The Color of Power: Racial Coalitions and Political Power in Oakland

By Frédérick Douzet and George Holoch

The Color of Power is a fascinating examination of the changing politics of race in Oakland, California. Oakland has been at the forefront of California’s multicultural changes for decades. Since the 1960s, the city has been a shining example of a fruitful liberal black-and-white political partnership and the successful incorporation of black politicians into the political landscape. But over the past forty years, the balance of power has changed as a consequence of dramatic demographic trends and economic circumstances. The city’s formerly dominant biracial political machine has been challenged by the demands of new multiracial interests.

The city, once governed by a succession of black mayors and majority black city councils, must now accommodate rapidly growing Asian and Latino communities. While the black-led coalition still relies on white progressive support, this alliance has weakened due to a shift in the progressives’ agenda and the voting habits of the black community, the rise of a Hispanic-Asian coalition, and a strong demographic decline of the African American population. With similar demographic changes taking place across the nation, Oakland’s experience provides insight in to the multiracial future of other American cities.

The Color of Power investigates Oakland’s contemporary racial politics with a detailed study of conflicts over issues like education, elections and political representation, and crime. Trained as a journalist, a political scientist, and a geographer, the author provides a unique perspective supported by numerous maps and extensive interviews.

Winner of awards from the French Society of Geography and the French National Academy of Sciences

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932842

Book preview

Introduction

In their book Protest Is Not Enough¹ (1984), Browning, Marshall, and Tabb argued that minority incorporation in the political life of cities was based on biracial coalitions formed by the electoral mobilization of African Americans combined with the backing of progressive whites. Although Hispanics were at times associated with these coalitions, their role was never necessary or sufficient for minority political incorporation up to the early 1990s.² The city of Oakland, California, was one of the case studies Browning et al. picked as a significant example of successful liberal black-and-white coalitions.

After several decades of experience with African American mayors and changing demographics, we need to reflect on the adequacy of this paradigm in light of the contemporary situation. Massive immigration has brought substantial demographic change to predominantly black cities while gentrification has attracted young white-collar professionals to many inner cities.

Meanwhile, a number of predominantly black cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Atlanta have faced a decline in black population, both in absolute numbers and population share.³ This phenomenon can be explained by the cities’ spatial assimilation into the suburbs and recent desegregation, along with their increased diversity within the inner city.⁴ Contemporary studies have identified patterns of conflicts and coalitions that arise among the main racial and ethnic groups in areas that were once majority African American and are now becoming more diverse.⁵ Considering the diffusion of immigration across the territory,⁶ it is likely that many cities with a large black population and a dynamic economy will face similar trends, raising the question of the future of black political power and minority incorporation.

To what extent, in these new circumstances, can black power rely on biracial coalitions and progressive politics as it did forty years ago? It seems unlikely that African Americans will be in a position to form governing coalitions with business interests as durable as those found in C. N. Stone’s analysis of Atlanta.⁷ Black control seems to be more tenuous and fragile than it was ten or fifteen years ago in cities where we find these new demographic patterns.⁸ Yet raw numbers might not be the primary reason.

There are several possible explanations for the changing fortunes of black empowerment. This case study considers the city of Oakland, California, after more than two decades of black elected mayors. Because of the demographic and political changes Oakland has gone through over the past forty years, it is now at the cutting edge of new coalition politics.

The main findings are that black urban power in Oakland is still predominantly coalition based but involves new coalition partners with the demographic growth and electoral mobilization of Hispanics and Asians. While the black-led coalition still relies on white progressive support, this support has weakened, mostly because of the broadening of the progressives’ agenda. Finally, the black community seems less likely to vote on pure identity grounds and increasingly inclined to vote on issues and interests.

Methodology

This book is based on a mixture of elite interviews and aggregate data. Semi-open qualitative interviews were conducted between 1993 and 2009 with the major players of Oakland politics, including Mayor Elihu Harris, Mayor Jerry Brown, Police Chief Wayne Tucker, City Attorney John Russo, most of the city council and school board members and their staff, businesspeople, community and church leaders, police officers, schoolteachers, members of grassroots organizations, local reporters, and residents. In addition, I attended many community and city council meetings and regularly read the newspapers to keep up with the salient issues and key actors.

This study also utilizes data collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Oakland police department, the Alameda County registrar of voters, the Oakland Unified School District and the Statewide Database of the Institute of Governmental Studies of the University of California at Berkeley. Most of the data collected were used to develop maps.

This study is based on a multidisciplinary approach within a field called urban geopolitics in France. Geopolitics has become a buzzword in the media, lacking definition and often referring to complex conflictual situations between nation-states. Definitions, however, abound in the literature, reflecting an ongoing and broad intellectual debate. The concept of critical geopolitics emerged in the 1970s in opposition to classical geopolitics, which refers to the objective and neutral stance adopted by the great powers up to the Second World War, putting forward geographic determinism to legitimate military action. The German school of geopolitics, based on the theories of Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen, led to the use of geopolitics between the two world wars to serve the interests of Nazi power. As a result, geopolitics was neglected in the postwar period. Yves Lacoste was the first to revive the use of the term in the 1970s with his best-selling book La géographie, ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre⁹ and the journal he founded, Hérodote. The concept emerged in the literature in English in the 1990s with the writings of John Agnew (1998) and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1996).¹⁰

Most of the contemporary definitions articulate the relationship between power (soft power, military, political) and space (territory, nations, groups of nations) in the context of world conflicts. The literature in English defines geopolitics as a discourse about world politics. In his book Geopolitics: Revisioning World Politics, John Agnew claims that understanding contemporary global geopolitics requires a critical examination of what he calls the modern geopolitical imagination, by which he means thinking globally about world politics.¹¹ The French school of geopolitics led by Yves Lacoste emphasizes more specifically the notion of power competition over territories between rival forces, which can apply to territories of various sizes and shapes.¹² This approach has been applied to conflicts occurring in smaller territories, within a nation or a region.¹³ Here this approach is applied to the level of the city.¹⁴ Urban geopolitics therefore refers to rivalries of power between groups and political forces in urban territories, using geography and tools borrowed from other disciplines to understand complex political conflicts.

Clarence Stone’s research has powerfully demonstrated how cities operate through complex alliances and interpersonal relationships between community groups, business leaders, neighborhoods, and local officials. This approach is necessary to make the distinction between the power over (control) and the power to (how individual actors develop through alliances with others a power to act that they would not otherwise) that groups or individuals have achieved in the context of changing demographics and challenging urban issues in the city of Oakland.¹⁵

The use of geography is particularly relevant to the study of Oakland’s politics because of the district-based election process and the changing patterns of the spatial distribution and concentration of minorities in the city. In the absence of exit polls, mapping election results helps identify ethnic bloc voting when it occurs. Although we should be aware of the ecological inference fallacy, the spatial concentration of minorities is so high in some census tracts that it allows spatial correlation with voting precinct to identify a trend. Mapping also allows us to understand the impact of political redistricting on minority empowerment in the city.

The next section outlines the prevailing paradigm of black power and the possible reasons why the old black-and-white coalition in Oakland might no longer be sustainable. It then leads into the case study.

Oakland: A Case Study in a New Urban Minority Paradigm

Although it is located on the West Coast, Oakland is a typical example of an old industrial black-dominated city normally found in the East and the Midwest. Oakland went through strong protest movements and a long struggle before it eventually achieved minority incorporation in the 1970s.¹⁶ Oakland was once a leading symbol of black power with the birth of the Black Panther Party. Incorporation was slowed down by the divisions in the black community: the unusual intensity of protest in Oakland, and in particular the extreme militancy of the Black Panther Party, did disrupt and postpone the kind of unity among blacks and between blacks and supportive whites that would have been necessary for a successful challenge to the conservative dominant coalition.¹⁷ And the resistance of the dominant coalition was particularly high, as it was in Vallejo.¹⁸ Oakland’s large black population eventually overcame the fragmentation of intense conflict and extreme militancy to win control of city government.¹⁹

The city elected its first black mayor in 1977. According to Browning et al. in Racial Politics in American Cities, Oakland achieved strong incorporation, measured by the establishment of a civilian review police board, the appointment of minority members to city boards and commissions, provisions for minority shares of city contracts, and minority employment in city government.²⁰ Browning et al. defined incorporation as the key to minority political success, in that it meant that minorities had won entry into the political leadership coalition of the city. Oakland therefore fits the case of cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where protest led to the elaboration of successful biracial coalitions that proved to be a powerful vehicle for minority incorporation.²¹

Browning et al. in Racial Politics in American Cities identified two major requirements for black empowerment. The first one is size: large black or Latino populations were critical to develop intense, sustained demand-and-protest activities; percentages were essential to win elections.²² The second is the support of white liberals and sometimes Hispanics. Numbers can generate massive protest, but percentages win elections. In all ten cities studied, black and Latino populations fell short of a majority and depended on the support of white liberals. But in the last forty years, the city of Oakland has undergone major demographic and political changes. The question is to what extent are these two requirements still met?

1. Since it reached its peak in 1980 with 46 percent of the total population, the black percentage of the population of Oakland has been decreasing. Hispanic and Asian immigrants have settled there in great numbers, putting an end to a cycle of population decline for the city and potentially challenging black power. Raphael J. Sonenshein and Susan H. Pinkus argue that the Hispanics’ role in minority advancement is likely to change: Latinos’ impressive demographic strength is now translating into major voter registration and turnout gains, and Latinos increasingly are taking the lead in minority incorporation in some cities and states.²³ In addition to demographic growth, political reaction against immigration has encouraged Latino immigrants to seek naturalization and to register to vote. Following Proposition 187 in California in 1994, the number of Latino voters increased by one million in the 1990s.²⁴ The 2008 election clearly demonstrated that the debate over immigration reform had encouraged Latino participation.²⁵ In the spring of 2006, many demonstrators chanted, Today we march—tomorrow we vote!

2. Meanwhile, progressive whites—particularly younger generations—have become more diverse and concerned with issues that may conflict with a traditional black agenda, such as environmental protection, crime reduction, and downtown business growth. There is a greater diversity of interests in minority groups as well about issues such as economic development, land use, and taxation. Browning et al. in Racial Politics in American Cities, well aware of how the urban minority setting is changing, state: Coalitions between groups are now more likely to be organized around particular, diverse, and fluid issues rather than around fixed electoral slates centered on fundamental fairness in housing, employment, contracting, and services that formerly defined racial liberalism in the struggle against exclusion.²⁶

In his book Left Coast City, Richard E. DeLeon emphasizes the diversity of the progressives in San Francisco.²⁷ He argues that African Americans encounter difficulties forging stable coalitions in the city, because they are liberal on economic issues but more conservative on social and environmental issues. Black incorporation is not necessarily sufficient. The pro-growth politics of the Willie Brown administration, for example, fostered gentrification and threatened to displace the low-income families he had been promising to serve.²⁸ Similarly, the election of Jerry Brown and his 10K housing plan, a plan to build ten thousand housing units to gentrify downtown, is highly symptomatic of the broadening of the progressives’ agenda.

In addition, white progressives now have other options in addition to supporting black incorporation. The goal has somewhat shifted from breaking racial barriers to being inclusive with all minorities. In the early 1990s, political redistricting gave rise to an Asian-Hispanic coalition supported by white progressives that redistributed electoral power in the city. Oakland had adopted district-based elections in 1981, which, according to Browning et al. in Racial Politics in American Cities, is a factor likely to weaken biracial coalitions, particularly in cities with a large plurality of African American voters, such as Oakland or Richmond.²⁹ It encourages more grassroots, neighborhood-based politics, requiring less money and name recognition than at-large elections. In cities where minorities are small, however, district elections are essential to winning minority representation. Yet in 1991, the new census showed that the Hispanic and Asian communities were split among districts, undermining their ability to elect a representative.

The black leadership chose to redraw the city district lines in order to allow a better incorporation of Asian and Hispanic minorities in the city. And by 1998, the number of black council members had dropped from five in 1992 to two and the mayor of Oakland was no longer black. Considering the demographic trends at work, this is probably the price to be paid for inclusive and progressive politics by the African Americans. Bruce E. Cain, the expert for Oakland’s redistricting and for the California state legislative redistricting, noted: Taking low-voting, high-immigrant Latino or Asian neighborhoods out of black districts to create majority Latino or Asian seats could lead to retrogression in African American representation. But opposing that approach puts African Americans in the uncomfortable position of opposing additional representation for other underrepresented groups and of using the logic and the rhetoric that had previously been used against African Americans by white opponents to the VRA [Voting Rights Act].³⁰

Browning et al. in Racial Politics in American Cities argue that once incorporation is achieved, the scale of incorporation does not have to be as high quantitatively because of the qualitative gap, after a group is on the inside and its importance has been acknowledged. The scale of incorporation measured well the office holding that ensured representation of a group’s interests during the period of struggle to overcome exclusion, but it does not capture so well different structures that strongly represent group interests after exclusion has been overcome.³¹ But white mayor Jerry Brown’s politics raised concern among some of the black leadership who, in addition to losing council seats, felt shut out of power. In Oakland, under the Brown administration, responsiveness to constituents in the black community as defined in Racial Politics seemed to have declined. In addition, Mayor Brown endorsed as his successor a Latino candidate, which encouraged black leaders to resort to a well-known black political star to regain power in the city.

In 2006, Ron Dellums, a retired black congressman in his seventies, was elected the new mayor of Oakland after running a very tight race against Ignacio De La Fuente, a longtime Latino council member supported by Jerry Brown. Yet there are reasons to believe that this election might well have been the last gasp of the old black-and-white politics in Oakland, considering the new dynamics at work in the city.

Contents of the Book

Chapter 1 gives an overview of Oakland’s racial and political evolution in the midst of the debate over multiculturalism and anti-immigrant politics. Most of the background on national and state racial and political history in the original French version has been eliminated in this edition, since these issues are well known to the American audience.

Chapter 2 traces the growth of black political power through the establishment of federal poverty programs in Oakland and the switch from confrontational to electoral tactics. It emphasizes the violent struggle to break racial barriers in a city that was once controlled by a white oligarchy. This history has been very well documented by Robert O. Self in his book American Babylon (2003) and by Browning et al. in Protest Is Not Enough (1984).³²

Chapter 3 chronicles the economic problems Oakland faces and its various attempts to improve the city’s business climate. It explores the long-lasting impact of deindustrialization and the various economic blows Oakland has suffered over the years. It includes discussions of the city’s unwise underwriting of sports stadiums, the ongoing competition from neighboring cities, and Mayor Jerry Brown’s initiatives to attract investors and middle-class taxpayers into the downtown areas.

Chapter 4 focuses on the overlay of poverty on political power. It explores the heterogeneity of various new immigrant groups and the way that demographic differences can hinder solidarity. It also discusses the perceptions and resentments of African Americans toward the changes they see in their community.

Chapter 5 traces the conflicts in redistricting and affirmative action hiring between the black, Latino, and Asian populations. It documents the emergence of an Asian-Hispanic coalition and underlines the awkward position some of the black leaders were put in when their own civil rights logic was used against them. It also demonstrates that voters are ready to cross lines in a city that is accustomed to diversity and still struggles economically.

Chapter 6 presents education as a critical political issue. The Oakland school board made national news on the Ebonics debate in the mid-nineties. This chapter traces the tie between educational attainment and economic inequality and then shows how the layering of bilingual programs and ongoing underachievement of disadvantaged children has caused concerns in the black community. Whether the issue is the choice of textbooks, the teachers’ strike, bilingual programs, or budget cuts, the racial card has been played in most of the education debates.

Chapter 7 addresses the issue of crime and the tense relationship between the police and the community. It discusses the correlation of crime and poverty, conflicts over police reform, the fight over the creation of a civilian police review board, and the prevalence of drugs, as well as the impact of the war on drugs and of the three strikes law. Much of the national and state background intended for a French audience, however, has been cut from the original version.

The conclusion gives an update of the recent developments of the city since the original edition was published in 2007. The subprime crisis and the recession have hit the city very hard, leading to thousands of foreclosures and small-business bankruptcies. New investors and developers have lost millions of dollars, which raises concerns about whether the city is entering a new cycle of disinvestment. At the state level, California is going through one of the worst financial crises of its history, taking resources away from struggling cities. Finally, new scandals have hit the city, and the underperformance of Mayor Ron Dellums could discourage voters about the power of politics to solve black community issues.

1   Racial Diversity

A Central Political Issue

The shift of a black and white biracial model toward a multicultural model is a new phase in the long history of racial politics in the United States, a history closely related to the country’s immigration policies and economic conditions. Two questions constantly recur, one or the other dominating depending on circumstances. The first has to do with the assimilation of a mass of foreigners who pose economic, political, and identity problems, the second with equality of opportunity and equality of results in connection with the adoption, followed by the side effects, of affirmative action policies.

In periods of large-scale immigration, questions of assimilation were raised with great vehemence, notably between 1840 and 1930, with the massive influx of European migrants into the East and Midwest. These questions produced a revival of nativism, the denunciation of the foreigner who was ‘unassimilable’ because of his language, his conduct, and his lack of political loyalty. They also gave rise to conflicts on subjects such as bilingual education for German speakers and political battles engendering xenophobic laws that limited the rights of one minority or another.¹

In the late 1960s, the United States embarked on a new period of massive immigration, but this time the majority of immigrants was not white but Asian and Latin American, which inevitably reawakened ancestral fears about assimilation. Many migrants settled in areas inhabited by blacks and gradually began to adopt their demands for equality and their rhetoric. They also sought legal protection against discrimination and the benefits of national affirmative action programs. The issue of multiculturalism thus brings together questions of assimilation and of equality among ethnic groups. California reacted by calling into question both the rights of immigrants and favorable treatment of minorities, whether preferential treatment afforded by affirmative action or antipoverty measures that were seen as primarily benefiting urban minorities.

Multiculturalism and multicultural representations emerged from many sources, the chief of which was unquestionably immigration. California can, in this respect, be considered a veritable laboratory. It is both the most populous state in the country and the one that receives the largest number of immigrants every year. In 1992, California admitted more than one fourth of the immigrants to the United States, a figure three times that of Texas and not including illegal immigrants. In 2003, the state took in 291,216 immigrants, twice the New York figure (114,827). California was also the scene of contests for power directly related to questions of immigration and the struggle for equal opportunity and greater real equality among various ethnic groups.

The California Laboratory

The real story of the California Dream—past, present, and future—is a story about the clash between the instinctive barrier of self-protective isolationism and the irresistible force of immigration. It is a story of institutional authority that creates a dream for those it accepts while simultaneously crushing the dream for those it rejects.² California seems to have been at the origin of most of the political movements and events that marked the history of racial politics in the United States in the 1990s. Profoundly multicultural because of its demography, many aspects of its culture, and the lifestyles of its residents, California is also the state in which the political manifestations of racial tensions were the most acute in the 1990s. The Rodney King affair and the subsequent Los Angeles riots, the O. J. Simpson case, Proposition 187 (intended to deprive illegal immigrants of access to medical care, public education, and social services), Proposition 209 (ending affirmative action programs), and Proposition 227 (opposing bilingual education) are all indications of the importance of multiculturalism in California and of the importance of California in the study of multiculturalism in the United States.³

By 2006, California was the most populous state in the country, with more than 35 million residents. But in 1940 it had been ranked only fifth. The state thus experienced extremely rapid growth in the second half of the twentieth century, some of which, up to the mid-1990s, was attributable to internal U.S. migration, but the great majority of growth—70 percent in the 1980s—was due to the influx of foreign populations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, California was a state with one of the most diverse populations and the only one that was no longer majority white. Unlike the waves of primarily European immigrants in the early twentieth century, approximately 35 percent of recent legal immigrants are from Asia and a little more than 40 percent come from Latin America and the Caribbean, chiefly from Mexico, which is also thought to be the source of more than two thirds of the illegal immigrants. The rest come in equal parts from Europe and from the rest of the world.⁴

What provoked debates about immigration was less the number of immigrants than the swift and radical transformation of the composition of the state’s population. In 1980, Hispanics accounted for only 19.2 percent of California’s total population. By 1995, they had reached 28 percent, by 2004 more than 34 percent, and, if current trends continue, are projected to be 45 percent by 2025. Growth was just as rapid for Asians, particularly because their immigration was heavily concentrated in California: 40 percent of Asian immigrants to the United States live in the state.

Other elements, however, contributed to the political reactions engendered by these demographic changes, among them the economic circumstances of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Supported by the Reagan administration’s high level of defense spending, California did not immediately experience the economic recession that severely affected other states in those years. But with the disappearance of the Soviet threat, the defense budget was considerably reduced, many military bases were closed, and weapons manufacturers began layoffs. The recession had painful effects on the labor market, particularly for less qualified workers. Immigrants became scapegoats for the difficult economic situation; they were accused of taking the jobs of native Californians and thereby aggravating the recession. Experts debated about the extent of the economic impact of immigrants. Some argued that illegals undermined the labor market by agreeing to work for outrageously low wages and competing unfairly against the black minority and legal Hispanic immigrants, forcing them into unemployment. In contrast, others contended that the economic vitality of California owed a good deal to immigration, whose benefits far exceeded its costs.⁵

The political context unquestionably bolstered the effect of economic and demographic developments. Governor Pete Wilson, who at the time still thought he could be a candidate for the presidency of the United States, constantly threw oil on the fire with the sole purpose of getting reelected. In 1992, two years before his reelection, he took on illegal immigration, which he claimed to be the source of all California’s ills, and did not hesitate to challenge the federal government on the question. He asserted that the heart of the problem was located not at the Mexican border but in the decisions made 3,000 miles from California, in Washington, D.C. Wilson particularly emphasized the costs of immigration at a time when the state’s property tax revenues had literally collapsed since the passage of Proposition 13.⁶ In June 1978, California voters had passed that popular initiative limiting property taxes to one percent of the cash value of the property as assessed in 1975. This was the first major episode of direct democracy in California whereby questions of social policy were placed squarely in the hands of the voters. The immediate result was a 57 percent fall in the state’s property tax revenues, approximately $6 billion annually. This taxpayer revolt reduced the state’s resources traditionally allocated to services and public education, thereby accentuating the inequality between rich and poor. Those most affected were new immigrants and marginalized populations, primarily black and Hispanic minorities.⁷

The nature of the state’s political institutions also helps explain the events of the 1990s. It is particularly necessary to take into account a specific aspect of the political system: the popular initiative. In 1911, Californians approved a measure permitting citizens, backed by a petition, to submit amendments to the constitution and propose laws directly to the voters.⁸ Between 1911 and 2000, 278 initiatives (called propositions) were presented and 90 approved. Most of them dealt with minor questions, but a few touching on basic public policy questions, like Proposition 13, transformed the life of Californians. The use of popular initiatives increased over the last two decades of the century. In the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, 112 propositions were submitted for a vote and 44 adopted, compared with 166 presented and 46 adopted in the course of the 70 preceding years. While the popular initiative was seen at the beginning as a progressive device, it has gradually been exploited for conservative ends. The commentator Peter Schrag, former editor in chief of the Sacramento Bee, thinks that referendums on popular initiatives have destroyed California and that the system has reached its limits. The more Californians use referendums, the less power the state legislature has and the less it is able to provide the social benefits and public services that once made California a livable state.⁹ In the course of the 1990s, some of these initiatives were co-opted by candidates for national office, a sign that they were focused on a certain number of partisan concerns. This was the case, for example, for Proposition 209, supported by Robert Dole, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1996. This measure ended affirmative action programs in California in a vote that was clearly divided along ethnic and racial lines. It was also the case for proposition 187, entitled Save Our State, which, while not initiated by Gov. Pete Wilson, clearly echoed his speeches demonizing immigration. The measure was approved by 59 percent of the electorate and, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll, by 63 percent of white voters, 55 percent of black voters, 55 percent of Asian voters, and 31 percent of Hispanic voters. It was invalidated by a federal court and never took effect.

San Francisco Bay Area

It is in this context of heavy immigration, demographic transformation, economic recession, budgetary difficulties, and political and racial tensions that the case of Oakland needs to be considered.

Why Oakland?

Studies dealing with the questions sketched above are often most interesting on the local level, because the territory and its organization are at the center of the debate. Ideas and perceptions that circulate at the state or national level have some impact, but local matters contribute at least as much to shape those representations. Depending on the urban, demographic, and economic configuration of a territory, the stakes differ and alliances between political groups vary according to need, as does political conduct. The city of Oakland went through a very interesting transitional phase in the 1990s, during which time demographic transformations led to a redistribution of power among minorities in the city. The keys to understanding the current dynamics of interaction among minorities lie in a study of this transition period.

Urban Portrait

An Integrated City

Designated an All-America City by USA Today and the National Civic League in 1993, Oakland has the reputation of being the most ethnically and racially integrated city in the United States. The city’s presentation brochures and speeches by its representatives and promoters overflow with references to its ethnic richness and the diversity of its neighborhoods. In the early 1990s, its political leaders and the leaders of various ethnic communities frequently used the expression laboratory of multiculturalism to describe their city. Diversity became one of their chief arguments in creating a positive identity for Oakland, capable of overcoming an extremely negative image linked to economic decline, poverty, racial tensions, and galloping criminality.

An observation of the city’s urban landscape demonstrates, at first sight, the great extent of the racial mixture of the population, evidenced by the proximity of Asian and Hispanic stores in some neighborhoods, the presence of people of every origin in downtown Oakland, and the diversity of the population attending public meetings and other social events. But a more refined analysis tends to attenuate this image of an integrated city. While some neighborhoods are significantly and increasingly mixed because of immigration, there is a marked ethnic concentration in many other neighborhoods, and a particularly spectacular socioeconomic segregation dividing Oakland into the Hills and the flatlands. The racial question is thus compounded by socioeconomic and geographic aspects that are important for the interpretation of relations between the races in Oakland.

Confronting a demographic explosion of its minorities in the early 1990s, Oakland was in the forefront of what, according to demographic projections, seemed to await most large urban centers in the early twenty-first century. In the ten years between 1980 and 1990, the Asian population doubled and the Hispanic population increased by half, bringing each of these minorities to 15 percent of the total population. The tendency was confirmed in the succeeding decade, with a 69 percent growth of Hispanics, who in 2000 comprised nearly 22 percent of the population. The city had always had some degree of racial diversity from its beginnings, and its geographical situation itself, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, had long exposed it to the successive waves of immigration that peopled California and the ideological debates they provoked. Despite that diversity, tensions and power contests between ethnic groups, in Oakland as in most American cities, had been expressed primarily between white and black populations. Long a bastion of a white Republican oligarchy, the city was in the hands of a few families who resisted the access of minorities to political power for many years.

The conquest of power by the black minority in the 1970s, with the election of Lionel Wilson as mayor in April 1977, was the start of a major shift that contributed, as in many other American cities, to a massive flight of the well-to-do white population to the nearby suburbs, where development was booming thanks to federal subsidies, mainly through secured mortgages and infrastructure building. This movement had already begun after the Second World War, which, by fostering the city’s economic development and economic opportunities for people of color notably through federal weapons programs, had encouraged the influx of a substantial unskilled black population.

Simultaneously, the city experienced a number of economic setbacks characteristic of the development of urban centers over the past thirty years. The decline of industry and the movement of the most thriving companies to the periphery greatly contributed to the deterioration of the city’s economic situation. Oakland has a greater number of industrial wastelands than neighboring cities. The attempt to convert to a service economy with the help of development programs financed by the federal government led to the construction of numerous office buildings in downtown Oakland. While these buildings house a significant number of public administrations, there were too many of them and the ambitious project of conversion to a service economy turned into an economic fiasco, with a particularly high rate of unoccupied offices. The city was hit by two natural disasters that did nothing to improve its economic situation: the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and the 1991 fire that destroyed more than 3,000 houses. Despite an exceptional location on San Francisco Bay, at the center of a strong transportation network connecting an international airport, one of the largest ports on the Pacific coast, mass transit services facilitating travel to San Francisco and the rest of the region, the presence of the administrative offices, and a significant service economy, in the early 1990s Oakland did not seem able to overcome the economic crisis in which the city had been mired for years.

The economic and demographic evolution of the urban environment had driven many whites out of the city, and its population declined until 1980. The black population, in contrast, continued to grow up to 1990 (42.8 percent) and then began to decline (27 percent in 2010). Oakland remained a major pocket of poverty with 19.4 percent of the population, exclusively concentrated in the flatlands, living below the poverty