Marquise S. sat in the driver’s seat of an old black Honda on Oakland’s Foothill Boulevard with white powder spread out over his knees. A slender young black woman sat in the passenger seat; a young black man with braids sat in the back. Marquise, a black man, looks like he’s in his early thirties. Rolling a piece of paper into a straw, he offered me a bump.

I declined, but he was willing to talk to me about the recent election anyway. “I voted for Trump,” he said, before I had the chance to ask.

Across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland is the African-American cultural capital of the West Coast. As the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, its politics are famously Left-wing. Kamala Harris was born here and claims it as her hometown. She even kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign in front of Oakland City Hall.

Yet from what I can tell, among black voters in Oakland, there’s never been an overwhelming sense of loyalty to Harris. I interviewed black Oakland residents both before and after she became the presidential nominee. Since she lost the election, I’ve interviewed several more. The lack of enthusiasm she inspires among black voters speaks to her weakness as a candidate. But more importantly, it indicates the long-growing disillusionment of black Americans with the Democratic Party, which was borne out in Donald Trump’s successful courtship of the working-class black vote during the election. In particular, Trump doubled his support from young black men.

“I don’t care about Kamala. Who’s Kamala? She’s just a woman,” a young woman in West Oakland named Sakai told me. She voted for Trump, and insisted that gas and grocery prices were already going down as a result of the election. “Life is going to go back to what it was before 2020 took place.”

Even the black Oakland residents I spoke to who had voted for Harris had done so without much enthusiasm. Dionne, a middle-aged black woman who works at an OB-GYN clinic in East Oakland, voted for Harris despite aligning more closely with Republican values — especially when it came to abortion. “I feel like [the Democrats are] leaning way in a direction that I’m not ready for,” she told me. When I asked her what issues she had in mind, she spoke of the Democrats allowing biological men to use the women’s restrooms, and how that could open the door for predators to go after kids.

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But the most immediate factor driving black voters away from the Democrats is the one driving voters of all races away: immigration.

Michelle is a 60-year-old black woman who grew up in Harris’s neighbourhood in Berkeley before moving to Oakland at the age of eight. She’s deeply involved in local politics. And over the years, she has gone from being a lifelong Democrat to  a Trump supporter. “We’ve always had a messianic complex,” she said of black American voters and their loyalty to Democrats. “There were always figures who could dazzle us with bullshit.”

The final straw for Michelle was the Democrats’ “insane” policies on immigration. Democratic politicians “blatantly drop like 10 or 15,000 immigrants into a black neighborhood, blatantly giving them resources they don’t give us,” she said. The wave of new immigrants under Biden, she believes, is driving down working-class wages. Moreover, she said, “a lot of the young males are dangerous”. She knows older immigrants who have been in Oakland for decades who feel the same way about the new arrivals.

Marquise felt a similar way. When I asked him why he doesn’t support the Democrats, he replied: “To tell the truth: immigrants.” “There’s too many in California.” He said that there are no jobs available. The woman in the passenger seat agreed, describing overcrowded classrooms filled with immigrant children who weren’t required to be immunised. She complained about teachers “speaking Mexican” in class.

When I asked Marquise what he liked about Trump, he replied that the President-elect would “get rid of all the Mexicans”. He also believed that Trump would let a lot of people out of prison. “He’s an asshole, but not that bad,” he explained.

There’s another, more subtle factor eroding loyalty to the Democrats: the party’s failure to improve economic conditions for working-class black Americans. The Democratic Party’s long history is littered with broken promises to black voters. The disappointments span the decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Barack Obama’s promise of Hope.

Michelle’s older brother, Cardell Watkins, doesn’t particularly like Trump. But when he heard Trump speaking in 2016 about how bleak conditions were for black Americans under Democratic governance, his ears pricked up. “You’re living in poverty,” Trump riffed. “Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.” The speech touched a nerve.

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Watkins, 62, has been a longshoreman for two decades. He currently works at the Port of Oakland. We, longshoremen, he said, “work ourselves to death”. The average longshoreman retires at about 70 years old, he said, and only lives to the age of 73 or 74. His granddaughter is a longshoreman, too. He’s constantly telling her to get out and go to school.

That said, as a union worker, Watkins has done well for himself. He’s been making about $150,000 a year for the better part of the last decade, with only a high-school diploma. He moved out of Oakland and now lives in Fairfield, a Bay Area suburb. “I’m around white people,” he told me. “I’ve never been so happy in my life. The front yards are clean, there’s no constant blaring of sirens.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren growing up in Oakland,” he said. “All the trash on the street, all the undocumented people coming in, all the lies.” He said he understands “white flight” now.

Watkins believes that local politicians, who are almost entirely Democrats, “have failed us”. “The Nancy Pelosis. Do you know how wealthy they are now?” The Democrats inherited San Francisco and Oakland, two cities with thriving maritime industries, he said, and “[ran] them into the ground”.

“They’re not interested in changing, in making America better. They’re interested in power and influence. They can live on Martha’s Vineyard, they can move to Switzerland, where there’s no crime or dirt in the streets. Once you become infinitely wealthy, the whole world is your neighbourhood.”

When he was a kid, Watkins was raised to believe in Democratic leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. “They were able to tell us who to endorse and support,” he said. “We were in lockstep.”

But over the years, he saw those leaders betray ordinary black Americans, putting their careers before their constituents. “Once they got what they wanted from us, they didn’t have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We were being used.” His sister, Michelle, agrees.

When Obama first came on the scene, the siblings were exuberant. Michelle described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as “magic”. But by the end of his presidency, they felt used all over again. By then, “[Obama] didn’t even really believe the shit he was saying no more,” said Michelle.

Michelle recalls the moment she lost faith in the Obama project. It was during the Great Recession, when Michelle was doing loan modifications for a bank called World Savings, trying to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. At the time, Senator Elizabeth Warren favoured a policy called “cramdown”, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce people’s mortgage debts to bring them into line with the reduced values of their homes. “This was going to be a lifeline,” Michelle said. “It could have saved so many people.” She believes that Obama killed it, helping the banks facilitate what she described as “the greatest transfer of black wealth in the history of the country”.

These days she sees Obama as just another condescending politician. “He’s made a cottage industry of always talking down to black people.” “He’s uplifting for every other race. But always kind of negative toward black people.”

This year, both Michelle and her brother thought Kamala Harris was just more of the same. “She doesn’t care about black people,” Watkins told me. “She just wants to be president — another Rolex in her jewellery box.”

Such scepticism was widespread among the voters I spoke to, but it was especially pronounced among the younger ones. Watkins and Michelle’s generation was raised in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Its heroes became elected leaders who basked in history’s heroic glow as they operated the levers of the Democratic machine. Yet the lives of younger black Americans today have been shaped by what that movement failed to reverse: enduring, racialised poverty; urban blight; and endemic violence.

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Michelle’s support for Trump has made her somewhat of a pariah among African Americans of her generation. But she believes that among younger black people the partisan loyalty that was so deeply ingrained in her is entirely absent. “The Democratic Party has lost the young black generation,” she told me. “They’re gone. And that’s in liberal Oakland. They want no part of it.”

Marquise’s views confirm her suspicions. “She full of shit,” Marquise said of Harris. When Harris kicked off her campaign, her team seemed to assume that young voters would flock to her. When Charli XCX tweeted that Harris was “brat”, her campaign revelled in the approval, rebranding her online presence to match the pop artist’s album cover.

But on the topic of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing alongside Kamala during her campaign, Marquise said “It’s hella ghetto. Unprofessional.” He marvelled that Kamala Harris would put someone like Cardi B on stage with her while Trump was campaigning with Elon Musk.

The only reason the Democrats selected Harris, Marquise believes, was because she was a “minority”. But for black voters like him, appeals to identity politics are no longer enough to ensure their loyalty. Instead, they want to see real change — Michelle pointed to things like student reading scores, poverty, and crime. She said that the Democrats’ appeal to black voters was always “emotional, never practical”. She was tired of the “paternalistic attitude the party has taken toward black people”.

Nowadays, Watkins said that the workers at the union hiring hall, who are mostly black and Latino, are “flying their colours” for Donald Trump. Like him, they’re tired of being told what to think and who to vote for.

“I don’t have anything against her or anyone else,” Watkins said of Kamala Harris. “Just don’t tell me I have to support her, or that Trump’s been associated with white supremacy so I can’t vote for him. I’m tired of the bullshit. If it takes a white supremacist to get things done, so be it.”

Even more than its neighbour San Francisco, Oakland is known for its extraordinarily high levels of crime. The city’s police force is understaffed by hundreds of officers. Only 35 are on patrol in the city of nearly half a million at any given time, and they’re limited by rules that prevent them from, for instance, pursuing drivers fleeing crime scenes. The situation is so extreme that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has deployed state highway patrol officers to do city police work.

But the crime that seems hardest to stop is also the most inane: sideshows. In the Eighties, the earliest sideshows were largely benign: young men would cruise through the neighbourhood in swanky cars in a kind of impromptu parade, like something out of the film American Graffiti. “I used to go to sideshows as an 18-year-old,” former Oakland police chief LeRonne Armstrong tells me. “It was just guys from the community showing off nice, restored cars.”

In time, drivers started performing tricks in the intersections. This was not unusual for California low-rider culture — but since then, these sideshows have evolved into something more threatening. “Now it’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness,” Armstrong says.

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Today’s sideshows are typically organised through text chat and WhatsApp groups. But if you’re not in the loop, they appear spontaneous: dozens of cars will suddenly appear at an intersection, often in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of boisterous onlookers. Cars do doughnuts and burnouts with passengers hanging out of the windows, while the crowds film them to post on YouTube and Instagram. People launch fireworks, fire their guns into the air and torch abandoned vehicles. If the cops show up, the crowds just jeer at them.

Sometimes bystanders are hit by drifting cars. Last weekend, a swaggering red Mustang crashed into the crowd, running over a woman. Residents living near the crime scene told me that sideshows have been a problem for years. “It’s every other Friday or Saturday night,” Joel Everett, a 63-year-old church member, tells me. People park on his residential street to join the crowd of spectators, leaving trash, bottles and cans everywhere, and pulling in and out of his driveway to make three-point turns. Everett worries about his car getting stolen or broken into. “You can’t sleep. There’s gunfire,” he says.

Another neighbour, Marcos, who declined to give me his last name, is a 65-year-old truck driver who works at night. One early morning, returning home from work, he had to sit in his car for an hour and a half waiting for a sideshow to disperse just to drive the last block to his house.

In the past few years, Oakland’s sideshows have become more diffuse: according to the city, several hundred intersections are regularly used for sideshows. Spiralling skid marks stain streets all over town. And nowadays, you’re as likely to hear the screeching of tires at 10am as you are at midnight. A single car will do a spontaneous intersection takeover in broad daylight, without a pre-warned crowd gathered for the spectacle. Affluent neighbourhoods aren’t safe, either: one of the most popular intersections is on Skyline Boulevard, on the ridge of the Oakland Hills, alongside a regional park used by hikers, joggers and equestrians. Sideshows have also spread to other cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco.

Even though sideshows began in Oakland, they now tend to be organised and attended by a marauding group of participants from all over northern California. “I would say 70% are from out of town,” Armstrong says. “It’s a group that’s causing havoc throughout the East Bay.”

With their drunk and hopped-up crowds, sideshows are often preludes to other crimes. Last month, five people were shot during one in East Oakland. In July, a sideshow mob ransacked a convenient store near the airport, racking up $100,000 in damages. In June, 15 people were shot in a gunfight following a sideshow.

With no faith in the city authorities or the police, tormented residents have taken matters into their own hands. Last month, Salcedo and his neighbours put up impromptu barriers in the worst-hit intersections in Oakland’s San Antonio district to discourage the mayhem. They dragged tires into the road, filled them with rocks and dirt, and painted them in bright colours. They installed speed bumps and Botts’ Dots pavement markers purchased on Amazon. And they did all this without the city’s permission or knowledge.

Users on one Oakland subreddit applauded the intervention. “I’m tempted to do something similar,” wrote one user. “The city has failed us so might as well take matters into your own hands.”

For a while, the San Antonio neighbourhood’s guerrilla installations worked. But a driver speeding in a stolen Lexus hit one of the tires and flipped it over. City workers came in one morning soon after and removed the tires, leaving some of the smaller, less hazardous impediments in place.

After that, residents lost patience with the city. At an outdoor meeting with a council member, a city engineer lectured the neighbours about Oakland’s liability for their handiwork. He told them that the impediments were a fire code violation as they blocked the egress of fire trucks, and that the risks they posed to drivers was “non-negotiable”.

“Your liability is more important than my kid being hit by a car?” one neighbour asked. The residents complained of cars running up on sidewalks where kids play; one of the worst intersections is between a park and a middle school. A Brazilian man named Odelson Souza said his two-year-old was once nearly run over. From the neighbours’ perspective, the city is more worried about the hypothetical safety risks posed by their DIY obstacle course than the real risks posed by daily sideshows.

The city is currently testing new hardscape solutions such as bollards and traffic circles, but at the tectonic rate of about one intersection a month. The police, meanwhile, are powerless to shut down sideshows when they involve hundreds of people, many of them armed — though Armstrong told me that they have had some success embedding undercover officers in the crowds, taking pictures of cars and licence plates, and impounding the vehicles in the days that follow. Last year, the county made it illegal to attend a sideshow as a spectator, though that law is being challenged in federal court.

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Besides being annoying, dangerous and occasionally deadly, sideshows have come to embody Oakland’s surrender to brazen criminality. Not far from where Salcedo and his neighbours put up their road blocks, there is open sex trafficking, day and night. Pimps and prostitutes operate outside schools. Meanwhile, the streets alongside Oakland’s 880 freeway are filled with tarp and tent encampments, and decaying RVs clog miles of sidewalk on either side of the Oakland Coliseum, which the city’s last professional sports team will soon abandon.

The defiant screech of the sideshow is a constant reminder to Oakland residents that when it comes to public safety, they’re on their own. But to the residents of San Antonio, it’s even worse than that: they’ve learned that even when they improvise their own fixes, the city will remove them. “Right now, they protect the criminals,” Salcedo told his neighbours at their meeting. “They need to protect us.”

The haircut was about half-finished when I heard several sounds of a brief, intense disturbance happening on the street just out of view — a car turning sharply and then braking hard, a muffled smash, a car turning and accelerating again, and then the long blast of a horn. Having all this audible drama happen just outside my perspective, when that perspective captured so much, was acutely frustrating. I felt like the victim of a cinema technique. Someone was cagily withholding information from me! But when I roused myself and went outside, six or seven people were already standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant next door. From them, none of the information I was hungering for had been withheld. A few of these people were moving behind a Honda SUV that was parked at the curb so they could get a better look at the hole that had just been smashed in its back window. A laptop had just been stolen, right in front of them, as if for their bourgeois scrutiny and disapproval.

This was pretty brazen, but it’s not nearly the most brazen recent street theft in and around my Oakland, California neighbourhood. Several times over the past couple of months, I or my children have been walking along the crowded sunlit sidewalk of the busy commercial street near where we live as a late-model car raced up and loudly braked mere feet away, and a young man in a hoodie and Covid mask leapt out, smashed a car window, grabbed something from inside, and leapt back into the getaway car. Or, it wasn’t exactly a getaway car, or at least not right away, because these teams tend to repeat the procedure further up a street before U-turning violently to shop the cars on the opposite side, the whole time holding the stunned attention of Oakland pedestrians, who are well accustomed to car burglary but conditioned from earlier years to think of it as something done in stealth, generally when they’re asleep.

I seethe when I see this brazen shit. But why I (and my fellow citizens with similar anger issues) don’t intervene is shown by another act of brazenness that happened three doors down from my house last month. Several carpenters were on their lunchbreak, standing or sitting near their two trucks when a car pulled up and a young man jumped from the passenger’s seat and into the driver’s seat of one of the trucks. Two of the workers were around the truck and upon this guy a little faster than he was expecting, but no matter. As they yanked the would-be thief to the ground, the crime car’s driver yelled to them through the passenger window. They looked up to see him making the universal gesture for: “I will shoot you if you do not release my esteemed colleague from your rough grip, post haste.”

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Of course they had a gun. This, despite how angry I get, is why I don’t intervene. Sometimes my anger is so intense it feels suicidal, the honour-code anger of someone ready to die to make a point, but then it thinks of the guy driving the car, and it pictures the gun this guy is almost certainly holding, and it chooses life. On my behalf, my anger stands down.

I linger over my own reactions to this crime experience not to make a spectacle of myself, to boast of my proud moments of impotent rage, but to note a curious aspect of the crime wave American cities are presently suffering. In my town, many crimes such as car break-ins and carjackings have spiked dramatically this year (though homicides, thankfully, have declined slightly from their alarming post-Covid peaks). But what seems really new is how and when — and by implication why — these crimes are committed. A striking number of them are done in daytime, in public, in front of an audience of shoppers and workers and pedestrians forced to look on uselessly, lest a spirit of civic outrage overtake them, and get them shot.

Street crime has become oddly social, in other words. Acts of violence and theft have assumed a gestural aspect. They seem performative, self-aware, almost conversational. Even if the young men conducting the busy procedures of breaking into one vehicle after another appear lost in concentration, immersed in their careful labours, one must imagine they’re also aware of the stunned and appalled people all around them. Whenever you’re doing something that’s causing people to stare at you, no matter how involving or rewarding it is, it’s hard to keep their attention from informing your broader experience, and to ignore how your actions are informing theirs. When I played basketball in high school, for example, the intensities of the game itself commanded most of my awareness, but I still had a fair amount left over for the hundreds of people watching me run around in little shorts.

For the figures most sympathetic to them in city government, though, our prolific criminals are becoming an inconvenience. By breaking into and stealing so many cars, burgling and invading so many houses, and carjacking so many unsuspecting drivers, these energetic thieves and assailants have created a population of fresh victims large enough to be electorally meaningful in its own right in a city with fewer than 500,000 people. As of late September, for example, more than 11,000 cars had been reported stolen in Oakland — which was already 2,000 more than the total for all of last year. According to police statistics, this year has seen more reported car thefts than car break-ins — but that is because, as one report has it, “people don’t report break-ins anymore”, since the understaffed and overwhelmed police don’t do anything when you do. (Not only do they not visit you in person, to offer a sympathetic ear at the puddle of pebbled glass next to your car. In my experience they don’t even email to acknowledge you’ve submitted your online crime report.) And now as a result of this crime surge, public meetings around the city are filling up with angry crime victims who yell unsupportive things at Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, an incompetent young progressive who, in safer times, built her political brand on hostility to law enforcement.

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More damaging to her political fortunes and those of her progressive allies, though, and perhaps more corrosive of their larger cause, is the public assault, by all this public lawbreaking, on their theory of what crime is and why it happens in the first place. For our Mayor, like progressive activists around the country, the causes of crime most important to talk about are “structural” — poverty, inequality, the “generational trauma” of racism, just plain racism, and so on. She likes to redirect discussions of crime so as to distance herself from the unpleasant matter of policing, reliably changing the subject to the “root causes” of crime. One news article captured her view in a paraphrase: “Thao said in her mind, no one would choose a life of crime, so getting to the root causes is important.” Since no one would choose a life of crime, her thinking seems to go, the individual criminal acts that make up such a life or start one on its path must not be chosen either.

The main point here is that the agency of lawbreakers is somehow constrained or compromised, if we can really say it exists at all. As an Oakland resident, I’ve been the victim of several overnight auto break-ins, and even I have made a sociologist’s effort of sympathy towards the anonymous people who smashed my car windows — if mainly to medicate my toxic anger at being a crime victim once again. We’d wake up to a smashed car window and my wife would tell me that, for my own sake, I should try feeling compassion for the person who did it, rather than anger or offence. And as usual, she was right. It was simply healthier, mentally and physically, to view these window smashers as something like points of convergence, sites on the social body where unhealthy forces intersect to yield an unwell or desperate impulse, from which issues a regrettable act.

Such thinking is likewise therapeutic for our Mayor and other urban progressives who’ve won elections. It is an unhappy fact of governing that they find themselves in charge of, and thus unfashionably associated with, police departments. It soothes them in this predicament, when someone’s arrest and confinement are obviously justified and unavoidable, to breathe out a miasma of jargon about structural oppression and root causes as if they’re critiquing the law for making them enforce it. And it justifies their inaction in other cases, when some extenuation can be conjured that spares the offenders any punishment, to speak as if these offenders suffer from an absence of conscious will or human agency.

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But it’s easier to think of lawbreakers as lacking consciousness and agency, as mere objects of abstract structural forces, when crime itself is an abstraction, conducted out of sight, overnight, as if a dreamlike result of one’s own sleeping. When a window smasher is doing his thing in broad daylight, on the other hand, when you’re watching him beside a car and his focused eyes flit from his work to his audience, so that as an onlooker you might find yourself sharing a glance with him, he appears to have not just agency but a bubbling surplus of it. He looks like the most purposeful, composed, indeed self-realised person on the street, and by a good distance.

Think of the choreography that combines precision driving in close traffic with a young man’s timely dancing from the passenger seat of an attractive car, his focus and composure over repeated acts of window-smashing and extracting other people’s possessions. This belies any sense that you’re watching acts of impulse, performed by people who lack agency thanks to oppressive structures. The unwelcome suspicion you get is that, no, these are human beings in full possession of their faculties. They don’t lack judgement or impulse control. They’re using sound judgement at several levels — the basic practical judgement of which streets to choose, and which cars, and when to stop, when to hop out, how long to spend on each theft, and then the higher-level judgement that says this auto burglary thing is a safe proposition because those frightened pedestrians won’t do anything — and the police are too busy to bother us.

This sense of full agency and conscious, vigorous industry also comes through in surveillance videos of recent local crimes — videos of a robbery team carefully using a car to break into several auto repair shops on the same block; a young man calmly pistol-whipping a woman across the face as he begins to rob her; another young man who, showing real commitment to his task, drags a screaming woman down a street by the strap of her purse.

This impression — of able young men calmly, consciously at a task they understand the meaning of — is deepened further by the social aspect of these crimes. It is virtually impossible to imagine they’re not aware of their audience, that they don’t feel themselves operating within the network of moral perceptions they have brought to life with their actions. How many other people similarly tempted to violate their fellow citizens have access to so much social feedback?

But wait a minute. Why are they on a busy commercial street in the first place? The nearby residential streets are also packed with parked cars, but quiet. The thieves could do their Bluetooth scanning along those streets, discovering the odd car with a laptop slipped into its trunk, and they could do this without all those pedestrians watching, all those witnesses. Given this, you’re almost forced to conclude that the pedestrian audience is sort of the point.

This is consistent with economic analyses of street crime I have seen, which suggest the normal payoff of mugging and burgling is quite low relative to the risk, unless you factor into this payoff the pleasure of transgression and dominance, the simple fun of teasing danger and crossing limits to fuck with other people. This makes even more sense when you imagine how far the value of stolen laptops, or those 10,000 stolen cars, has fallen during our current crime wave, with so many of them freed from their previous owners and cluttering the contraband markets. Those things must be worth far less these days, which means the pleasure of stealing them — perhaps especially in front of other people — must be worth a lot.

But then my wife and I had kids in the expensive California city of Oakland, and we sent them to our local government school (“public” school, in the US). I saw that, rather than applying dubious theories from their training — “child-centred” teaching inspired by John Dewey, Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” — teachers were mainly using age-old methods to convey mandated curriculum to restless children. And I learned that many of them, especially younger teachers without spouses, or divorced teachers raising children of their own, were sharing bedrooms in group houses to cut down on living expenses, commuting huge distances from more affordable cities, or even working second jobs.

I was also seeing research showing that the skill of individual teachers was a key variable in both the subject learning and life outcomes of students. I decided to think of our local teachers’ unions as a sort of guild, securing a measure of agency and public dignity and better pay for members of a maligned profession, which might help schools attract talented people to their classrooms, and keep them there. In any case, we were part of the same community now, working together to see our kids through their school years. Some of us — the teachers — needed better pay to have decent lives. Their 2019 strike thus seemed pretty defensible. Despite the learning it interrupted and the inconvenience it caused us, no one in my world of school parents opposed it.

We parents aren’t feeling so communal about the Oakland teachers’ strike of 2023. The strike, which ran from 5 May to 15 May, wasn’t about the thing we were used to feeling invested in and guilty about — teachers’ pay. The parties (the teachers’ union and the Oakland school district) were close to agreement on a pay increase when the strike was called. What they continued to disagree on was a set of broad demands that, the union said, it was making on behalf of the “common good”.

These demands sounded like an odd fit within a contract negotiation. Our kids had been kept home from school not because teachers were being ill-paid or disrespectfully treated, but because the leaders of their union had some theories about homelessness, social welfare, climate change and, of course, racism, along with some conspicuously swollen ambitions about how much policymaking power they might wrest from elected officials.

The two most newsworthy of the union’s demands, and the most noteworthy to parents wondering how long their kids would be out of school, concerned racial reparations and environmental justice. From what we were hearing, the teachers wouldn’t return to work until our schools were remade into places where racial reparations are paid out and environmental justice is finally done.

The “reparations” demand is, at once, confusing and revealing. It’s confusing because, in its details, it doesn’t mean what Americans think of when they think of racial reparations. It’s revealing because it shows the teachers’ union going the way of other progressive organisations in recent years. Instead of protecting the material and professional interests of our beloved teachers, the activist leaders of their union have taken up a new mission — impressing each other with radical gestures.

What the term “reparations” signifies in the United States is a tough national reckoning with the moral, material, legal and political injustice of slavery, in the form of generous payouts to black Americans. As a political issue, it is profoundly unresolved. But what the teachers’ union calls racial reparations is, along with a proposal to let homeless students live in empty school buildings, the most palatable part of its common-good vision. What the union means by reparations — according to a detailed description of its common-good demands, which it published in December — is that the school district would turn schools with large black populations into “Black thriving community schools”, where food, healthcare and other social services are provided to needy families.

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Now, the idea of community schools is an old one in education circles. If it turned out that such schools were an effective way to educate poor children and deliver social services to their families, Oakland parents would probably support them, even given the racially specific framing of “Black thriving” (though we’d still object to using them as a reason to hold a teacher strike). We recognise that the overlap between black and poor populations in our city is large. And the fact that politics in Oakland — birthplace of the Black Panthers — is always also racial politics, is a shock to no one who lives here. Indeed, the vernacular rawness and bluntness of Oakland’s racial politics is one of the many things I found refreshing about the city when I moved here in 2004. Feeling all my arguments from “colour blindness” fall away was both a settling-in and a liberation. I lived in Oakland now.

In this context, casting the “Black thriving community schools” proposal as reparations is almost perversely divisive, especially for a teacher organisation ostensibly dependent on the support of parents, including non-black, politically moderate parents. In conversations about the strike I had with such parents, the word came up several times as a bemused question: “Reparations?”

To Americans, “reparations” conjures political scenarios of endless accusation and evasion, anger and resentment and guilt chasing each other in a circle, a titanic policy debate that will never end because it never really starts. This total impasse of national deliberation is not what parents want to imagine as a sticking point in the contract negotiation that’s keeping their kids home from school. And it really wasn’t. “Reparations” was just a word they chose.

But why would our embattled teachers’ union package its proposal for community schools — already ambitious, as both power-grab and policy, but not without its moral appeal — in the divisive and discouraging language of reparations? Why would it risk the support of parents by seeming to foist on them a sudden resolution of the great American racial reckoning, from the private setting of a contract negotiation, when what they were really proposing was feeding poor families and letting them see a nurse at their kids’ school?

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Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

I wasn’t present when the union forged this document, so I can’t say for sure. But I have a theory. Activists within the teachers’ union chose the language of reparations not for its denotative accuracy, nor for the crucial support it might add to its negotiating position, both of which it subverts, but to impress each other and challenge – and, perhaps even, cow — their less fervent colleagues.

We’ve watched this pattern repeat itself, especially since the George Floyd protests of 2020: organisations dominated in their leadership by a core of activists, or highly sensitive to the sort of problematic publicity that activists can generate for them, having their historic missions erased and rewritten according to the internal dynamics of progressive cadres — pathological status contests in which no one wants to appear less extreme than the most extreme person.

In these settings, terms such as “reparations” work as memes, easily permeating a symbolic system that offers very little friction or resistance to their movement. This is surely why the union’s list of common-good demands includes other terms that are faddish in progressive circles, but entirely outside either the real classroom mission of school teachers or the proper negotiating brief of a teachers’ union, nor particularly accurate as names for what the teachers were actually seeking.

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American education's new dark age

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

Under the politically exciting term “environmental justice” — another red flag for parents worried their teachers were taking on messy fights that would keep their kids out of school — the union demanded that “all student learning areas […] be independently climate controlled, ventilated and weatherised using safe and green technologies”. So, what our striking teachers meant by the provocative and pragmatically fraught term “environmental justice” was… air conditioning

When we parents learnt that our teachers were in fact striking over massive and intractable societal problems, we were perhaps justified in wondering how such a strike could possibly end. The teachers weren’t willing to budge on their “equity” demands. Rumours circulated that the school year was over. Summer would be starting a month early. Few of us knew what was really at stake. We’d only heard the news stories, which dealt in generalities. We hadn’t read the online documents that said reparations for slavery meant meals and medical checkups at some schools, and environmental justice meant better insulation and stronger fans in classrooms.

Still, the teachers did stage a strike, and the strike was about a set of grievances so novel and abstract it’s hard to understand them as grievances. Now that the strike is over, the union’s ostensible grievances seem more like plans. They certainly have some big ideas about how the schools, indeed the city, ought to be run. And they seem willing to strike again if our actually elected officials don’t do as they wish, or hand them the power to do it themselves.

On their own, in their scale and reach, these novel and ambitious plans violate the implicit agreement that parents make with their unionised teachers, whose work-stoppages they support and even encourage, despite the expense and inconvenience and learning-loss they result in. We parents do this on the grounds that teachers are joined with us in an educational project that is no less urgent or dignified for being confined to the teaching of humble things like reading and maths, which requires good teachers who are paid well, and which the schools find hard enough already.

More alienating is the strong sense that these plans emerged from a hermetic and vaguely unhealthy process, an esoteric set of deliberative pressures peculiar to progressive “spaces”, as these spaces have been rewired in recent years. It will be an ominous feeling for Oakland parents, as the term for the new contract moves toward another crisis of negotiation, to know that the future design of their public schools, and their future ability to send their kids to them, could be determined by a further set of ideological gambits by progressive activists — and by the larger number of people who will go along with them, no matter how crazy they sound.

One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.

Since November, throughout California, thousands of dollars have been stolen from stores including Apple, CVS, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry. In San Jose, over $40,000-worth of inventory was stolen from a Lululemon before the robbers escaped in getaway car. In Carmel-by-the-Sea last week, thieves wielding sledgehammers broke into a high-end jewellery store, smashing, grabbing and then fleeing. Right before Thanksgiving, 80 individuals rushed a Nordstrom in the Bay Area to participate in what authorities called “organised theft”.

Cannabis dispensaries are another favourite target. In Oakland, the Police Chief LeRonne L. Armstrong explained that most of these attacks turn violent: “more than 175 shots were fired” during cannabis robberies in Oakland last month alone. Even a physical therapy office in Beverly Hills was robbed this month by armed, masked burglars who entered the office and stole the doctor’s Rolex. The list of robberies is not limited to stores or businesses.

Many of the victims are ordinary individuals, walking down the street in broad daylight. As Jamie McBride, the head of the union representing LAPD officers, told tourists last week: “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before. It’s like that movie Purge, but instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want.”

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Paedophilia is not progressive

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Once upon a time, we would have been shocked by this level of crime. Today, citizens fatalistically adapt their behaviours. I know countless women who no longer walk alone after dark in California’s cities. Everyone knows to hide anything they leave in their cars. Those who can afford it are installing gates and building tall fences around their homes. The wealthy are hiring personal security and no longer relying on police for protection. I’ve seen this all before — in Nairobi as well as other places in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and India.

Stores are boarding up their windows and closing earlier. They are hiring security staff and implementing new safety processes. A Safeway in San Francisco has installed gates that “let customers easily enter the store but swing quickly shut behind them, preventing would-be thieves from dashing out with shopping carts full of stolen items”. Rental car companies, like the one my friend used, are hiring glass repairmen to work full-time fixing the overwhelming number of broken windows.

As for those who cannot or will not adapt, they are faced with one option: to leave their city and often the state. High taxes are not the only reason so many big companies have pulled out of California over the past two years.

But how did we arrive at a point where people either have to adapt to the crime surrounding them or to flee; where the police union’s spokesperson has to warn the public that they are no longer in control?

The answer lies in an abundance of affluence. Affluence has allowed us to overcome many constraints in a way past generations could never have imagined. For long periods, a majority of people in the West have not had to worry about what tomorrow might bring. Questions over where future food, water and shelter will come from are no longer bother the majority of Americans. We’ve got apps on our phone that tell us what the weather will be not only tomorrow, but ten days hence; apps that allow us to buy meals, drinks, cars and even apartments with only a click or two; apps that even think for us.

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By Aris Roussinos

But with that increased quality of life, we’ve become lazy. We’ve stopped paying attention. We’ve come to take for granted the institutions that hold up our affluent society. We have assumed that they would continue functioning without our personal involvement and investment. It seems that when a society is as wealthy as ours and as insulated from day-to-day threats, the vigilance to maintain its institutions wilts.

What makes this affluence particularly damaging is the fact that the rich are the furthest removed from the consequences of their negligence. In California, those with enormous wealth are often also the loudest advocates for leniency towards criminals. Those individuals, who have the least contact with crime, are frequently the most enthusiastic proponents of reforms that reduce the safety of the average American. Democratic donors give their money to candidates who support defunding the police. They campaign against stop-and-search, three strikes, and “broken window” policies. They argue for lighter sentences or even the decriminalisation of certain crimes — shoplifting, for example, has been all but legalised in San Francisco.

Wealthy liberals for some reason feel more compassion for those committing crimes than for their victims. They believe in a form of “progress” that ignores human nature and social reality. As Mary Harrington recently wrote: “Team Empathy… tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.”

Meanwhile, some of the politicians they support, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even deny problems such as smash-and-grab exist. Others urge the public not to be distracted by rising crime, but to follow the “arc of history” towards the utopia of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism. Melina Andullah, founder of Black Lives Matter LA, recently said of those concerned about the rising tide of crime: “They’re trying to move us backward. We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

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The hypocrisy of America's terror debate

By Simon Cottee

On December 1, Jacqueline Avant, the wife of Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, was shot and killed in her home in Beverly Hills. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was attempting to rob her home when he shot her. He also attempted to kill her security guard.

On hearing the news, Abdullah’s response was to condemn it as “appalling”, yet also called on officials not to use it as an excuse to introduce tougher measures on crime. Elsewhere, Oprah Winfrey mourned the loss of her friend with a social media post that ended with the comment: “The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”

Love, as Oprah imagines it, is an ideal. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, we will achieve universal love. But, in the absence of any meaningful proposals, to hold it up as the solution to criminal activity is pure decadence.

Far more important is the need to keep in place the infrastructure of policing, investigating, trying and punishing that has evolved in the Western world — a system that seeks to strike a judicious balance between the safety of society and the rights of any accused individual. Tweak that system by all means. No one claims it is perfect, and much has been achieved in recent years by the movement for criminal justice reform.

But don’t delude yourself with talk of “love” or proposals to defund the police. For the perpetrators, the best kind of love is tough love. For the victims, whether they’re affluent or not, the best kind of love is being protected. We don’t need “social justice”, just plain justice.