Editorials

So, the Democratic candidate to be the next president of the United States is a Berkeley girl, and the leading progressive candidate (also a Democrat) for the next mayor of San Francisco is a Berkeley boy. Alums of BUSD are making their mark in the world.

Admittedly, Kamala Harris is often described as a proud Oakland native. Well, yes, she was born in Oakland, but of course that’s just where the nearest Kaiser hospital was located in 1964. I haven’t checked,, but she was probably born at Kaiser Oakland like many Berkeleyans, or possibly at Highland, then a county hospital.

Mirabile dictu, the two future candidates were together in Mrs. Frances Wilson’s first grade at Thousand Oaks School in 1968. San Francisco Supervisor and mayoral hopeful Aaron Peskin has the class photo to prove it, which he shared last week with his email fans.

A key piece of Kamala’s online presence is this video praising the teacher for giving her the idea that she could do anything. It’s thanks to BUSD’s pioneering school busing program that she was in the class.

The family’s apartment on Bancroft is still there, on the corner of Bancroft and Berkeley Way in Berkeley. It’s on the edge of the area available to residents of color in the formerly red-lined district.

Harris’s parents were not wealthy. Her mother and father were typical ‘60s academic gypsies, going wherever they were offered short-term post Ph.D.appointments until they found relatively secure posts. But Kamala was never a Poor Little Black Girl living in a dangerous Oakland neighborhood, as one earnest young woman described her on an NPR talk show last week. She was the proudly mixed-race offspring of well-educated parents who were able to support their daughters in comfortable if not luxurious circumstances in college towns.

Aaron Peskin came from another academic family, living in the Berkeley neighborhood previously served by Thousand Oaks School when it was almost all white, before integration in 1969 which brought kids like Kamala on school buses to Mrs. Wilson’s first grade.

The Harris family moved away from Berkeley when their daughters were still in primary school, and divorced when Kamala was 7. Her public high school, in Montreal near her mother’s research job, was described by another alumnus as unremarkable. Aaron stayed in BUSD through Berkeley High, which was automatically integrated as the city’s single high school.

My own daughters were in the same age cohort as Harris and Peskin. One says that she thinks his political career was stimulated by his participation in Berkeley High’s “Politics and Power”class as taught by Mr. Steve Teel, in which students role-played the legislative process.

A Berkeley High graduate from that era is the first person of color to lead the Court of Appeals, New York state’s highest court., Music, especially jazz, is another area where successive generations of BHS alums have excelled.

One way and another, it’s hard not to conclude that the Berkeley schools must be doing something right. Of course, this does not prevent successive generations of Berkeley parents from complaining vigorously about them, which is probably a good thing for their kids. After all, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, doesn’t it? But it can be hard on the teachers.

Though the system works well for the children of active, engaged parents, some of those whose parents must work hard to support the family continue to fall through the cracks. For every Kamala Harris or Aaron Peskin there are others whose mother or father can’t make sure that homework gets done or provide transport to important extracurricular activities.

And Berkeley is changing. Paradoxically, historically redlining Black families out of the mostly White neighborhoods east of Grove (now Martin Luther King Way) created housing opportunities for people of color in South and West Berkeley. Now, however, gentrification attracts prosperous White buyers to pay big money for modest homes which previously could be owned or rented by Black families. A substantial proportion of Black-owned properties are now owned by seniors, and as they depart their families move to distant and less expensive suburbs like Antioch.

The intentional integration of the late sixties which brought Kamala and Aaron together in Mrs. Wilson’s first grade is more complicated now. Many of the African-American students in BUSD schools are registered from the home of Grandma or a family friend. There’s still a reasonable percentage of the Black upper-middle-class professionals who have lived here for the last 40 years, mostly in the single family neighborhoods which the current Berkeley mayor and council majority seem determined to abolish.

Changing zoning is not going to solve the problem, since up-zoning simply increases land value, motivating the property owner to build multiple student apartments in place of family homes. In the end Berkeley’s segregation is now economic, not racial, and that’s a harder nut to crack.