I grew up upper middle class. My parents took us on a trip to a foreign country every few years, and they sent us to sleepaway camp every summer. My teeth were straightened with braces on two separate occasions. My parents were always home to help me with homework. There was a distinct absence of stress, health problems, and suffering in my home. I never had to worry that I might not be housed next month, or stress that my future education depended solely on my grades and scholarships. Ultimately I was able to go to college with minimal student loans, and while in college, I had a financial safety net that allowed me to focus on my studies.
I grew up in a town whose property values were only reachable by the affluent. The kids in my class all had as much as I did, or sometimes much more. My friends’ parents were all realtors, lawyers, investment bankers and stock brokers. They picked up their kids in SUVs made by Cadillac and Mercedes. The moms wore white jeans and jangly gold bracelets. The dads had slick hair and expensive watches, and they never remembered the names of their children’s friends.
The police in our town have a small armada of shiny black muscle cars. They are well-funded and under-worked in a jurisdiction of only 10,000 people. Nervous residents call them in to chase away “suspicious loiterers” and to report the illegal use of gas-powered leaf blowers. People from the surrounding cities who don’t look like us try to stay away.
Our “public” schools regularly send dozens of students to Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, UCLA and the Ivy Leagues. I say “public” because our school zoning starts and ends with our city borders, which have so thoroughly red-lined and out-priced anyone from the surrounding communities, that we might as well call them private schools. Has there ever been such a thing as a “private city?”
I grew up with such distaste for this place and its people, but without any ability to articulate the problem. Even as a child I could tell there was something manufactured and unnatural about a city full of rich white people, surrounded by the colorful, dysfunctional, and historic cities of the East Bay. The sense of unfairness, of class levels between me and the kids I met from the surrounding areas, was too uncomfortable to contemplate. I did not want to recognize that I was living in a city that all but declares itself separate from its surrounding community on the basis of wealth and race.
My childhood was blessed; and most of the time, I did not care to actually look at the hand that was holding the silver spoon that fed me. I was too comfortable in my ignorance and affluence. If I had looked a little harder, I would have understood that there was no good reason for why I should deserve all these blessings and privileges, given to me by chance of birth. The guilt would have been intolerable.
I never asked any questions. I drifted through a self-conscious adolescence of embarrassing socio-economic class performance, and I moved out of town as soon as I could. For many years I wished I did not have to say where I was from when people asked. Piedmont made me uncomfortable. That’s all I knew, and that’s all I was willing to talk about.
Here’s what I’ve learned: it’s a waste of time to feel guilty. I was born lucky into a system that favors some and not others. The way things are is fucked, and my culpability starts when I let myself believe that I earned any of this, or that my parents earned any of this. It starts when I allow myself to believe that this is just the way things are, and I can’t do anything about it. Most importantly, my culpability will start if I accept the gifts and blessings of my privilege, and use them only to make myself richer.
Piedmont should not be a city. There should be no such thing as a rich city that is surrounded on all sides by its struggling, working-class neighbors. And no city should show a hole in its map where the rich white people have legally absconded to hoard their wealth and their privilege. Piedmont’s status as a separate city from Oakland means its residents get to invest their wealth in themselves and in their schools, over and over again, creating a bubble economy for their entitled children to reap more and more privileges, all as a direct result of the exclusion, racism and classism that elevates them above the rest. The cycle will only continue, as the affluent syphon off the wealth of the low-wage workers who make them rich, and then hoard that wealth amongst themselves. There is no ultimate benefit for those low-wage workers. There is no trickle down economic effect. How could there be, when Piedmont is literally a separate city that funds its own school district and police force? There is no affordable housing in Piedmont, let alone any free public facilities for low income community members. Piedmont, California is a perfect example of the tendency of the rich to manufacture their own little societies, exclusive of those without financial membership, so they can keep their wealth for themselves and their descendants. Piedmont has not changed in decades, and unless something is done on a conscious level, it will stay as exclusive, classist and racist as it has always been.
Reparations must be paid to the descendents of families who were denied homeownership in Piedmont due to race. School zoning needs to be expanded to include the surrounding Oakland neighborhoods, at the expense of the city of Piedmont. Free daycare centers should be established in the surrounding areas, all on Piedmont’s dollar. The story of the Dearing family must be taught in Piedmont schools; and historic monuments to those who have been wronged — from the native Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone peoples, to the Black families and businesspeople who were denied real estate — must be established in Piedmont Park. Critical Race Theory must become part of PUSD’s core curriculum from elementary school to high school. We must do everything we can to spread our obscene wealth to the working class people of Oakland. And ultimately, I believe we must rejoin our neighbors. There is no good, non-racist, reason for why Piedmont should continue to exist as a separate city. We must become a community again. Piedmont is Oakland.
Piedmont’s existence is embarrassing, and it always has been. We must be willing to see that, say it, and believe it. I would be proud to see Piedmont’s liberal majority use their considerable resources to create meaningful change. And I would be honored to get to feel genuinely connected to Oakland, one of the most beautiful, artistic, community-oriented, delicious, and fabulous cities in the world. Piedmonters — wouldn’t you?
THE RABID RABBIT 