Columns

Bringing race home: Race, racism is our country’s history. Racism is front and center in the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia, in the Charlottesville civil trial over the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Racism is tangential to the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and his acquittal. 

Critical Race Theory was used to whip parents and voters into a frenzy in the Virginia Governor’s election. Racism plays into the fights over social spending, national health care. Racism defines where people live and who is pushed out with gentrification. And, then there is the pure economic racism, not just what is paid, but who gets the contracts. 

The first hour Tuesday evening, November 16, 2021 at Berkeley City Council was a lesson in institutional systemic racism Berkeley style. Dr. Eleanor Ramsey from the Mason Tillman consulting firm slowly and methodically built the foundation and then showed slide after slide of the findings of the City of Berkeley practices. It was an eye-popping, jaw dropping analysis of who receives contracts from the City of Berkeley and who doesn’t. It wasn’t the Black owned business. The Hispanic businesses did only a touch better than the nothing that was dished out to the Black owned businesses. You can watch it all by choosing the webcast for 11/16 at 6:00 pm. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Clerk/City_Council/City_Council__Agenda_Index.aspx 

The Mason Tillman analysis of the City of Berkeley contracts’s concluding finding is Intentional Discrimination Systemic Practices. Let that sink in. 

Councilmember Ben Bartlett, who authored the measure to secure the study (item 34 January 24, 2017) with co-sponsors Cheryl Davila and Kris Worthington, said the findings confirmed what he heard over and over when he ran for office. 

The Mason Tillman presentation is not attached to last Tuesday’s agenda and there was comment that the report is in the hands of the city. I hope that doesn’t mean it will be scrubbed before we see it. 

I did attend the first hour of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force meeting Thursday evening when the task force was informed that city staff (unnamed) have requested the removal of the “History” section of the NICJR (National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform) Report stating that it is inaccurate. Members of the task force vocalized their outrage, saying that the history [of policing in Berkeley] is the reason for the task force. 

After attending many of the Public Safety Task Force meetings, removing the history section smacks of more city “scrubbing.” There are other ways of handling any purported discrepancies. Has no one heard of footnotes? But, as task force members have so clearly asked from the beginning, are they “window dressing”? 

Withholding information is not new. There was a fight to withhold the report of disparate treatment of people of color by Berkeley Police in the Center for Policing Equity Report of 2018. 

Once again it comes back to race and intentional discrimination. It should be no surprise to anyone when you see the chart of “Priorities for Berkeley’s city government” with Equity as the least important. It is the chart that has been posted at the top of the Berkeley Daily Planet front page. Climate didn’t rate much higher. 

Councilmember Droste complimented the city manager for five department heads of color, but as former Councilmember Davila said so succinctly, “…Sadly not all skin folk are kin folk” pointing to the fact that under this Black City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley and senior managers of color, discrimination didn’t end. Williams-Ridley officially started March 9, 2016,; the first year studied by Mason Tillman. One could excuse the city manager for her first year, but what about all the rest of the years? And now that we are clearly informed of the discrimination, should contracts include ethnicity, and should existing contracts just be extended as they appear to be? 

The raises for senior management were on the November 16^th consent calendar. The City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley, was granted her $84,732 / 28.11% raise to a salary of $386,160 with no one from council abstaining or voting no. 

Public comment on the raises and consent calendar starts at 2:08:21 into the meeting webcast. I spoke just before Charles Clark, stating that a 2% raise not a 28.11% raise was appropriate. You can fast forward the webcast from the MasonTillman Equity presentation to 2:20:16 – 2:22:09 to hear Charles Clark. 

“I am Charles Clark a resident of District 6, I actually support the raises for senior city management, items 5 and 12, but that support comes with two criticisms and a caution some of which you have already heard.First, why are you looking at Palo Alto, but not cities like Alameda, San Leandro, Antioch, Walnut Creek and Fairfield? If you want a small rich city, why not Piedmont? The sample seems rigged to conclude that Berkeley’s managers are underpaid. And, I’ll tell you rigged samples don’t tell you, don’t command respect. Second, why can’t the item say in so many words the city manager will be getting a 28% raise so that her current $301,000 salary will increase to $386,000 per year. You know the Alameda County Grand Jury criticized that same lack of directness in measure JJ which this council authored last year to raise your own salaries 75% without saying so directly, which brings me to my caution. If you want compensation like Palo Alto, then I want roads like Palo Alto. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission told us just this month that Palo Alto’s pavement condition index is 84, while Berkeley’s is only 58, and you know this year’s paving report told us that 1/5 of our street miles are in failed condition. With raises like the ones you will approve tonight with my support such failure is not an option. The caution is, Taco Bell performance at French Laundry prices is unacceptable.” 

The Agenda and Rules Committee met Monday and from Mayor Arreguin’s comments, don’t be surprised to experience some trickery around item 27m the Surveillance Technology Report, and item 28, the ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader) budget referral. There was discussion at the Agenda committee that the Action calendar for the November 30^th council meeting was very full and they might not get through all of it. Arreguin said he could call a special meeting with only 24 hours’ notice, and pondered choosing December 13^th. 

The strategy on controversial items is all too often, schedule the item as the last of the evening, make people sit through an entire 5 hour plus meeting and then continue the item. Or, if enough people have given up and left the meeting, take up the controversial item around midnight when the objectors have gone to bed. 

In this case it looks like Arreguin’s intent is to continue the report and ALPR, call a special full council meeting on short notice, and then hold a special budget meeting the next day followed with a full council regular meeting that evening on December 14^th to approve the AAO (mid-year budget cycle spending) and fund ALPR. On these kinds of forecasts, I really like to be proven wrong. 

Two of us have been attending the Design Review Committee (DRC) and Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) meetings for months to educate and push for native plants, permeable paving, bird safe glass and dark skies. Charles Kahn, architect on ZAB and DRC, has really taken this in. Thursday, we saw a little more progress, but it is so hard for people to let go of what they have always believed and the way they have always worked. 

Douglas Tallamy in his books Bringing Nature Home, Nature’s Best Hope and The Nature of Oaks explains so well the relationships of plants, insects and birds. It was reading one of his books and then watching one of the many YouTube presentations/lectures that put it all together for me. Maybe in this coming week of holidays and no meetings you can set aside a little time to watch Tallamy and reflect on what we all might do to make a place for nature and a place for nurture in our lives. 

Please put these into your holiday plans: 

Restoring the Little Things that Run the World 

Nature’s Best Hope: Conservation That starts in Your Yard  

In closing I’ve been busy. I just finished two lovely non-fiction books by Hope Jahren, Lab Girl published in 2016 and The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where We Go from Here published in 2020. Hope Jahren is a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Norway. I grew up not far from where Jahren was born, Austin, MN and even have a picture of myself with my friend Susan from our tour of the Spam Museum in Austin. The Austin Hormel meat packing plant is mentioned in both books. There is so much more she gives us to think about and not just women in science and the funding of science in her first book. Her second book is a provocative look at climate. 

The third book is After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, by Ben Rhodes, published in June 2021. Rhodes writes that he asked a Hungarian how Viktor Orban transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of ten years. As I read this section I couldn’t stop thinking about Fox host Tucker Carlson broadcasting from Hungary with Viktor Orban. 

Here are the steps and they may sound way too familiar: 

1. Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization.
2. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics.
3. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine.
4. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power.
5. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law.
6. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment.
7. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation.
8. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros.
9. Cast yourself as the legitimate defender of national security.
10. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past.
11. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses.
12. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.