Said City Administrator Ed Reiskin, “It’s deeply troubling and puzzling that anyone would call for an investigation into allegations and, at the same time, jump to the conclusion that the allegations were true and propagate them as facts.”
Well, that makes sense. If you call for “an investigation,” it means you don’t know all the facts, right? And that means that you shouldn’t automatically conclude anything. You might have your hunches and suspicions, but you shouldn’t be reaching a verdict until all the facts are known.
Unless you’re Rebecca Kaplan, Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao.
The background here is that an employee of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, Sarai Crain, who was fired by her boss, Guillermo Cespedes, is demanding that she be rehired, and be promoted to head the department, and be paid a lot of money for lost wages, attorney’s fees, and “emotional damages.”
Nobody has the slightest idea why Crain was fired; that information is confidential. All that Reiskin will say officially is, “I can say that there were circumstances and facts that led to the personnel decision in question and that I supported it.”
Enter Kaplan, Fife, Bas and Thao, who’s running for mayor. In a press release issued on Wednesday, they’ve already held the trial and reached a verdict: Guilty! “We must take action,” Vice Mayor Kaplan wrote, “to undo inappropriate actions, and take further steps to ensure that race and gender discrimination are not tolerated.” Fife, for her part, accuses Cespedes and Reiskin of “perpetuating a practice of diminishing talented, experienced women, particularly women of color.” Bas contributed her own J’accuse! “Every day, not just during Women’s History Month, it’s absolutely urgent to ensure pay equity and a workplace free from gender discrimination.” As for Thao, “It is unconscionable that this discriminatory practice would be allowed to go on.”
Discrimination! Inappropriate! Diminishing women! Unconscionable! It sure sounds to me like the Big Four have made up their minds.
And there you have it: These four women have no idea what really happened, but that doesn’t matter; facts never matter to ideologues. What they do know is that Crain is a Black woman, and therefore anything bad that happened to her must be the fault of someone else, particularly men, and particularly White men, like Reiskin. (Cespedes is himself a person of color.)
I say, fine, let’s have an investigation and get to the bottom of what happened. But let’s have an open, transparent investigation. If we, the public, are supposed to side with someone, we have to know all the facts. What did Crain actually do in order for Cespedes to fire her? If Crain and Kaplan et al. want to make a Big Deal about this to influence public opinion, then Crain and her lawyers can’t hide behind a screen of “confidential personnel matter.” Let us know the details. If Crain really did nothing wrong, she should welcome opening up her personnel files. If she won’t, well, why should we believe her version?
I continue to be baffled at how these City Council members, Kaplan, Fife, Bas and Thao, seemingly care only about people of color. Aren’t they elected to represent everyone in Oakland? They seem to envision themselves as Social Justice Warriors out to avenge the wrongs perpetrated against people of color by white men throughout history. It’s fine, even praiseworthy, that they have such passionate motives, but they’re being paid to address city-wide issues that affect everyone. Instead, they have this very narrow range of race-related obsessions, which cloud their judgment and make them unable to be fair. They need to explain to us why they’ve pre-determined that Crain was unjustly fired, even though they don’t know the circumstances of the case.
Steve Heimoff