really talking about me, was he? [Take a look at the letters to the editor page elsewhere in this issue to see what I'm talking about.] When he (or she) calls Chip Johnson a "chimp," it takes us back to the days when it was common for some folks -- oftentimes public officials -- to openly compare black people with monkeys and apes. And when he (or she) says that I must have gotten my job from some welfare-to-work program ... well, that was really repeating the line that any black person in a "thinking job" must have gotten it by taking it away from some more qualified (other-kind-of) person. One important point to make. I have a lot of respect for Councilmember Danny Wan. This is not his style, and I don't think the "willweatherstorm" email originated with him. I think that if Wan had a beef with the way I wrote my original column, he would have said (or written) it publicly. That aside, we've had some disturbing events take place in Oakland government over the past few months. The weakening of CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) in downtown Oakland was one of them. The sale of the Jack London Square properties to private developers was another. These two actions alone reversed decades of public policy with barely an explanation, and no serious public debate at all. Frankly, I don't trust either government or private enterprise enough to let them get together in the back room and work out these things on their own. Don't sign anything unless they give you enough time to read the contract; that's what my father used to tell me. The Raiders deal ... and more recently, the governor's power contract blowup and the Enron collapse ... ought to alert the public that we should be in on the beginning of these arrangements, and know all the facts before the deals are made. It's all being signed off on in our names, after all, we're the ones who have to pay the bills. And if "willweatherstorm" thinks I shouldn't ask the questions because I'm too dumb to be able to understand the answers ... Well, I believe I'll keep on asking, anyway. J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an author, a journalist, and a graduate of Castlemont High School. He can be reached at www.safero.org and [email protected]. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]