Culture
At Oakland’s inner harbor near the water’s edge stands the bronze statue of Jack London—a famed 20th Century author, labor union advocate and racist who promoted eugenics and white supremacy. Communities of color make up 75% of the population in Oakland. This summer, Oakland residents petitioned to remove a monument dedicated to London and to protest the name of the popular commercial square and district named in his honor. Historically, there’s a well-established culture of renaming spaces and places in…
2019 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. We covered a city that is always changing, but where tensions about city finances, policing, housing and the fate of the public schools run deep. We also produced three new episodes of our Tales of Two Cities podcast, which covers audio stories from Oakland and Richmond in collaboration with our sister site, Richmond Confidential. Click here to check out all episodes of the Tales of…
The Goodwill’s Greater East Bay headquarters on International Boulevard is a clothing reseller’s dream and a garbage system nightmare. This block-long facility is, despite its size, an inconspicuous treasure trove for resellers sifting for secondhand goods they will leave with by the cartload. The white cinderblock interior has an almost clinical feel: Clothes lie sprawled in plastic carts the size of operating tables, pushed together in a maze that only the regulars know how to navigate. This kind of retail…
Although food insecurity—the formal term for being unable to reliably access and afford nutritious food—is on the decline in California, it’s on the rise for senior citizens.
Oakland is a city of immigrants. According to information provided by Census.gov, in 2018, Oakland had a population of about 429,000 people, with about a third of the population being from another country. But those census figures may not be accurate. “I think the challenge is that many of them are living in the shadows, so it is really hard to know how many [immigrants] are here,” said Lisa Hoffman, development director for the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, an organization…
More trans men and non-binary folks are deciding to carry their children themselves, pushing the birth industry to be more gender inclusive in the process.
Tina Liu founded Chinese Beyond Borders in 2013 to bring diversity to Burning Man which believes is underrepresented.
There aren’t any markets or restaurants, but there is the Pu Guang temple. And pigeons. Lots of pigeons.
Maliwop*, a longtime Oakland graffiti-writer, didn’t listen when his grandmother told him not to make graffiti. Now he is almost a decade into his illegal art career.