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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2008 - January 2009
Youth speak on crisis in Oakland
Oakland, Cal.--The banks failing may be new, but African-American people have been going through a permanent recession for years. I'm intelligent, I have what it takes, but because of my color and my background of generations of poverty, I'm not going to be able to get the capital to start the small business that I want. I have bad credit because I lived off credit cards when there was no money. Now I'm in debt like $10,000.
Diamond (right) and D.Nok at the meeting where they addressed how they see the crisis.
I would like to see more meetings like this News and Letters meeting, more dialogues about the crisis in capitalism and how it's affecting us in our neighborhoods down here. You know, we're walking down the street trying to sell our Silence the Violence CDs and it's a Friday night and the kids are hungry. And it's like, "No, sorry, can't help you." It's getting later and later so what you going to do? You call your partner and say let me get some dope so I can go sell it real quick and get this $20 to feed my kids.
Or this man, he thinks I'm pretty cute so he wants to give me $100 to spend time with him. And that's what I see in my community, I see little girls walking down the street saying: "Can you pimp me?" cuz they mamma is in the house smoking crack and they got eight other siblings and they're not eating. That's what I see in my neighborhood.
I know we can make it. Obama's president. We got Condoleezza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan. I see that, I know that is possible. But when you're down here, the teacher is throwing chalk at you telling you you're hella stupid, you're never going to be nothing. And it's really bad in the house, there's no food, and you're raped by your big brother and you're trained by the dudes in the neighborhood. "Trained" means literally one after another rapes you and there's nothing you can do about it. If you tell, they get their sister to beat you up. That's what we live with. If you're smart and you're raising your hand to answer a question in class, then after school someone wants to see you because, "You think you're better than me now."
I had the opportunity to go to [community college] in Hayward, so I've had the opportunity to experience some diversity. I know a lot of youth in Oakland don't get that opportunity. Growing up, this caused a lot of conflict. I looked like everybody looked, and I lived where everybody lived, but my experiences were different. That made my outlook on life different, so a lot of times I would clash with my peers over thinking and philosophy. A lot of times I felt isolated and alone, looking for friends, because I still wanted to have friends that were like me, from the hood, and understood what it meant to be from the hood but were also intellectual and knew that we had to get out the hood so we could come back and make changes.
Through my music I was able to get involved in the Turf Unity Project and Silence the Violence campaign, to teach peace and show our peers that there are alternatives to violence and there are other ways to live productively. My passion for the last few years is to go out into the community and teach people strategies to bring themselves out of poverty and a whole bunch of violence.
--Diamond
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