Culture
The Shoong Family Chinese Cultural Center provides after-school programs that teach Chinese language skills and culture for children
On Tuesday, author Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke at a screening of Marvel’s Black Panther in front of 250 high school students at Oakland’s Grand Lake. The action film, which stars a nearly all-black black cast and imagines an Afrofuturist world untouched by white supremacy and colonialism, had a record-breaking opening weekend.
To commemorate Black History Month, the news teams from Oakland North and our sibling site, Richmond Confidential, spent a morning observing some of the spaces in our two cities that have been important to the East Bay’s black community—past and present.
The City of Oakland approved a new experimental short-term housing solution, called The Village. After a year of negotiations, they’ve been granted land by the city, and are building houses for the homeless.
Several Oakland organizations are uniting to bring economic growth to the city by opening a community advocacy and training center in a renovated building on International Boulevard, in the center of the Fruitvale community. Restore Oakland will provide community members with job preparation programs and offer services like a tenants’ rights clinic and a restaurant that will also be a work training site.
On Saturday morning, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf visited the Loong Kong Tien Yee Association, a Chinese family association based in Chinatown. “Happy new year, good to see you all!” the mayor said to the members of the association. “Welcome, welcome!” the members responded, shaking hands with her one by one. It was her first stop that day, in her plan to visit six Chinese associations to pay respect to the community, recognize their contributions to Oakland, and celebrate the Chinese…
The children’s hip hop group attended the 60th Annual Grammy Awards in New York, where they were nominated for Best Children’s Album.
Over 40,000 women and their allies spent Saturday, January 20, marching in Oakland to support the cause of women. Women’s March Oakland organizers will focus on registering voters throughout the year leading up to midterm elections in November as well as helping more women run for public office. Around the rest of the country, protests drew more than a million people.
In Berkeley, the La Peña Cultural Center and the UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative hosted an open mic night on January 26 called “Empowering Women of Color Open Mic.” The event opened a three-show series intended to provide a safe space for women of color to express themselves.