Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.” But just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time. This is why there must be a collective reflection on, and opposition to, the way whiteness takes hold of our ideas about whose lives matter. The norm of whiteness that supports both violence and inequality insinuates itself into the normal and the obvious. Understood as the sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit power to define the boundaries of kinship, community and nation, whiteness inflects all those frameworks within which certain lives are made to matter less than others.

No, dear. That is not at all what I meant. I detest male-bashing. I meant equal pay for equal work & that means for men as well as women. I mean everyone, men and women, should have reproductive rights. Feminism could have been the great equalizer, but it was hijacked and misrepresented by so many men and women, it’s become a derogatory term. I’m proud to be a feminist. I’m not proud of the women and men who think feminism is a license to be abusive towards men.

From MissBerk.com

respect

A data-driven organization acquires, processes, and leverages data in a timely fashion to create efficiencies, iterate on and develop new products, and navigate the competitive landscape.

What we do every day. We have a long way to go before local government and nonprofits are even close to data driven!

From DJ Patil

In ten words or less, sugar is both toxic and abused. Every substance that is both toxic and abused at the same time requires both personal intervention, which, for lack of a better word, we can call ‘rehab,’ or societal intervention [which], for lack of a better word, we call ‘a tax.’ Same thing we do with alcohol and tobacco.

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco, it’s a dangerous trend. The mass consumption of sugar via soda affects the human body much like drugs and tobacco. Lustig also argued that education alone is not enough to fight sugar addiction.

From the EBX article on how Big Soda played the Race baiting game to defeat the soda tax.

We’re losing eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day… As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.

Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund. Source

They are our new age city advocates – just like our tried and true volunteers who wear vests and bring shovels, these new style digital folks, use an iPad, the cloud and zeros & ones to engage the citizenry, help govt get the word out, make things easier- faster-better! They are committed to Oakland, and are generous with their skills and amazing abilities and know how.

A City Staffer and attendee of CityCamp Oakland talking about OpenOakland!