I attended a community meeting about diesel emissions in West Oakland yesterday. It was fairly well-attended; the air regulators did their best to present dry voluminous data as attractively and succinctly as they could; and good questions were raised by the audience, with environmental scientists clarifying technical issues and community advocates injecting the role of checks-and-balances into the process with their emphatic comments.On the surface, it seemed like a typical community meeting, with people networking in whispers in the shadows, a presenter trying to connect with the audience by laughingly disparaging herself when a mistake was identified on her slide,…but then a small-framed elderly woman opened her mouth to speak.
I’ve seen Ms. P at most of the town hall meetings I’ve been to in this neighborhood. I dare say she’s one of the matriarchs of West Oakland, having lived there for almost a century. She looks in her 80s, her gentle face dusted with light powder, her wavy curls kept neatly in place with a long hair pin. On this night, her stockinged feet braced themselves in open-toed pumps as she called us out. In a frail but stern voice, she announced that this was not a “community meeting”, as there were hardly any “community folk” there. She calmly snipped at the presenters’ defenses with, “I didn’t receive any postcard” and “No, I don’t want to talk with you one-on-one at the end. Maybe that’s the problem. Explain this now, in front of everyone.”
I scanned my gaze around the room. Sure enough, I was among the 45 of 50 or so participants who would leave West Oakland that night and drive home – home, where our neighborhoods don’t have the distinctions that children are 7 times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than the average child in the state of California; nearly 82% of the population live within 1/8 mile of an industrial area; 31% of residents are not able to afford the median rent on available housing units (Pacific Institute). Our backyards certainly don’t look much like theirs.
1 comment:
Wow. It's unfortunate that activism is often an activity for the "well-off" and not the "getting by". Your right, when you've got real life issues like health care and making the rent facing you everyday, sometimes coming to a meeting at night is not high on the priority list. It's too bad. Go Ms. P - REPRESENT :)
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