I don’t know how you feel about the Oakland A’s proposed Howard Terminal stadium, and I don’t know how my colleagues here at the Coalition feel. I haven’t asked them, and I would not want to speak for them. My own feelings are mixed. I want the A’s to stay, but I also want a good deal for Oakland.
Are the A’s asking too much from Oakland, or is the City Council asking too much from the A’s? As usual in such controversies, this has become a Rorschach test: each of us sees what we want to, based on our predispositions. The A’s stadium is not an issue that we at the Coalition have a position on; we’re about managing encampments and supporting the Oakland Police Department, and we stay away from other things. But I do believe that the same council members who today will vote against Howard Terminal are the ones who defunded OPD a few weeks ago, and who refuse to do anything about encampments. A similar mindset drives both positions, and it’s important for us to understand it.
That mindset is one that sees everything in terms of race. It has grievances against what it considers the entrenched power structure of white hierarchy, which it views as historically illegitimate. We can call these people, for lack of a better word, the Woke-ists. From their point of view, anything that reflects or benefits this entrenched power structure is wrong and must be resisted, and anything that weakens it is correct and must be supported.
It’s not for me to argue one way or another whether there is in fact such an entrenched power structure, or, if there is, what ought to be done about it. That is fundamentally a political debate. I want to understand how this ideological point of view lies behind both the anti-police movement and the movement to drive the Oakland A’s from town.
What both these sentiments have in common is the theory that two unrelated phenomena—the police department and the Oakland A’s—actually are expressions of the entrenched power structure of white hierarchy. In the case of the A’s, those who see Oakland without the A’s always talk about the “billionaires” who own the team, “billionaires” being a metaphor for white privilege. As for the police, they imply that OPD is somehow a manifestation of that same white privilege, despite the fact that it’s one of the most ethnically-, racially- and genderly-diverse police forces in America. But facts often don’t matter to those who see their lives as a struggle against the entrenched power structure of white hierarchy. They view themselves as Revolutionaries, and to a Revolutionary, only one thing is real: the struggle.
Whether or not the A’s stay in Oakland, I cannot say. As of this morning, it looks unlikely, but the City Council and the team may yet reach a deal. What I find interesting is that even those who would vote against Howard Terminal concede that it would bring thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in new tax revenues to Oakland. You might think that would be incentive enough to approve the deal, but if you’re a Woke-ist, jobs and revenues are of secondary importance; the main thing is getting rid of the entrenched power structure of white hierarchy, a goal whose very vagueness guarantees its political relevance forever.
Steve Heimoff