Checking out a brotha’s iPad, outside Oakland Tech, Broadway between 42nd and 45th.
Ajuan Mance
Category Archives: Art, Black Men, African American, Artist
1001 Black Men #721
The Liza Minelli show at Davies Symphony Hall (March 28, 2014) was even more wonderful than I was expecting. Aside from the simple pleasure of sharing space with a singer and actress whose Cabaret and Liza with a Z are among the finest performances I’ve ever seen, there was also the thrill of seeing someone fully and passionately inhabiting her creativity. Liza can no longer hits all of her notes all of the time, nor does she dance as vivaciously as she did even 10 years ago. And yet, despite these limitations, Liza Minelli performs for her audience with the passion of a person who is truly at home on the stage.
The man in this drawing was one of less than five Black people I noticed in the audience. There may well have been as many as 10 of us. I did not, after all, get a good look at the crowd in the balcony. In any event, though, he and I passed each other in the lobby and nodded at each other as only Black folks can.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #720
Heading toward the Bay Bridge, last Saturday night.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #719
My second sketch in that meeting was of a guy I remember from a recent trip to–that’s right–the Zocalo Coffeehouse in San Leandro. After changing owners and then closing for remodeling, it’s baaaaack! I’ve missed Zocalo and, at the risk of sounding overly sentimental, going back to my favorite cafe was like seeing an old friend after a long period apart.
Welcome back, Zocalo. It wasn’t the same without you.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #718
I was sketching during a meeting, and I liked the way the letters on the spring calendar looked through the modified crosshatching I used to create texture in this drawing.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #717
The Actual Cafe, San Pablo Ave., Oakland CA
When it comes to discussions of gentrification and Oakland, I generally do more listening than speaking. Oakland is a city in the midst of great flux, but it has been since before I arrived (15 years ago). Unlike some areas of the country, Oakland seems, at least at this point, to be able to hold both the upward mobility of some of its newest residents and the class and ethnic diversity to which it has long been a home. Unlike many parts of the country, a number of Oakland’s so-called gentrifiers are Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American; and there are plenty of people of each of those ethnicities represented on both sides of the economic fence.
San Pablo Ave. is paradigmatic of this phenomenon. Blue Bird Market (see drawing #716) is one of a number of convenience stores serving the low-income renters living south of 40th, and these businesses have a large Black customer base. The again, Black folks also patronize in significant numbers the Arizemendi Bakery, the Actual Cafe, and other businesses that many have identified as harbingers of a newer, more affluent Oakland.
The class diversity of our Black and brown communities complicates the traditional politics of resistance to gentrification in that it prevents us from looking at this solely as a Black and Brown vs. white issue. It doesn’t completely neutralize the resistance to gentrification. (In fact, it doesn’t even come close.) Still, here, as in D.C. and other cities that attract young Black professionals, the questions and solutions to the influx of wealth are murkier and demand a little more thought than in places where the racial lines are drawn more clearly.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #716
Outside the Blue Bird Market, San Pablo Ave., Oakland, CA.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #715
When I first moved to Oakland, I would see groups of Black folks hanging out in front of the California Hotel. The California Hotel is a beautifully-designed historic hotel located on San Pablo Ave. Since the late 1980s, it has served as low-income housing for a largely Black clientele. The sidewalk in front of the California Hotel was a popular gathering place for residents and their friends and just about anyone else who wanted to get into some kind of impromptu conversation or transaction.
In the last few years, though, the sidewalk in front of the California Hotel has become a lot quieter. A lot of the street action that used to happen there has moved down to St. Andrews Park on the corner of San Pablo and 32nd. This is one of the smallest parks in the city of Oakland, but it’s also one of the busiest. It’s one of the most concentrated gatherings of homeless and economically marginalized Black folks in the city. Throughout the day, there is a steady stream of people from the park to the nearby convenient store and back to the park. There are also regular patrols of the area by the Oakland police.
This drawing kind of sums up the mood of a lot of people in the park. For many, hanging out there is better than being alone, but it’s difficult company in an even more difficult life. I am reminded of the the title of a 1978 short story by Lynn Schwartz. In 1985, the story would go on to become a novel of the same name. Either way though, her title, “Rough Strife,” seems to capture a lot of what I see when I drive past the park at San Pablo and 32nd.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #714
Outside Black and White Liquors, near the Oakland-Emeryville border.
***
At the beginning of the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois observes that many of the white people he encounters long to ask him and other Black people one question: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
All over Oakland, I have encountered Black men who live a significant part of their lives on the street. Some are homeless, but a lot of these brothers hang out on the street because they have nowhere else to go during the day. For some, their living situation is awkward, uncomfortable, or unwelcoming; and for many, especially the previously incarcerated, it is nearly impossible to find work.
As I’ve moved through this series of drawings, I’ve begun to pay more attention to these brothers, and to really see them when I encounter them. More importantly, I watch how people watch them. I see most people looking through them or around them, though some react to them with fear and discomfort (if the passers by are not Black) or with simple disappointment (if they are Black).
My encounters with the brothers on the streets have had an interesting impact. 100 years after Du Bois first spoke about the curious circumstance of being perceived as a “problem,” I am not only reminded that his famous question still applies, but I am brought face-to-face with the uncomfortable truth that sometimes I, a Black person myself, am the one who is asking.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men #713
BART to San Bruno, boarding at West Oakland Station.
Ajuan Mance