The Bar for excellence WITH PRECIOUS J. STROUD

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was not viscerally aware of my experience as a minority. My parents, like many other Black folks, made sure of this. When I was growing up there were Black people everywhere from what I could tell. My parents patronized Black-owned businesses throughout Oakland and Berkeley. I had Black teachers and Black doctors; my parents had a Black accountant; our grocery clerks, bus drivers, bank tellers, and local artists and performers–they were all Black, of African descent, and proud of it. It was the 1970s-80s. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention because the reality was that I was one of three Black girls in orchestra in 1985 (the other two have white mothers); one of two Black girls in college prep English in 1990 (go Yellow Jackets!); the only Black person in my Business Law course in 1995; and the first Black director in a Berkeley-based nonprofit in 2014.

Oakland used to be more than 60 percent Black; Berkeley had a stable Black population; and San Francisco was rich with Black culture. The last census informed us that nearly 40 percent of Berkeley’s Black residents left the Bay Area between 2000 and 2010. Like many other neighborhoods across the nation, the predominantly Black block I grew up on in Berkeley, where my mother has lived in our family home since she was fourteen, now has only five Black families remaining. Continue reading my story “The Bar For Excellence”.