Columns

“A rising tide lifts all boats” is a phrase I’ve heard over and over in relation to improving the lot of the poor, but as sensible as it sounds it didn’t explain why people continue to vote against their own interests. It is our nature to want to have an order of things, an explanation, and when there is none conspiracy theories abound, sometimes so crazy and bizarre it is bewildering how they could take hold. 

Isabel Wilkerson’s second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, was released August 4, 2020. I finished it Wednesday and listened to conversations with Isabel Wilkerson throughout Thanksgiving Day on both Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns. It took fifteen years for Wilkerson to write The Warmth of Other Suns, and it was ten more before I took it off my book shelf and read it. She never uses the word racism in her writing. Instead, she writes narrative nonfiction telling the humiliating to the horrific, the story of racism through the people who experienced it. 

Wilkerson describes caste through metaphors in her book and in conversations as the frame on which race is built , layered with class. Her writings have changed how I think about race and racism and given framing to recent Berkeley City meetings. 

Last week I wrote, “I’m going to leave my comments to the Fair and Impartial Policing Working Committee 

Group to next week when there will be fewer meetings to review, and the Declaration of Racism as a Public Health Crisis is on the agenda at the City Council Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Committee. Just let it be said out loud to everyone who is White, Berkeley is not experienced in the same way if someone is Black” 

The proposal that Cheryl Davila put forward, Declare Racism as a Public Health Crisis, a Threat and Safety Issue in the City of Berkeley, is dense with information, history, initial actions and a resolution that is thorough. There is no denying that racism is complex and permeates every corner of our lives, although many declare it doesn’t even exist. 

The summer was filled with worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the video of the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police went viral. Nothing as pervasive as racism and maintaining Whiteness can be reined in with one resolution, even as thorough as it was, but it was a beginning. Was is the key word here, since all the meticulous research and documentation in the original was discarded and replaced with a thin list of things to be considered and actions to be taken dictated by Sophie Hahn. You might think what was left was fine if you didn’t know what was written in the first place. 

This is coming out later than I intended. as I spent my evening reading through one and a half years of City Council agendas and watching clips of meeting videos until I found it, May 8, 2018 at 2 hours 2 minutes into the special meeting. There it was: Sophie Hahn talking about wanting a visionary plan and her earliest memories of the marina, riding in a taxi to the heliport and getting on a helicopter with her family to fly to SFO. She mentioned that of those many trips by helicopter, one of them even made it into a picture in the San Francisco Chronicle. 

While Sophie often talks about her family moving from Kensington to Berkeley so she would be part of the Berkeley school integration program, going to school with Black children doesn’t necessarily result in crossing the divide between what is experienced by someone who is Black and by someone who is White, especially when the person who is White has more than White privilege and sits in the upper rungs of the hierarchy in a university town. 

Isabel Wilkerson uses the metaphor in Caste that America is like an old house: 

“America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation…The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.” (pp 15-16) 

There was a takedown in the last election of Cheryl Davila, the bristly Black woman who grew frustrated and inpatient and at times angry with being cut off and shut down. We’ve lost an important voice. 

I don’t know Terry Taplin, who won the District 2 seat, and I don’t recall hearing him speak on issues. Looking at who endorsed him and his thin resume,,it looks like he was elevated to run for Council to make everyone comfortable that diversity is maintained, and that by placing him in the position he will know his place. He has big shoes to fill and I hope he surprises us all. 

The Mayor’s Working Group on Fair and Impartial Policing produced a 26 page draft of recommendations on Berkeley Police Department practices. The report didn’t stop with policing, and advanced recommendations for City Council including a section on adopting a system for compliance and accountability. 

At the November 18 meeting, things got testy. Mayor Arreguin pushed the working group to withdraw the section on accountability. So far, the working group has held firm. Truly, what is the point of months of work to create a plan to reduce (seek to eliminate) racially disparate practices if there is no accountability.