Oakland North TV
Jason Muñiz stands in the door frame that separates his classroom from the bright hallway full of lockers, with his hands holding onto the frame behind him. He looks back and forth from the high school students who are greeting each other before taking a seat inside the classroom, and welcomes the ones who are just walking in. When the school bell rings, Muñiz walks to the front of the classroom, closing the door behind him. “Thank you for being…
Cynthia Obleton was born and raised in Abandze, a coastal town in Ghana’s Central Region. She started braiding at age fifteen and opened her first salon at seventeen. In 2010, Obleton moved from Ghana to Oakland, where she started a braiding business at her house. In 2014, she opened Sankofa Braiding and Natural HairCare in South Berkeley. She says she wants her salon to be a place where black women feel comfortable. “I realized that I’m living in a place where…
Every month, a group of technology enthusiasts meet in an Oakland warehouse to build tiny self-driving cars. “DIY Robocars” was organized by Chris Anderson, who also runs drone company 3DR. While these cheap, disposable cars aren’t as sophisticated as the ones being developed by Tesla or Google, Anderson says that the advantage of using these “Robocars” is that there is lots of room to fail.
Artist Favianna Rodriguez is busy designing political posters and preparing to produce a large glass mural. A printmaker by trade, the mural will be the first time Rodriguez works wth glass. Ten minutes away, in a gallery in downtown Oakland, Natalia Mount spends her days guiding visitors through the current exhibition, which includes sculptures that move and emit loud sounds. The executive director of Pro Arts Gallery, Mount is eagerly planning new shows that toy with accepted notions of what is…
Crack, snap, and pop. That it is all you hear on the football field as Ronald Jenkins, known to his friends and teammates as RJ, drives his shoulder into the waistline of the ball carrier for the opposing team. With a huge thud that sounds like a body breaking in half, they both hit the turf. As the whistle blows in the background, signaling the end of the play, Jenkins gets up and proceeds to dance, not even acknowledging his…
Bang! There go the bowling pins, as Benton Lu knocks down another strike on the bowling lane. He stands there quietly, and admires his work. Then he turns around, and walks back to the resurfacing machine to grab his ball. Lu returns to position to deliver another strike. He cocks his left foot back, and begins to walk slowly towards the lane, like a lion getting ready to devour its prey. His eyes look as if he was in a…
The ball smacks down right in the middle of the court off of Hannah Hoang’s hand. She quickly runs back into the line, as she gets ready to deliver another devastating spike. She leaps into the air as gracefully as if she were performing ballet, but comes down hard with a spike that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As a defender on the women’s volleyball team at Oakland Senior High School, Hoang is…
This article is part of “Birthing Inequity,” an Oakland North project on maternal and infant health disparities in Oakland. See the full multimedia report here. In 2003, while she was carrying her third child, Tanisha Fuller had to convince her hospital caretakers that something was really wrong. Six months pregnant, and unsure of what was happening to her, she’d rushed to the emergency room with pain in her back, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, she was told that…
Oakland City workers represented by SEIU Local 1021, with the solidarity of IBEW 1245 workers, have been participating in an unfair labor practice strike for the last four days, while IFPTE Local 21 has participated in a sympathy strike.