Have you guys been to the Oakland Tribune's website lately? If you have you may have noticed a relatively new feature on the site called "My Town." This feature allows readers to navigate directly to the news relevant to their city since the Trib is not completely Oakland exclusive. The four city specific links in the bottom middle of the homepage are Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont and . . . . any guesses?? Maybe San Leandro? Albany possibly? Oooh I know Emeryville!! No, those would all be incorrect guesses. I'm afraid the answer is MONTCLAIR.
Proposed streetscape at Antioch Ct. in Montclair VillageI was upset by this because clearly Montclair isn't a city or a town, its merely a part of Oakland. This raises the question: Why is Montclair the only part of Oakland that gets its own segregated news? I don't know the particulars, but I do know know something about Montclair's trust fund of social, cultural and educational capital. I won't delve into it here but comparing Montclair's Census information to Oakland's Census information is quite revealing, as is this chart detailing Montclair's educational and professional advantages. So I understood why Montclair may have fenagled its way into their own newsroom over the likes of Ghost Town, Bushrod, Eastmont or The Fruitvale.
Click on Oakland income map for link to zoomed in viewWhat I didn't understand was why Montclair was favored over other parts of Oakland with similar demographics, such as Rockridge, Redwood and Sequoia Heights and the Skyline Hills. Why didn't they have their own part of the Tribune website? But then I discovered that they did!! The section was called "Montclair."
This brings us to my bigger point. "Montclair" is just a code word on the Tribune's website. The Montclair homepage is not in fact Montclair exclusive, it is quite exclusive howevver. The common denominator is that the news pieces on this webpage concern all the affluent and predominantly white parts of Oakland (and even the hated Piedmont!). The headlines for today alone refer to the Glenview and Rockridge districts in addition to the Redwood Day school and Bishop O'Dowd, Skyline and Piedmont High Schools. None of these places or schools have anything to do with Montclair- they have to do with upper-middle class and predominantly white Oaklanders.
This to me is extremely racist and classist and I feel that the Oakland Tribune should be taken to task for this. Please discuss this in the comment section. Do you think this is unjust? Or am I doing too much?
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