ONN – Battery SF, Blacks, Oakland: Susan Stever Tries Racial Gaslighting To Stop Topic Talk On Facebook – vlog by Zennie62 YouTube
Battery SF, Blacks, Oakland: Susan Stever Tries Racial Gaslighting To Stop Topic Talk On Facebook
This is all too typical today, at least for me. I install a post from my media platform that concerns some aspect of race relations in Oakland in a Facebook Group , and someone not black like Susan Stever – who happens to live in my general Lake Merritt Neighborhood, but I don’t know and is not a Facebook friend – pops up to tag me and attempt to diminish my story. And remember, it’s my point of view.
That problem has occurred a lot. This time, it’s the case of the Battery SF expanding its tech wealthy club to Oakland, and to the Bellevue Club Building at 525 Bellevue Ave. Now, as I have vlogged before, I’ve visited the Battery SF at 77 Battery, a number of times, and had a great experience each time. But that’s not true for some of my Black friends who were full members of the venue. They quit, with one person saying they did not like the elitist attitude.
So, here comes the Battery SF to Oakland. In evaluating the news, I raised the good and bad aspects of it, and focused on how it would do in a City, Oakland, known for its historic contributions to Black History, from The Black Panthers to The Oscar Grant Murder, Marcus Garvey, and many other actions and people. Will a club that tends to draw rich white tech entrepreneurs in San Francisco fit in Oakland – and especially at a location that’s not downtown, unlike its SF location? And will the Battery SF work to make sure ‘too many’ black folks do not become members?
The question is more than appropriate considering that I’ve experienced my neighborhood change in such a way that in 2016, at a popular local cafe since closed, I looked about and discovered I was the only black man in it. Well, OK, the only black person. That was and still is weird. I’ve never known that to be in Oakland – a place with no black folks in it. That points to a scary future, and it seems no one is talking about it, which points to one reason I started Zennie62Media, but that’s another story.
Anyway, I put the post on the public Facebook Group, and someone named Susan Stever writes to me, out of the blue, this:
Susan Stever
Stop using circumstances like this for your own “news worthy” self.
So it becomes a predominantly black club or not?? Are you coming in every night to count?
Get over it. The club will define itself…by what it values…music, cuisine and events.
Hopefully it will reflect what’s good about Oakland!
Oakland is an amazing city filled with amazing people.
“Money can’t buy you love.” ❤️
In other words, don’t talk about a race issue. There’s a term for what she tried to do. It’s called “racial gaslighting”.
What Is Racial Gaslighting?
Racial Gaslighting is said to be “a convenient tactic used to derail accusations of racism and shift the scrutiny onto the accuser – forcing them to question and re-asses their own response to the racism, rather than the racism itself” according to Natalie Morris who wrote about it in the Metro UK, and proving that it’s a problem for Blacks in England (at least) too.
She writes “A classic example of racial gaslighting is where a person of colour describes a racist interaction, only to have it immediately questioned. ‘Are you sure that’s what it was about?’, ‘Was it definitely about skin colour though?’, ‘But I don’t think that was about racism. All of these responses undermine the lived experience of racism that the person of colour has just described. The purpose of these questions is to make the person who has experienced racism second-guess what they remember and how they interpreted the events – which is gaslighting.”
UPDATE: Racial Gaslighting Is More Widespread Than You Think
That’s what Susan Stever did, or tried to do, which as I read Facebook Group rules, is something that’s not supposed to be allowed, but guess what? It happens a lot to me on Facebook, and always from someone outside my giant, worldwide, friendship circle.
And far more often its done by folks who claim to live in Oakland. It’s wrong and in my view is the central reason why we have not had that so-called “reckoning on race” . But who came up with “racial gaslighting”?
As a term, Angelique M. Davis coined “racial gaslighting” in 2017, in a research paper. She and her colleague Rose Ernst wrote that “racial gaslighting” is “the political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuates and normalizes a white supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist”. They argue that is a tool for maintaining a social structure that favors anyone white over anyone black or of color, rather than building a socially equitable and diverse world.
Geez. I am just trying to share my view of the Battery SF in Oakland, and tell my story. It’s called news commentary and its my right.
Stay tuned.
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Note from Zennie62Media’s Zennie62 YouTube and Oakland News Now Today Blog SF Bay Area: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.