Tag: Oakland Seen

When the gentrifiers come into our streets and neighborhoods and speculate on our real estate, we can see our demise coming and we just might have a chance to stop it. But when the e-colonizers come into our digital communities or e-estate, we can’t see them. E-gentrifying is much more subtle, insidious, less clear.

In this manifesto that shows why JR Valrey is rightly called the Minister of Information, he exposes "gentrification journalism" as "the public relations team that is put in place to make gentrifiers feel safe," the media's twisting of the murders of Chauncey Bailey and Oscar Grant to demonize Blacks and the hyper-funding of "hyper-local media" as an effort to drown out community media. Everyone who wants to stop the exodus of Blacks from the Bay must read this.

Recently, a white KPFA supporter asked me do I really think that KPFA as a station is racist and deserves to be categorized as apartheid radio? The answer was yes, because still in 2009 KPFA does not have a Black show that speaks to the issues of the Black community in the U.S. KPFA does have shows for the white community, like The Morning Show, Democracy Now and Against the Grain, and for other communities, like the Asians with APEX Express, the Latinos with La Onda and La Raza Chronicles, disabled people with Pushing Limits and so on, but Black people living in the United States are supposed to beg other programmers to air what is important to our community.