For now, while the girls are in school, Erika runs an informal taxi service. “Someone might hire me to drive to McLaughlin. That’s how I get my gas money. It’s $10 a ride to McLaughlin and back.” She also acts as an informal taxi for neighbors when she makes the sixty-mile round trip to Mobridge for groceries and household goods. The thought of car trouble is too distressing to even talk about. So much depends on having a vehicle that runs – even if it is held together with Bondo and duct tape.
This is what it means to be part of the struggling class: to work consistently in a breathtakingly vulnerable situation, with few resources, and with an unfounded hope that you can build a better life. If the isolation of the rural landscape suggests some similarities between Appalachia and Standing Rock, few places could be more different from this reservation than Oakland, California. And yet, even here, the daily lives of the struggling class bear remarkable similarities.
Oakland, California
Oakland, California is a racially diverse city with demographics that are roughly 29% white; 26.5% Latinx; 22.5% African American; 15.2% Asian.32 Wealthy neighborhoods, like those in the Oakland hills, are home to families of color as well as white families. The city’s poor communities, however, are overwhelming Black and Latinx. Home to 429,082 people, Oakland has a population density of 7,676 people per square mile. (By contrast, Athens County has 130.7 people per square mile and Standing Rock has about nine people per square mile.)
The Oakland commercial district is an eclectic mix of old and new storefronts that give this part of the city a working-class bohemian reputation. Lakeshore Avenue is home to multiple cafés, bakeries, and small restaurants. Peet’s Coffee operates a large café just a few hundred feet away from a Starbucks. The upscale Peet’s is designed to invite people to linger – for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons settle into books or conversations that can last hours. The neighborhood is home to an old-fashioned donut shop, an artisanal bakery, a small greengrocer and a trendy gift store. Yoga studios and high-end hair salons (for women and men) take up significant real estate. Just one block over from Lakeshore Avenue on Grand Avenue, the picture is a little different. The high-end chains have not invested in Grand Avenue as they have on Lakeshore Avenue. The storefronts show signs of wear and age, and closed stores are prevalent. For an outsider, this makes it hard to tell if the community is gentrifying or collapsing.
The Lakeshore district is ringed by hills to the east. A maze of narrow streets winds past bungalows as it climbs up the hillside to increasingly expensive homes. Slightly to the west of Lakeshore and Grand Avenue is Lake Merritt – an amazing tidal lagoon and wildlife refuge. People without disposable income generally lose access to public space. (Libraries in urban areas remain one of the last bastions of community space but a very circumscribed one.) Lake Merritt is an urban jewel surrounded by parkland. The lake is a regular destination for school field trips to analyze water samples or visit wildlife recovering from injuries at the Nature Center.
The parkland includes a playground for small children surrounded by picnic tables, a bonsai garden, a children’s fairyland, and a boating center. Not all of it works well, not all of it works all of the time, but it is a tremendous community resource. Indeed, in a country radically segregated by class and race, one of the most striking things about Lake Merritt is the willingness of people in the community to share it. Schoolchildren, families, lovers, sunbathers, students, fitness buffs, picnickers, and temporary housing encampments all coexist around the 3.5-mile shoreline. In a city where a two-bedroom apartment might rent for $5,000, it’s not surprising to see a small tent encampment beside the lake. When the city authorities moved port-o-johns into the park for people living in the tent encampment, it became obvious that things were not going to change any time soon. This is not to say that everyone is happy about it, but the park continues to serve a wide and diverse community.
Oakland, once called the Harlem of the West, has been experiencing an influx of young, white, wealthy tech workers and an explosion in housing prices. The changing demographics are also affecting the park use. As white families move into Oakland in increasing numbers, complaints to police about people “living while Black” have also increased. For example, in 2018 Oakland made the news when a leisurely picnic turned into a nightmare. A white woman, Jennifer Schulte, called the police on a Black family using a charcoal grill at their Lake Merritt picnic. As she summoned the police, Schulte reportedly told Kenzie Smith and Onsayo Abram, who were barbecuing, that they would be going to jail. Smith told the Guardian he couldn’t get her voice out of his head. “I honestly thought that I was going to die.”33 Jennifer Schulte became a potent symbol for the ways in which white people target Black people engaged in ordinary behavior. She was quickly dubbed “BBQ Becky” in memes that went viral. Later in the month, hundreds of Black residents showed up at Lake Merritt for a “BBQ’n while Black” cookout/protest.
There is much more to Oakland than Lake Merritt. A short drive from downtown Oakland, several communities are laboring under the weight of deep poverty, including Acorn, Ghost Town, and the Deep East. Today, these communities can only be described as the homelands of American apartheid. Their reputation for violence makes it easy to forget – perhaps encourages people to forget – that people live here, raise children here, and call these communities home. The media refers to them as “areas.” No one lives in an “area.” Even the poorest of us live in communities and neighborhoods – even when those communities carry a more dangerous feeling at night.
Once envisioned as part of a redevelopment plan, the Acorn neighborhood, at the edge of West Oakland, stands as a weary testimony to the old housing projects of the 1960s. Today, the community is not just bordered by Interstate 980 – Interstate 880 runs right through it. Small yards in front of homes have been paved with concrete and delineated from each other and the sidewalk by chain link fencing. Every home I saw was protected by bars on the windows and security gates on doors. As I wander through these streets on foot, the overwhelming presence of concrete and home security is harsh and unrelenting.
Just a short distance away in West Oakland, another development project created the neighborhood of Ghost Town. Hundreds of families, nearly all Black, lost their homes to eminent domain claims that cleared the way for three freeways, a massive freeway interchange dubbed “the MacArthur Maze,” and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all of which cut through the low-income community. The MacArthur Maze marks the south border of Ghost Town, that stretches roughly from 27th Street to 35th Street. Under the knot of freeways that form the Maze, the sidewalks are filled with encampments of people – an informal community of its own, with cardboard architecture, a few shopping carts, and mounds of belongings wrapped in trash bags.
In the midst of the sidewalk encampments and broken-down buildings are schools and children. In this neighborhood half of all families live below the federal poverty line. Despite the number of boarded up buildings, however, it is a neighborhood with a strong identity.
The community is home to a small garden known as Ghost Town Farms, as well as the local Ghost Town Brewery, and it once attracted artist collectives that sprung up in converted warehouses. A tragic fire in the artist’s collective known as the the Ghost Ship in 2016 took thirty-six lives and led the city to condemn many of these properties.
Viewed from Ghost Town, Oakland’s high-rise office buildings form a horizon that looks like the Emerald City of Oz. So perhaps it is telling that the history of Ghost Town has been replaced with local lore. One story claims that there were so many killings in the neighborhood it became known as a Ghost Town, another that the name derives from the fact that two casket makers were once located side by side in the neighborhood, while a third attributes the name to a drug kingpin who referred to the area as a Ghost Town because he had eliminated all his rivals. The scariest story of all is the real history. It has nothing to do with gangs – it’s a story of how collusion between government and business betrayed entire communities; first
