Derreck Johnson Oakland City Council At-Large 2020 Candidate Interview
From YouTube Channel: September 8, 2020 at 05:52PM
ONN – Derreck Johnson Oakland City Council At-Large 2020 Candidate Interview – UPDATE
While not my first choice for the Oakland City Council At-Large Seat occupied by Rebecca Kaplan (whom I endorsed) Derreck Johnson is a new face on the Oakland Political Scene, even though he is a third-generation black Oaklander. I told him that because my first introduction to him was via an email from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, I considered him a Manchurian candidate caught up in the 10-year-war between my godsister the Mayor and Councilmember Kaplan.
Derreck Johnson should be congratulated for his Chicken and Waffles business, which was successful in that he managed to employ black ex-prisoners. Sadly, he had to file for bankruptcy, then later and during the campaign, suffer from institutional racism on the part of the website Oaklandside, which seemed to delight in asserting that he wasn’t successful only because he filed for bankruptcy! That was both racial profiling and nasty, considering we have a POTUS who’s filed many bankruptcies and yet is considered very successful. But, there again, is the signal that it’s OK to have a blemish on your business record and still allow yourself to say you’re successful if you’re white, but not if you’re black. Not cool, man. Not right. Not cool.
In closing, there must be a truly aggressive black-ran media that points out racism in media. The media practice done to Derreck feeds an ugly desire among some, and not just white, in America, who refuse to see and present a black person in a positive light, and literally hunger for bad news about us.
In this case, some who are white, just could not accept that my actions were out of anger for the racist Oaklandside post, and first assumed that I was backing Derreck Johnson, when I openly said I was supporting Rebecca Kaplan and did not know Derreck prior to my interview with him, and then, on their own, guessed that Derreck, Mayor Schaaf, and I all went to Skyline High School together.
When a friend of mine who’s white texted me with that question about Skyline High School (where I am Class of 80 and Libby is Class of 1981), I called and let him know how upset with him I was. I said “You can’t accept the fact that my concern for what was written about him was purely because I perceived it as racist, huh? Do you realize that’s racist?”
As my friend is prone to do, he laughs nervously and tries to change the subject, but this time I kept focus. The problem was the Oaklandside post was truly institutionally racist, and it doesn’t matter what a person thinks to the contrary, even if they’re black. In Oakland, too many of us black folks are too willing to put down someone else black anyway – it’s a crabbarrel problem of massive proportions that helps no one.
The fact is that, according to Derreck himself, he went to Bishop O’Dowd High School, not Skyline High School. And so that leads back to my point: the desire to not see a racist act and deflect eyes from view keeps it as justifiable. That’s what my friend was trying to do, and he needs to stop doing it. As I said to him “We can’t allow a point of view like yours to fester because, little by little, these racist stories build up, until we get George Floyd all over again.”
No more racial profiling in media. If Derreck’s run has done anything, it’s shown a spotlight on that problem. It has to stop.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: 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.