We’ve heard in the past week a lot about Oakland’s new “Downtown Oakland Specific Plan” (DOSP), which is stuffed with irrational “racial equity” provisions.
Now, you may ask yourself what “racial equity” has to do with attracting business to Oakland, building new housing, protection against rising sea levels, redesigning Lake Merritt Boulevard, establishing green spaces and bike lanes, and so on. Aren’t these the traditional purview of architects, urban planners, landscapers, engineers and transit experts?
You’d think so. But in Oakland, of course, everything is racialized. Nothing can ever be done without racialist politicians and bureaucrats playing the race card. One way to think about Oakland government is that it is nothing less than an ongoing effort to redistribute money from those who have it to those who don’t. If your political philosophy is basically communist-socialist, you might like the compulsory redistribution of wealth. If you happen to believe that seizing public wealth and arbitrarily handing it to individuals who just happen to be people of color, you might have second thoughts.
Look carefully at the official language of DOSP. The program “is designed to reduce relevant racial disparities.” Each goal includes “racial equity ‘measures of success’ to track the DOSP’s impact over time.” “The DOSP [was] developed with more racially and socially inclusive community engagement than previous planning efforts.” “The City brought on a racial equity consultant team and engaged in deeper racial equity-focused interviews.” In other words, Oakland spent a lot of money to bring onboard people with racial complaints, who scoured the city for every little thing that annoyed them, every imagined slight and micro-aggression, for which they blamed “racism.” This drive to “identify inequities” resulted, predictably, in the City Council—already predisposed to find racism everywhere—to, in fact, discover structural racism under every rock and behind every tree. In DOSP’s own words, recent years have “worsened racial inequities” (how, they don’t explain), which meant the DOSP people had to work extra-hard to identify those inequities so they could blot them out. Which in turn means, of course, more money given to “racial equity” consultants, those leeches of the grievance industry who make a living feasting off the decaying but wealthy carcasses of woke cities like Oakland.
It’s impossible to identify specific examples of what DOSP does, since the program hasn’t yet been implemented. But we can make some educated inferences from their own published statements. For instance, one DOSP goal is to “reduce racial disparities in hiring and ownership.” Since this language appears in a section on “the tech sector,” we can infer that the DOSP wishes to compel Oakland tech companies to hire more people of color, whether or not they’re qualified, in the name of “racial equity.” It doesn’t seem to me that business leaders would want to come here under such conditions of coercion. It also means making sure that more tech companies owned by people of color locate in Oakland. This can be expedited by giving BIPOC tech companies tax breaks, concessions, waivers, and other inducements to locate here. This may be unconstitutional, and it’s certainly unfair, but it’s the way Racial Grievance politicians operate. This isn’t just a paranoid fantasy on my part. From DOSP’s official policy statement: “Provide assistance to locally-owned businesses and businesses owned by people harmed by racial and gender disparities.”
You can see how easily these allegations of “racial disparities” come to the slogan-purveyors at DOSP. If a business is owned by persons of color, then by definition it has been “harmed” by racial disparities and therefore deserves special treatment. It need not prove such harm exists or was deliberately inflicted; it’s enough to cite skin color. Whether or not that business is competent is irrelevant; what matters is exactly what Dr. King said should not matter: “the color of their skin.”
And how are these “racial disparities” to be determined? Through something called “racial equity impact assessments” (REIAs). This is a field Oakland has been pioneering for years. The goal of REIAs is “maximizing equitable outcomes”: in other words, the desired outcomes are determined first, and then rules and laws are devised to compel them. Who runs the REIA program? Why, Oakland’s Department of Race and Equity, of course. That’s the commissariat that oversees “racial equity” from its Kremlin in City Hall, under the directorship of professional “social justice” bureaucrats who foresaw that these kinds of woke jobs were going to be lucrative, and got into the business early. You’ll find them implanted throughout Oakland government.
What does DOSP have to do with Pamela Price and the recall? It should be obvious. Price is the same kind of race baiter as the people who run REIA and the Dept. of Race and Equity. It’s their job to identify racial inequity now and forever. Racial inequity by definition will never end while these people have power, because as long as they’re the ones identifying it, they’ll continue to look for it everywhere, and find it everywhere.
The City Council will meet on June 25, when it will consider DOSP’s Final Draft Plan. According to the draft, DOSP’s “Equity Team Lead”—its consulting expert on racial equity--is an organization called Institute for Sustainable Economic, Educational, Environmental Design (ISEEED), which says its mission is to “fundamentally transform the built environment [and] heal social and environmental trauma.” ISEED’s co-founder and executive director, Antwi Akom, describes himself as a “nationally recognized thought leader on urban acupuncture,” whatever that is. When he gave a TEDx Talk, he asked rhetorically, “Where is innovation happening? And he answered his own question: “Our jails, our prisons, our ghettoes, our favelas (shanty towns), and our low-income neighborhoods and hotbeds of innovation.” If that’s true, then Oakland ought to be among the most innovative cities in the world, since we have a lot of shanty towns and ghettoes. Obviously, Oakland is not a hotbed of innovation. Quite the opposite. We have only to take a look around to realize that Oakland is one of the least innovative cities in America. It’s an ahistoric sinkhole, not progressive as its leaders allege, but regressive in the worst, more primitive ways.
Steve Heimoff