INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

What do we owe our young people? Respect, if nothing else. It’s the best way they can learn how to give respect in return.

A few weeks ago, a couple of young folks—African-Americans—dropped by Oakland City Council to make a presentation. They were members of Books Not Bars, an organization that has been fighting against what they call Alameda County’s proposed new juvenile hall "superjail." They think the proposed new hall is too large, and shouldn’t be moved way out in Dublin, and they wanted Oakland City Council to have a discussion on the subject.

But Oakland City Council didn’t want to have a discussion.

Councilmember Larry Reid, among others, argued that since the juvenile hall issue was under the jurisdiction of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, he didn’t want to waste his time or anybody else’s talking about something that City Council couldn’t do anything about. He said he wasn’t into symbolic voting. Council agreed with him.

As luck or fate or Ochosi would have it, the next item on the Council agenda that night was a resolution to oppose AT&T Broadband’s new cable rate increases in Oakland. Since the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1998, city councils across the country no longer have power over cable rate hikes. But Council wanted to have their sayso, anyhow. And they did, on a "symbolic vote," immediately after they refused to talk about the juvenile hall issue. It wasn’t consistent but, then, this is not a Council that’s made consistency a high priority. Oh, yes. The AT&T protest resolution was sponsored by…you guessed it…Larry Reid.

But consistency is a side issue here.

When the City Council voted not to talk about juvenile hall, one of the young men from Books Not Bars took offense. He started shouting his opinion of City Council, and had to be escorted out of Council chambers by a couple of police. What he did was inappropriate. But what Councilmember Larry Reid did afterward was just as bad, maybe worse. Grinning, Reid shouted after the departing young man, "God bless America, brother!"

If the Councilmember had been Terrell Owens, he’d have been benched and fined. This was clearly taunting.

After the Council adjourned a few minutes later, Reid got in a shouting/screaming match with the young man at one of the side doors of City Hall. Friends had to pull both of them away.

There are more implications here than juvenile hall. It also involves the greater relationship of the City of Oakland with our young black folk.

Larry Reid has been the Council point man on the city’s "sideshow" issue. Since these late-night gatherings of young African-American drivers seem at their worst merely a major annoyance—unlike, say, the drug-dealing and murders and burglaries and strong-arm robberies and gang wars that plague Oakland’s nights—I’ve often wondered why there wasn’t some middle ground that could be worked out. Once, when I asked another City Councilmember why negotiations with the young folk hadn’t been instituted, he told me, privately, that he was under the impression that Reid had already tried it, and it had failed, and that’s why Council had endorsed a crackdown on the kids.

Some time ago, Councilmember Reid held an East Oakland community meeting on the sideshow issue. In the televised portion I saw, Reid got into a similar shouting match with some of the young African-American folks who attended, at one time telling them that they weren’t wanted in the community. So maybe Larry Reid’s not the best person to handle such negotiations. Maybe he’s got the wrong temperament.

Committed, true-believing young folks like the Books Not Bars people can be a godsend when they’re on your side and a pain-in-the-ass when they’re not. They often don’t like to listen to the opposite side. But without the fervor of such folk, the American rights we so celebrate would simply not exist. A hundred and fifty years ago, these type of young folk would have conducted on the Underground Railroad or shot at slave traders. Thirty years ago they would have been marching in Selma.

If we don’t think these young activists are on the right track today, we ought to find a better way of telling them. After all, thirty years from now they might end up writing a weekly column in an Oakland newspaper. Or sitting on City Council.