citymaus

“Traffic stops are by far the most common reason that police officers initiate contact with members of the public; they account for 84% of encounters, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In fact, before cars, ordinary citizens rarely came in contact with law enforcement. As we rebuilt cities around the automobile, historians contend, drivers came to expect to be policed. And communities of color have paid the highest price. 

In Berkeley, Black drivers are six times as likely to be stopped as white drivers, and four times as likely to be searched. Stops for minor infractions––a broken taillight, speeding––are also more likely to turn deadly for Black and brown drivers, as the deaths of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and Daunte Wright illustrated.

All this enforcement isn’t making our streets safe: Despite growing police budgets, the United States has the highest number of traffic deaths per capita of all developed nations.

Darrell Owens––along with a coalition of racial-justice advocates, anti-car activists, and traffic-court public defenders––wants to change that. Designing better streets, they say, won’t just prevent traffic accidents. It will reduce the need for police enforcement, and its potential for violence, altogether. 

Just a few weeks earlier, Owens had watched George Floyd being murdered in an intersection and had joined in the protests. The Berkeley City Council had since promised police reform. But Owens, who, at 6 foot 6, is known by one city-council member as the “youngest, tallest, and only Black” regular attendee of transportation-commission meetings, had been stewing on a more specific idea. His Twitter thread laid out his argument for transforming law enforcement by transforming city streets: “I prefer license plate cameras … and mailed tickets over: ‘ok make sure nobody does anything that justifies this cop pumping 4 rounds of lead into me.’” 

To his surprise, the City responded. A councilmember retweeted his thread. A month later, the City Council passed “BerkDOT,” a first-in-the-nation measure to shift traffic enforcement to unarmed Department of Transportation workers. 

In the summer of 2020, cities across America made similar commitments: to curtail the use of force, shrink police budgets, and fund fleets of civilian officers. But Berkeley was the first to target the traffic cop. By doing so, it is rethinking police power at its root. 

a speed feedback sign in stockholm that enters complaint drivers into a lottery. 

“In 1925’s Carroll v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the police could search automobiles—unlike homes and offices––without a warrant. This Prohibition-era “vehicle exception,” passed to counter an uptick in alcohol smuggling, gouged a hole in citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Suddenly, law enforcement had unprecedented entry into our private lives––all an officer needed was a missing license plate or a broken taillight.

Thus was born the pretextual stop.

Police enforce the law. But they can’t fix the street-level issues that cause people to break it. In 2020, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency examined the effects of speeding enforcement on driver behavior and found that once a visible officer leaves the scene, speeding violations recommence.

Narrow the road, protect bike lanes, and add medians, and drivers will slow down.”

read more: theatlantic, 15.10.21. 

“A New York Times investigation last fall revealed that in the previous five years, police officers pulling over drivers had killed more than 400 drivers who were neither wielding a gun or knife nor under pursuit for a violent crime—a rate of more than one a week. Police culture and court precedents significantly overstated the danger to officers, encouraging aggression in the name of self-defense and impunity from prosecutors and juries, the investigation found. 

Legislation limiting pretextual traffic stops in Pittsburgh quoted The Times’s reporting, and advocates across the country have cited it to argue for the changes. The killings at traffic stops are among a total of about 1,000 a year by American police, data shows.

The Rev. Ricky Burgess, the councilman who sponsored Pittsburgh’s legislation, said the risk of escalation created by disproportionately stopping Black drivers—exacerbated by pre-existing tensions between the police and Black residents—was a greater threat to public safety than the traffic violations.

“For a Black person, the stop itself becomes the dangerous moment,” he said. 

philando castile was killed in 2016 by a police officer at a traffic stop for a broken brake light. 

“Although unions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles oppose limiting the stops, police chiefs in those cities and elsewhere have embraced the idea. In 2013, Harold Medlock, the now-retired police chief of Fayetteville, N.C., told his officers to quit stopping cars for expired registrations or equipment violations to focus on speeding, reckless driving and other more dangerous infractions.

In 2016, the year he retired, the Fayetteville police made more than 50% more stops than in the year before he took over—and mainly for those hazardous infractions. But although the police were stopping more cars, they searched far fewer Black drivers or passengers—a third of the number they had searched in 2012, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

The same data showed that traffic fatalities, the police use of force and citizen complaints about the police all declined during that time—while predictions of an explosion in gun and drug crimes never came to pass.

“Everything good that could happen, did happen,” recalled Mr. Medlock, the former chief.

In Seattle, Chief Adrian Z. Diaz said the demands for more equitable policing after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 had coincided with staffing challenges from the pandemic. Dangerous driving surged on empty streets while the number of officers available for duty fell sharply. In response, the city this year began using cameras to police red-light violations and other infractions at some intersections, and Chief Diaz ordered officers to quit stopping cars for a list of low-level traffic infractions that he deemed a waste of their time. 

“We would prefer to get back to the basics of, you know, fighting crime,” Chief Diaz added.”

read more: nytimes, 15.04.2022.

afrovillage PDX MAX car parklet. pearl district, portland, oregon.

"Last year, PSU ran a design competition on ideas for our soon-to-be-retired Type 1 MAX cars. AfroVillage won the People’s Choice Award. And now they’re raising awareness and money to try and make their idea a reality.” —TriMet

“This June 24–27, Oakland Black Pride will be holding the inaugural Inside/OUT! Black Pride Celebration, a four-day series of events including virtual workshops and limited-capacity in-person events at various Oakland businesses.

Honoring the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two trans women of color who shaped the early gay rights movement, Inside/OUT! is a Black-led Pride Month event that celebrates the contributions of Black members of the LGBTQ+ community. The celebration will include a kickball tournament; a Queer Expo at The Loom with over 50 primarily LGBTQ+ and BIPOC vendors and nonprofits; a Skate for Pride roller skating party hosted by Grammy award-winning musician Durand Bernarr; a Queer Pub Crawl at select Oakland bars and restaurants including Oeste, Sobre Mesa, Kingston 11 and more.

The four-day series will culminate in a Slayer’s Ball grand finale at the Bridge Yard by the waterfront, with music by Soulovely DJs, Nina Sol and Astu. There will also be a series of panels and workshops focused on advancing the health and financial stability of Oakland’s queer community, featuring an inclusive economics panel for Black and Indigenous-led LGBTQ businesses, a daily fitness and nutrition class hosted by Brown & Healthy and more.

“Oakland Black Pride is an Oakland-based nonprofit organization that was founded to support Black members of the LGBTQ+ community in low- and middle-income income areas of Oakland and the regional Bay Area. “At Oakland Black Pride, we take great joy and responsibility in mobilizing to create pathways for queer Black people to express themselves freely, live healthy lives and have equal opportunities for professional advancement,” said executive director Olaywa K. Austin.

General admission to most events are free to the public, but registration is required. View the full schedule for Inside/OUT!”

via kqed, 01.06.2021. 

reactions in minneapollis and new york after mr. chauvin was found guilty of murdering george floyd.

more photos: nytimes, 20.04.2021. 

california senator scott wiener, whose ambitious bill SB50, to allow more housing units to be constructed near mass transit, failed. 

read more: nytimes, 11.02.2021. 

women of the black panther party. mural by rachel wolfe-goldsmith, commissioned by jilchristina vest in west oakland. mural progress, 19.02.2021.

read more: eastbaytimes, 13.02.2021. sfchronicle, 17.02.2021. and: “dr. huey p. newton way dedicated on west oakland’s 9th street.” eastbaytimes, 17.02.2021.

women of the black panther party. mural by rachel wolfe-goldsmith, commissioned by jilchristina vest in west oakland. 

“I want people, specifically young girls, to be able to walk up to my house and look up, have their shoulders go back, have them stand up stronger and feel the pride that this is their history, and they have something to be celebrated.” —Jilchristina Vest

read more: eastbaytimes, 13.02.2021. sfchronicle, 17.02.2021. 

arrested mobility — exploring the impacts of over-policing BIPOC mobility in the us. @TRB (transportation research board) session, 25.01.2021.

“arrested mobility”: black people are historically and presently denied the inalienable right to move, to be moved, or to simply exist in public space by legal and illegal authority, resulting in adverse social, political, economic, and health outcomes that are preventable, widespread, and intergenerational. 

“Some of the early southern American police forces were born out of slave patrols. In other parts of the country, groups of men were hired to protect the property of the wealthy. After the Civil War during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs maintained a similar function to the slave patrols through their enforcement of segregation and disenfranchisement of previously enslaved Africans. Enforcement started out and continues to predominantly be about protecting wealthy and white comfort at the expense of the lives of Black and Brown folks.

The invention of the automobile represented a new threat to public safety, with the first US automobile fatality taking place as early as 1899. Regulations were needed to prevent reckless driving, and police began enforcing speed limits and other safety laws. 

“Policing the roads was always about more than just public safety. It was about the exercise of various types of power: local power, racial power, and making money.” —Cotton Seiler, author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America.

The over-reliance on police for traffic enforcement in the US has a serious impact on freedom of mobility for Black and Brown people. 

In the modern era, researchers at Stanford University analyzed data from close to 100 million traffic stops between 2011 and 2017 and found Black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and have their car searched than white drivers, which the researchers stated was evidence of systemic racial profiling. Latinos, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans are also disproportionately stopped while driving, which in many cases can lead to arrest and deportation. According to the US Burea vu of Justice, the traffic stop is the most common interaction between US residents and police officers. It is understandable that members of these these communities may feel distrust and uncertainty when interacting with law enforcement.

the chicago tribune, 17.03.17 reported that the police department was writing exponentially more bike tickets in black neighborhoods than majority-white ones.

“Oboi Reed form the mobility justice nonprofit Equiticity said that when he first started organizing community bike rides in predominantly Black and Brown lower-income neighborhoods, he heard from young people that they didn’t ride their bikes because they felt they were being targeted by the police. That was a new concept to him at the time, but he took their word for it. He added that when he shared the youths’ concerns with mainstream transportation advocates and Chicago Department of Transportation officials, often the response was disbelief—people didn’t believe the police were actually guilty of profiling cyclists of color. But years later the Tribune data proved that officers were, in fact, writing exponentially more bike tickets in communities of color, and a police spokesperson eventually admitted that this was due to bike enforcement being used a pretext to conduct searches in high-crime areas.

“The vast majority [of the contact] that BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] folks have with the police is in the act of exercising our human right to mobility….The vehicles of mobility are our sidewalks, trains, buses, and vehicles that are a major part of our cities. That’s where the collision happens.”

That’s a harmful situation because people require mobility for improved educational opportunities, job opportunities, opportunities to improve their health, etc. “When our mobility is restricted, any number of life outcomes become constricted. The nature of policing in [Chicago] is to constrict our movement.” He referenced slave patrols as “the foundation of policing.”

“I always think about mobility justice literally being the intersection and the arteries of every social justice movement,” Río Oxas said. “It’s how we get to school, work, the clinic, our friends, the mountains, the ocean. That’s mobility justice.””

read more: chi.streetsblog, 14.12.2020.

“When activist Carroll Fife choreographed homeless mothers and their kids taking over an empty house in West Oakland to spotlight the city’s housing crisis, it drew international coverage.

Now, Fife, the mastermind behind Moms 4 Housing, has unseated two-term City Council incumbent Lynette Gibson McElhaney in a stunning victory in District Three. The race—one of the most hotly contested among the five seats up for grabs on the council—is for a district that includes West Oakland, Downtown, Uptown, Jack London, Pill Hill, Lake Merritt,  and the Port of Oakland.

Fife’s win signals a shift to a more progressive electorate in Oakland. Her campaign centered on the idea that “housing is a human right” and that public safety should be reimagined — a nod to Oaklanders’ shifting priorities amid a growing homelessness crisis and a racial reckoning over police brutality.

Fife was one of the lead organizers behind Moms 4 Housing, a collective that began when homeless mothers took over a speculator-owned house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland in November 2019. The incumbent, McElhaney, was the first Black woman to be elected president of the City Council by her colleagues in 2015 and has a background in affordable housing but was seen as generally more moderate than Fife.”

carroll fife (left) defeated incumbent lynette gibson mcelhaney (right).

How did your two decades of activism inform your approach to your city council run?

“For years, people asked me to run for office but I said it wasn’t my jam; I thought we could be more impactful working on the outside. But we kept running into roadblocks that made me consider what could be possible if we’d have more progressive legislators at the local level.

As the director of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, I’ve always had to listen to the people closest to the pain so I knew there was huge dissatisfaction in the city, especially among Black people who have been let down by the mayor and neoliberal politicians.”

What skills do you bring to Oakland City Hall, and what skills do you hope to develop during your tenure?

“People say I can’t legislate because I’m an activist, but it’s been my job to legislate on an everyday basis. We’ve organized to get speed bumps to stop people doing donuts up and down the streets. I serve constituents everyday. Now I’m just expanding the way we do that and have to institutionalize the process.

The fact that I already listen to the people is critical and a skill that I wish the incumbent would have exercised: really listening to them about what’s happening. I’m also not beholden to any special interests like the police union or predatory landlords.”

sharena thomas, left, carroll fife, center, dominique walker, second from right, and tolani king, right, stand outside the speculator-owned house in west oakland on 30 december. photograph: kate wolffe

What are your priorities for your constituents?

“I have a whole spreadsheet of issues I want to address. I want to support our small businesses in this pandemic and sustain our local economy in this uncharted territory. I want these businesses to be resilient in this city and continue to contribute to the culture of Oakland.

I also want to divert police funding to a fund or somewhere that can keep our city afloat. It’s problematic that every other public sector is seeing cuts except police. Our fire department has a crumbling infrastructure that affects them saving lives while our police aren’t held accountable for taking lives.

I’m also on a permanent quest to make housing a human right at the local and state level. We need to do something about the people who are perpetually homeless and use every bit of resources we have. It’s unconscionable that we have children in encampments that aren’t even fit for animals and we lose a little bit of our humanity each day we let these conditions exist.”

read more: guardian, 12.11.2020. and sfchronicle, 09.11.2020.

“Every weekend, a fleet of 30 cyclists zipped on their bikes through the streets of Baltimore, their front lights illuminating the pavement as the sun set, with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album booming out of mobile speakers. Onlookers cheered the party. Children ran up to the curbside, holding their hands out for high fives.

"Every now and then you get someone who wants to know the name of our group, and then we look at each other with a smirk, like to say, ‘Who wants to answer that?’” said Shaka Pitts, the co-founder of the Baltimore club. One of the cyclists would proudly shout out: “Black People!” And then, in a call-and-response that announced their title, the rest would answer: “Ride Bikes!”

When COVID-19 struck, their “SoulFood Saturday” rides came to a halt for a few months. But since May, the group Black People Ride Bikes has been getting people outside and socializing. The year-old team is also working on the bigger picture: encouraging newcomers, inspiring people who haven’t biked in years to climb back on—and sending the message that African Americans embrace recreational biking.

They are one of a few Black biking groups in the city that have been attracting large followings on social media, with African Americans in other cities and states joining in remotely and bonding over riding.

“A 2013 national study by The League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club showed that the fastest growth in bicycling is among African Americans and other people of color. But Baltimore bikers and advocates say there have long been barriers to cycling in the Black community. They point to a limited number of resources, such as bike shops in Black neighborhoods, as well as the city’s infrastructure, where protected bike lanes have tended to be in predominantly white neighborhoods. There’s also been a lack of representation. When club members watch the Tour de France, they say they only see a handful of Black cyclists, and an even smaller number of Black women. 

“Pitts and his co-founder, Nia Reed-Jones, wanted to change that. After meeting at a bike party in 2019, they decided to launch an advocacy group that would educate beginner and intermediate riders, with mentorship from more seasoned cyclists. They would teach the importance of using the bike as a way to improve physical and mental health.

But first they needed to overcome misconceptions, such as the idea that riding bikes is for children...”

read more: baltimoresun, 05.11.2020. 

SPUR’s 2020 san francisco and california voter guide.

yes on prop 16! allows public institutions to consider race, gender or ethnicity in decisions around education, employment and contracting. 

Jerald Cooper is founder of the creative studio Things We’ve Made, and the man behind the Instagram account HOOD CENTURY with tagline: “Yes, there is mid-century modern design in the hood!”

“I was literally walking to the top of my childhood street, and just looked at this mid-century modern dead-on, and I was like: I don’t think people know about that!”

What is it about the HOOD CENTURY account that you think is resonating most with people right now?

Jerald: I do think I opened up an aesthetic look, like a thing, like a portal: Black bodies in modern settings. And I think I opened it up in a very interesting way, because every person who experiences modern, experiences modern differently. It’s an aesthetic it rips open: The Black body being in front of it is one rip, then my friends knowing that that is mid-century is another rip.

“The other day my church was getting knocked down – it sounds like a movie. It was a matriarchal place and I still get emotional about it. It was the place that we came in the ’20s and ’30s from Georgia – from sharecropping essentially – and it was the beacon; they went there like four or five times a week, they could go there to eat if they didn’t have anything at home. And it’s getting torn down for a soccer stadium. It’s a great fucking amazing spot for a soccer stadium, I’m not going to front. But they didn’t have the representation to properly negotiate an exit deal. To properly preserve the stuff. None of our stuff is digitized. The building should have been a historical preservation site – it was actually built in the mid-1800s – but I heard that the preservation society came by and said [no] since there was a modern addition to the church. I’m tired of that shit, you know? We’ve been getting bullied too much. 

I want people to go outside in their neighborhood and look at shit that they have no business looking at. Go out and be nosy about your neighborhood. I’m like, ‘Ma, have you been down this street?’ She’s like, ‘No.’ I’m like, ‘You’ve lived here 40 years and you haven’t been down this street?!’ Curiosity has been killed in the inner city because of the violence. Our mothers would say, ‘Don’t be curious, don’t go around that corner, it’s not safe.’ And I didn’t understand that until I went everywhere, but could you imagine? Curiosity is the thing that all brilliant people have, and we are asking our kids not to be curious? That is so bad.”

read more: designmilk, 19.10.2020. 

“Even at a young age, LeRonne Armstrong understood the officers’ actions as an affront to his family’s dignity. “Just to see the manner in which they searched left me in a position where I felt like, man, that’s just messed up,” he said. “Those experiences have a tremendous impact on you growing up and how you view police. It makes you dislike them.”

Armstrong’s distrust was reinforced by his mother, who was wearily accustomed to corrupt policing. She told him, “We don’t talk to the police. We don’t expect the police to do anything for us besides take us to jail or potentially kill us.”

West Oakland at the time was an increasingly dangerous place. “It’s got so that people have been afraid to go out of their houses,” a local Baptist pastor told the New York Times in 1984. And yet, Black residents often viewed the police as a force that terrorized the community it was intended to serve.

Armstrong is now being considered for the role of Oakland’s next chief of police. If appointed, he would oversee one of the most controversy-ridden departments in the country.

“Nationally, police killings have consistently hovered around 1,100 a year since 2013, according to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence – a number that dwarfs other wealthy countries. Although African Americans make up just over 13% of the general population, they account for a disproportionate number of shooting victims and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Police have killed at least one Black man or woman every week in 2020.

According to a recent analysis by the ACLU, Black men face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by the police over the course of their lives. The report states: “Stunningly, for young men of color, police use of force is now among the leading causes of death.”

Officers of color, especially those who are Black, have at times been met with accusations of selling out their community. During episodes of confrontation between the community and the force, such as this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, Black officers have to straddle a line of loyalty – Black or blue.

Black officers experience what WEB Du Bois once described as “double consciousness”, a state of seeing oneself through the eyes of other people. “It’s really a feedback loop, which is on one hand [Black officers’] experiences with other police officers and then on the other hand, their experiences with community members.” Sociologist Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution suggests that some may feel like impostors for “not really fitting in in either space”.

read more: 22.10.2020. 

“The East Oakland Black Cultural Zone Collaborative—a partnership of more than 20 local nonprofits—spearheaded the effort to establish the Black Cultural Zone in a triangle-shaped lot along 73rd Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. The site, also known as Liberation Park, borders the Eastmont Town and Transit centers.

East Oakland native and Castlemont High School graduate Carol Johnson, executive director of the collaborative, has been working with the city to bring the project to fruition. 

The 54,000-square-foot, city-owned land was a former automotive and tire center but has been vacant since 2007, when the city acquired it. The crime-plagued area has long been known for shootings instead of shopping.

“The collaborative partnered with Oakland District 6 City Councilmember Loren Taylor, who helped launch the Zone’s Akoma Outdoor Market on Sept. 6.

“Especially now with the Black Lives Matter movement, the need to empower and address the systemic issues that we face, including historical injustices and disparities, is even more urgent,” Taylor said.

The collaborative took control of the site in March, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and many businesses were shuttered. A variety of services began in June with the distribution of free meals from the World Central Kitchen and COVID-19 testing through Umoja in Health. First Fridays—similar to the Uptown Oakland event—began in July with live local entertainment and food trucks.

A commercial real estate developer, broker and tenured college professor, Johnson wants to change the negative impression of East Oakland and make sure there’s a balance between a thriving Black community and gentrification.

“Our goal is that every day of the week, there will be something happening that highlights Black arts, culture, people and business,” Johnson said.

During the dire economic times of the pandemic, Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen helped over 100 Oakland restaurants bring back employees to make meals for struggling residents. At the Zone, volunteers and paid student interns serve hundreds of dinners on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 4-6pm.

“Colorful murals and signs with positive messages adorn the fence surrounding the lot, and pots brimming with plants, herbs and vegetables are the first signs of new life reinvigorating the barren, dirt parcel. A small performance stage with a brightly colored backdrop and artwork is set in the southeast corner.

City of Oakland senior policy advisor and East Oakland resident Pamela Ferran, who works with Taylor, said she would pass by the lot often and see its potential. She loves the fact that she can now walk from her house and buy locally-produced coffee and other goods.

“This is like a dream come true for me,” Ferran said.”

read more: eastbaytimes, 27.09.2020.  visit: black cultural zone. 

“The American bicycle industry has been racist, often overtly racist, since 1878. Rivendell has been obliviously—not "obviously"— racist most of the time since 1994. We say this not to scold the industry, not to be publicly humble, not to scold our comrades, and not to be uncharacteristically on trend. It's just true—and it's true in other industries, too.

Racism isn't just policies and actions, although this industry has a history of those, for sure. Racism can be actions not taken, or it can be accidental, or unnoticed, like a super-camouflaged shape-shifting octopus. Racism can be secret, too. It can show up as feeling good about yourself for having Black friends. If you don't have a racist bone in your body, you probably didn't grow up white in the United States. (Or you are President Jimmy Carter.)

Racism doesn't doesn't go away when you believe in your bones that all people were created or evolved equal. People don't make the world a better or worse place by their thoughts. It takes anti-racist policies and action.

Reparations are an example—not because Reparations are "a nice thing to do," but because they're owed. If you don't believe that, what you're about to read will only make you mad. If you believe it, you may find it interesting.

Reparations acknowledge that in America, white wealth—recent or generational, earned or inherited—has come by the labor of Black people, who, even after slavery, were never given a leg up. Your non-Black tycoon great-grampa may have been born poor, may have been a sharp and clever go-getter at the top of his class, may have overcome his buck teeth and bad breath, but he wasn't born Black.

We've dabbled in Reparations since July, 2018, when we first offered a 45 percent discount to Black customers who shopped in person. There weren't many, and since we stopped taking walk-in customers because of COVID, now it's at zero.

“Starting October, 2020, we're going at it again, and with a name and an acronym: Black Reparations Pricing (BRP). We're in a good position to do it. We have advantages many other businesses don't have. We can do it without government insistence or shareholder fist-pounding. We have only eleven dealers worldwide, so the pricing schedule isn't a huge conflict with dealer pricing. BRP doesn't work with wholesale in the mix. Although we are undercutting them, they applaud the plan. They're independent, they can do what they like, but we're proud that they're supportive.

We've been urged to include other groups who've been discriminated against, and deserve something more than acknowledgment: Chinese people, Japanese people, Native Americans, Italian people, Jewish people, LGBTQ people, veterans, and low-income people of any race or color. "Base it on income!" was another suggestion. Frankly, we couldn't manage the complication, so we're sticking with BRP for now.

Black Reparations Pricing (BRP) Overview

“BRP is the same 45 percent (retail x 0.55) we've offered to walk-ins. This program is micro-scale reparations we can do ourselves. It doesn't apply to labor or freight.

One challenge of BRP is how to verify someone's race. For us, this is the most challenging and awkward part of BRP. Within two days of launch, we had a disturbing number of questionable inquiries. If you are Black, we'd like to ask for your understanding, your candor, and something tangible to assure that you are. People who aren't Black can pretend to be, which would steal the deal from a Black person.

This isn't just for you and us. It's also for the success of this program. If BRP is to have a chance of spreading to continue and spread other businesses, this is a hurdle that'll have to be overcome. Let's cooperate and make that happen, OK? Our role is emphasizing the importance of it, as we're doing now, Your role is to figure out a way for you to avoid the indignity of being asked if you're Black, and for us to avoid the horror of asking.” 

read more and contribute to the reparations fund: rivendell.