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Oakland Unwrapped We Are Your Friends! By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor The first casualty of war is common sense. The first benefi-ciary is hyperbole. In describing the U.S. airdrop of beans and tomato sauce and radios following the bombing of Afghanistan, somebody over at the Trib wrote the subhed "Food softens impact of civilian deaths." Really? If just before they plowed into the World Trade Center the September 11th hijackers had dropped packages on Lower Manhattan filled with, say, bottles of Pepsi Lite and Britney Spears CD's, do you figure we'd think of them less harshly? Instead of radios (on which we hope that the Afghanis will tune to the "Voice of America"), maybe we should just be dropping video clips of Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks!" The part where the Martians are blasting civilians with their death rays, all the time blaring out a recorded message on loudspeakers: "DO NOT RUN! WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS! WE MEAN YOU NO HARM!" Not so egregious, but still worthy of mention, were the remarks reportedly made by City Council President De La Fuente during the discussion of hate-crime attacks against Muslim- and Arab-looking citizens. "Oakland is famous for being a tolerant city," De La Fuente is reported as saying. "We have never had ... racial problems. ...[W]e have a responsibility to make sure that no one suffers any type of intimidation from anyone." Never had racial problems? I have no idea what Oakland is famous for, but for most of our history, racial intol-erance has abounded here. One of my family stories is that back in the '40s one uncle, who is very dark-skinned, was beaten up one time while walking along Lake Merritt with my aunt, who was very light-skinned. The white fellows apparently thought that they were witnessing a black man holding hands on a public street with a white woman, which, in those days in Oakland, was considered intolerable. Another aunt, who came of age in Berkeley in the '30s, couldn't get a job as a secretary anywhere around ... Oakland included ... because, well, black women weren't allowed to work as secretaries back then. They were supposed to find jobs in the canneries, and be happy about it. Another family story is about my father, who went on a school outing to a local swimming pool when he was about 13. He was the only black kid in the class. The manager of the swimming pool turned my father away because the pool did not allow "colored bathers." The other kids spent the afternoon at the pool while my father walked home by himself. In the '40s the Oakland Fire Department ran a segregated system. The black firemen were all housed in one fire station out in West Oakland ... Engine 22 I think it was called ... and none were allowed to rise to the rank of officer. They had to sue the department to get it to inte-grate. When black firemen were finally allowed to become offi-cers, the white officers refused to eat with them. This was as late as 1951, within my lifetime. When my parents tried to buy a house in an East Oakland neighborhood at the beginning of World War II, white neighbors tried to block the sale. When the realtor insisted on going through with the deal, the white neighbors left in droves. When I was born, there were perhaps ten black families in our neigh-borhood, in the area surround Highland Elementary. By the time I was in high school, there were only two white families left. There are more stories, of course. Worse ones, too. These are just the ones that come im-mediately to mind, from my own family history. So, please, let's not talk of Oakland never having racial problems. Mr. De La Fuente's heart was in the right place, certainly, wanting to make sure that folks' anger against the terrorist attacks was not taken out against innocent people, just because those innocent people wear a turban or a beard or worship in a mosque. But to avoid repeating an abomination, one must first admit to the orig-inal abomination. We can't move away from our past unless we understand it. 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 ]