I happened to see a tweet where this Darwin Bond Graham, now of Oaklandside, wrote that I told him I was not talking money for “clean coal”. That’s not true at all.
First, I told him nothing because it was a Twitter text exchange, and not a standard voice conversation. I have never met or talked to him and to this day, and I do not know or care what he looks like.
Second, he swore on Twitter that I was working for Phil Tagami. I said I was not and Phil is like my brother. Also, the fact is Darwin has zero technical idea how Zennie62Media network works. From my view, it’s completely weird that he would insist on targeting me for attack, but I’m used to the dynamic. And yes, its borne of institutional racism. That, I have to follow a line of thinking “just because” white media does it, as opposed to my own way of thinking.
The fact is that when Darwin and I had our Twitter exchange in 2019, I was using my blog platforms to help counter false information put out by the City of Oakland. That was me on my own. The Insight Terminal Solutions engagement came about a year later, and because I openly wanted it. Darwin didn’t reach out to me about it unlike Steven Tavares, who gave a clear picture of part of the situation but then did not return my phone calls to give more background. (And think about it: Mr. Tavares allowed himself to get paid to find out how I got paid, as if I’m some African American government official he thinks is on the take. See the racism?)
That’s why I started Zennie62Media: to give others power to counter efforts where other media types try to paint black folks in a bad way. I fight.
And I love fighting. I really do. Racism is wrong. And the people who do it always respond defensively, rather than try and learn how not to be racist in media. Moreover, there are examples of people being racist, who don’t think their words are just that. I think about Al Campanis of the L.A. Dodgers, who, in 1979, got on ABC’s Nightline and chortled this:
CAMPANIS: No, I don’t believe it’s prejudice. I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.
KOPPEL: Do you really believe that?
CAMPANIS: Well, I don’t say that all of them, but they certainly are short. How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are black?
Think about that. Al Campanis did not think he was being racist, and so he went on just plain talking. A lot of people do that, and think it’s OK. They always express shock to others that they, of all people, could be racist. This is a major problem in an American media that too often employs someone white to tell the story of someone black.
I built my online systems to counter a white ran media that insists on bending the truth to try and make black folks looks bad. Enough of it.
Besides, what position I took was based on my experience in economic development with the same City of Oakland Mr. Graham claims to have interest in.
Graham Wrote A Racist Piece About Oakland Entrepreneur Derreck Johnson, And With The Same Pattern Of Cherry-Picking Information To Make A Black Man Look Bad
I am not the only black person Graham has tried to smear. While there’s a set, the latest man was Derreck Johnson, the Oakland entrepreneur who was running for the Oakland City Council At-Large Seat then and now held by Rebecca Kaplan. What Darwin did was just plain awful. Every business owner has faced financial struggles at one point or another. To use their misfortune as a media platform for clicks is so shameful Derreck should have sued Darwin and Oakandside, the publication that ran his story, for emotional distress. In my interviews and talk with Mr. Johnson, he never presented himself as one who currently owned Chicken and Walffles; it was in the past. That he had to file bankruptcy is not something he denied when asked, but he had no reason to presented as part of himself, right off the bat. If you talk with him, you quickly learn that losing the business was traumatic for him. But Darwin, who got the information about Derreck from an Oakland politico, didn;t stop to think about that, and quickly went about crafting an image of Derrreck as a black person who had no business saying he ran a successful business. To put it in perspective, Donald Trump filed bankrupcy four times and yet no one dared say he was not successful. So why say that about Derreck? Because he’s black. It’s a knee-jerk racism that American society has not overcome, and in my view, Darwin had no problem repeating without thought.
I Am Proud Of My Work With Insight Terminal Solutions
I am proud that Insight Terminal Solutions was a Zennie62Media client. The work done was pathbreaking. And regarding coal and climate change, the fact is that stopping the use of coal will not curb climate change one bit, but reducing the human population growth rate will. But to those like Darwin, that’s no matter, and so I am reduced to being a hustler and other adjectives used to describe characters In blaxploitation movies.
Aside from that, the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal was a project I lived with going back to 1986. To see it reduced to not being built because of Tom Steyer’s money going to efforts to hedge against the very coal industry he put money into , while robbing the poor and black and Latino of jobs, is shameful.
Today, West Oakland has been damaged by the destruction of sources for low skilled, high-paying jobs. Coal hauling done cleanly is as possible and needed as explorations to Mars.
At the end of the day, its wrong to try and bully someone because they’re black and not toeing an idealogical line made by white folks. I suppose I should take it as some complement that Mr. Graham thinks I should be part of some flock. But my spider sense tells me that’s too magnanimous. There’s always been a group of Bay Area white media types who could not stand that I was in what they think is their god-given space.
When I was part of the City Brights bloggers for the SF Chronicle, I received no shortage of bad and racist comments that I learned came from some reporters with The San Francisco Chronicle! All that, as I was on the way to generating 25 million page views, one-quarter of the full City Brights output, the number one traffic source for SFGate.com according to Phil Bronstein, and generating over $100,000 in advertising revenue. All of that, and they never paid me; I engineered a way to get paid via a special YouTube playlist code I designed for my City Brights space. Oh, and yes, I told them all about it, but do you think they were smart enough to see that I was building a way to pay reporters? Nope.
White Media Will Not Bully Me, Got That?
I will not be bullied into any way of thinking. Don’t tell me what my position should be because I am black. And don’t assume that my work is of a technical nature because I am black. That what Darwin was trying to do in my opinion.
The issue is closed now and settled. But I remain a staunch advocate of using technology to produce a cleaner fossil fuel industry.
Regarding Darwin Bond Graham, he had no desire to tell the real story about my interest in and history with the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal; just interested in painting me as a bad black guy. That is racist and is all too common among white-ran media.
But it’s got to, and will, stop.
Stay tuned.