Dr. Harry Edwards first stepped onto San Jose State College’s campus in 1966, a 6’5”, 245 lb, 16-year-old track and basketball star who grew up in East St. Louis. He was excited to join not only a student body of free thinkers in the school’s sociology program, but also the university’s “Speed City” roster, whose runners produced 43 world records and 49 American records between 1958 and 1979.
After a semester at Fresno City College, his future looked bright with a track and field scholarship to the California State University system’s oldest campus in hand, where he says he “anticipated no problems of a racial sort in the sports program,” which had “become known as a haven for world-class Black sprinters.”
But that sunny California dreaming quickly dissolved; after learning there were fewer than 60 full-time Black students at SJSU—none of whom could name a Black athlete who had graduated, Edwards says—he quickly realized that the value those around him in San Jose saw in Black athletes started and ended on the field, court and track.
“There was a long established joke circulating,” Edwards wrote in his memoir The Struggle That Must Be, where he detailed years of perseverance through discrimination. “‘When campus police find a Negro on campus after dark, they throw him a football. If he fumbles it, they throw him a basketball. If he fumbles that, they throw him into their squad car—unless he can outrun them, in which they just assume that he is one of [track coach] Bud Winters’ boys.’ By the end of my first semester at San Jose State, all illusions of California as a super liberal interracial promised land had evaporated.”
A portrait of Dr. Harry Edwards, one of the organizers behind the 1968 Olympic podium protest. Photo courtesy of Edwards
He was forced to live with a coach while the SJSU administration struggled to find white students open to being roommates. Renting was out of the question, as nearby landlords feared Black tenants would force white tenants away. And the school shut down access to the dorms during Thanksgiving, forcing Edwards to spend November nights sleeping on a San Jose donut shop stoop.
These dismal stories are more than personal journal entries; from being one of the first Black students integrated into his Missouri high school to facing structural racism daily at SJSU, Edwards’ experiences facing discrimination in the South Bay became seeds that blossomed into his role as lead organizer of one of the most iconic political demonstrations in sports history: San Jose State sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ podium protest at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
Their silent act of resistance—heads down, black power fists up in the air—during the “Star-Spangled Banner” after winning a world-record gold and bronze in the men’s 200-meter race was a stand against injustices, from the apartheid in South Africa and revocation of Muhammad Ali’s world heavyweight boxing title, to the history of white supremacy and misogyny in the Olympics.
“That whole period had a profound impact on me, in terms of what I was up against doing anything academic, political, and athletic,” Edwards told San Jose Inside, noting that social tensions and assassinations culminated in one of the most violent periods in U.S. history since the Civil War. “All of these areas, I can think about them independently, but they all intersected to bring me to the point that I ultimately came to.”
While a 22-foot sculpture has immortalized the infamous 1968 Olympic snapshot on SJSU’s campus since 2005, the context behind Edwards’ evolution into a political organizer who helped define the modern intersection of sports, race and society—while being told he was insane in the process—has been somewhat lost in San Jose’s collective civil rights history.
“People would have you believe that Carlos and Smith just stepped up one day and decided, ‘We're gonna fight against discrimination, we're gonna stand up for human rights.’ There was a whole movement behind that, beginning with Tommie Smith taking my class,” Edwards said, noting that America has a habit of reducing Black experiences into singular, isolated high points, from Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream” speech to Rosa Parks refusing to move from a seat at the front of a segregated bus. “That eliminates a true understanding of the context out of which that movement emerged, and what it has to do with things that are going on this very day.”
Ground Zero
In 2021, Edwards spends his days as a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California Berkeley, a consultant with the National Football League, the NBA and the San Francisco 49ers, and a proud grandfather.
Half a century earlier, then-SJSU sociology instructor Edwards, along with George Washington Ware, Ken Noel, Jimmy Garrett, and Bob Hoover, helped rally dozens as United Black Students for Action against discrimination in SJSU’s housing, Greek organizations, athletics, and representation in student and staff on campus.
School administrators beat them to the punch, canceling a football game due to racial unrest—an unprecedented move, according to the New York Times–much to the ire of California Gov. Ronald Reagan.
After rejecting opportunities to be drafted by the NFL to pursue a PhD in sociology from Cornell University in New York City—where he kept the company of quintessential Black voices like Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin in between his research and writing—he returned to SJSU as an instructor, further crystalizing the idea he helped establish: athletes could use their platform in sports to change the world.
Dr. Harry Edwards stands with Malcolm X in August of 1964 in New York City. Photo courtesy of Edwards
Edwards took the momentum from his 1,104-page dissertation and ran with it, helping form the Olympic Project for Human Rights in 1968, which amplified the awareness of racial issues in sport and society by bringing together hundreds of Black athletes in workshops that year, connecting with notable activists like Martin Luther King Jr. to share their platform and desires.
OPHR crafted the playbook for tackling injustices through athletes’ collective leadership and action in the 1960s. Smith and Carlos’ 1968 protest in Mexico City took the message and movement against racism to the next level—from an idea formed on a bench on San Jose State’s campus, to making waves across international borders.
“The stadium became eerily quiet,” Carlos later recalled in his memoir, noting some of the 50,000 spectators went silent, booed or defiantly shouted the anthem. “They screamed it to the point where it seemed less a national anthem than a barbaric call to arms.”
The power of that moment has reemerged in headlines during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.
Smith and Carlos joined more than 150 athletes, educators and activists in signing a July letter urging the International Olympic Committee against punishing participants who demonstrate at the Tokyo Games. The IOC complied, relaxing its “Rule 50,” which prohibited “political, religious or racial propaganda,” but did not lift the ban on medals-stand demonstrations.
Reignited in the year since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, women’s soccer players for Britain, Chile, Sweden and the United States knelt before their games, a gymnast from Costa Rica incorporated a Black Lives Matter protest into her floor routine and a U.S. shot-putter made the first podium demonstration by raising and crossing her arms into an “X” shape, to bring attention to intersectional issues of racial, gender and mental health injustice—the same intentions then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and Atlanta Dream’s Ariana Smith had following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
All of these actions can be traced back to Smith and Carlos.
“San Jose State was ground zero for a movement that literally changed the perceptions of sport, the understanding of sport as a social institution, and a revolution that changed the disposition, and attitudes of athletes in terms of turning the athletic stages into political platforms,” Edwards says. “It's nice to talk about all of the people who started a computer firm in their garage, and it’s nice to talk about the moment of creating the most iconic sports image of the 20th century, which is Smith and Carlos on the podium in Mexico City, but you've also got to talk about how that came about and why here.”
Black Exodus
Following the hubbub of Mexico City, conditions didn’t get any better in San Jose.
Smith, Carlos and Edwards were welcomed back home with lost jobs, team suspensions, bad press, threatened lives, dead dogs and FBI surveillance for being dangerous to the state, anti-American and revolutionary.
“Our life was put on a stand to be vilified,” Smith said at an event at San Jose State two years ago, previously going so far as to say he thinks the protest ruined many parts of his life. “It is very sad that two young athletes had to do what they were doing to bring attention to racism.”
Their actions on a world stage may have sparked conversations and movements for decades to come, but not much of that progress has found its way to the South Bay, as prominent Black leaders still struggle to stay afloat—financially and socially.
An exodus of people of color and essential workers is happening as prices of living keep climbing, while opportunities to “make it” with a livable wage and access to affordable housing can’t keep up.
Metro areas such as San Francisco and Oakland saw sharp decreases of roughly 40% in Black residents between 1990 and 2019; San Jose lost 17.67% of its Black population over the same period. Additionally, of the 9,706 unhoused residents counted in 2019, 19% of those people were Black.
By 2019, Black people accounted for only 30,288 of San Jose’s population—about 3%.
“San Jose is not a place for Black people,” said Walter Wilson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Minority Business Consortium, in June, citing decades-long issues with racial segregation and profiling. “We’re not welcomed here, not really… and that is by design.”
Covid has accentuated the South Bay’s racial discrepancies; notably, African Americans accounted for 3% of Santa Clara County’s Covid deaths, according to public health data, while only representing 2.4% of its population.
San Jose Vice Mayor Chappie Jones took those concerns one step further, stating that if measures aren’t made to achieve some stability for Black residents, more and more may leave.
While Edwards has managed to successfully call the Bay Area home for more than five decades, many prominent Black San Jose residents aren’t able to say the same, packing up to seek better lives elsewhere.
After careers as athletes and educators, both Smith and Carlos eventually moved near Atlanta, Georgia. Smith eventually put his medal up for auction—both for the money and to give back to the community—but he’s now settled down south with a “good wife, a good mother-in-law and a lot of plants.”
In 2021, Rev. Jethroe Moore, the now-former president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley NAACP, also announced his move to Atlanta after decades spent in the South Bay, citing better opportunities for housing, jobs and education for his sons.
Especially as history repeats itself—similar protests are being organized around struggles in healthcare, voting rights, police brutality and discrimination—Edwards says nothing occurs in a vacuum.
Focusing on one event—the success of Speed City and the Mexico City games—to the exclusion of others—the physical, mental and economic toll organizers pushed through to get to that point—is an incomplete story. Without a full history, the role of San Jose State and the city of San Jose is lost.
“You're creating a false narrative, as if these people simply materialized out of thin air and then faded away—like the morning mist before the rising sun,” Edwards says. “You can't talk about the demonstration in Mexico City in isolation without seeing its impact as part of a whole history of athlete activism, going back to the turn of the 20th century, right up through the 21st century to what's going on at the Olympic games today.”
How does Edwards expect San Jose—a city that hasn’t taken much tangible action to address its racial justice failings in the past year—to own up to its decades-long history of mistreatment?
He’s not holding his breath, saying the city can never fully know itself until that context comes to light.
“Until they own it all, they can't tell that whole story,” Edwards says. “At the end of the day, I don't expect them to embrace it, but the one thing that they cannot stop is the story being told.”
The first meeting of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in February 1968. Photo courtesy of Edwards
There is a house on the zero block of North Eleventh Street that serves a physical manifestation of the racial discrimination that ultimately led to the 1968 demonstration.
Tommie Smith lived in this house, likely because racial redlining prevented black students from living south of Santa Clara Street, closer to the university.
I have urged that Tommie Smith’s house be acquired by the City and repurposed as an African-American history museum, which could house permanently History San Jose’s Speed City exhibit which tells the powerful story set forth in the above article, as well as other pertinent exhibits regarding our city’s rich African American heritage. It would make a terrific tourist attraction, as well.
Now-mayor Sam Liccardo was dismissive of the notion when he served as the downtown city councilman. Perhaps he can and the rest of the city council can be persuaded to reconsider, especially if the city’s new office of racial equity endorses the idea.
“Dr. Harry Edwards first stepped onto San Jose State College’s campus in 1966, a 6’5”, 245 lb, 16-year-old track and basketball star who grew up in East St. Louis.” — Author
Harry Edwards was born in 1942… the only way to make him just 16 in 1966 is to use math that’s been cleansed of privileged white influence.
Smith and Carlos, despite being accepted to an institution of higher learning and absolutely serious about making a political statement on the podium, couldn’t assemble enough IQ points to remember to bring two sets of gloves (so they could each raise a gloved right fist). The statue of them is, in my eyes, a monument to stupidity.
And what did SJSU do to celebrate Smith’s and Carlos’s achievements?
The morons at SJSU reduced Bud Winter Field into a parking lot.
David S. Wall
“San Jose is not a place for Black people,” said Walter Wilson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Minority Business Consortium, in June, citing decades-long issues with racial segregation and profiling. “We’re not welcomed here, not really… and that is by design.”
San Jose is not a place for almost any people and that IS by design. San Jose is turning into a Sunset Set City – they expect poor whites, poor latinos, poor Asians and poor blacks to be on the train and out of the city by sunset. What do you think the design of BART is? Tourism? Please. What do you think the design of HSR is?
They want your cheap labor, your lunch sales taxes, your kids in schools somewhere else, and your extended family weekend picnics (which scare them on a number of fronts) in a park in another part of the state.
All this race stuff is just a distraction. San Jose is like 2% black, San Jose might as well be in Utah. Even the “documents” say the poor neighborhoods back in FDR’s redlining days were 10% “Negro”, so black population portion has probably been 1%-5% going way back.
Looking at this date set (this is actually a very telling set of numbers):
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/SanJose50.htm#1940
In 1950 San Jose was 0.6% black, in 1960 it was 1%, in 1970 it grew to 2.5%, by 1980 it grew again to 4.6%, flattened to 4.7% in 1990, dropped to 3.5% in 2000, and by 2010 it was well on it’s way to current levels at 3.2%, and now in 2021 its anywhere from 2%-3%.
Blacks were not a significant portion of the San Jose population when redlining was installed in 1932 until it ended in the mid 50s, perhaps a couple hundred people in actual terms. It wasn’t unit 1980 that the population got close to 5%, likely due to the build out of affordable track homes instigated by Lockheed employment growth. I remember in our neighborhood in Berryessa there were many original owner black families when we arrived in 2005 and most sold for a cool million at least in the years since.
Those kinds of opportunities disappeared, as we know the radical environmentalist firmly took root in the government and such large-scale suburban ranch style developments were cast as “urban sprawl”. No more cheap market rate housing and the lack government contract job growth ended blacks run at getting a proportional piece of the San Jose pie. Not redlining or racism, at least in statistically relevant terms, if not anecdotal ones.
I find it interesting how people will attack one groups expression of oppression but want others to acknowledge their own?
How deep does this really go when the obvious gets ignored. The fact is, Asians, blacks, lgbqti, middle eastern, latino’s, all others including white “Americans have been subjected to biases (in some cases even by those of the same communities).
A person enter’s the criminal justice system with minimal education, mentally ill and they are subjected to abuse. The same lack of education and intellectual challenges prevent them from being able to present an intelligent defense, file complaints and receive services they are entitled to (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/da/newsroom/newsreleases/Pages/NRA2017/M-Tyree-Conviction.aspx)
More importantly, the tasked expected of our public servants should not be allowed to subvert accountability. You see, it’s irrefutable that racism exist in this county, even in Public Safety, amongst government employees (https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/investigative-reports/demotion-over-hateful-texts-moves-to-centerstage-in-santa-clara-county-sheriffs-race/). What should be appalling and unacceptable to all.. is that only five of these individuals were held accountable. The other three were allowed to subvert discipline by allowing the time required to take action by law to run out. They were subsequently assigned to train new employees, work in the “Gang Unit” and one was promoted to Supervisor. 3000, yes, 3000 racial, misogynistic and homophobic text messages coming from law-enforcement personnel employed within this county (Sheriff’s Office located in San Jose). No issue of racism here!!
The Sheriff provides security to the judges, patrol services to city without police departments, the unincorporated areas, oversees the jails and is responsible for enforcing “Evictions”!! This office, next to the office of the District Attorney, is the most powerful office of local government!!
When any government leader promotes “HATE”, “RACIAL”, “SEXUALITY” and “GENDER” “BIAS”, you don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist to identify the obvious.
By the way, the jail population reflects disparaging numbers in terms of its population. It historically ranges between 13%-20% American’s of African decent.
And for the record, I get those facts from personal experience. I’m a government employee, labor representative, trainer of cops and someone’s who’s successful litigated against the Sheriff (more to come).
To sronin
You wrote: “By the way, the jail population reflects disparaging numbers in terms of its population. It historically ranges between 13%-20% American’s of African decent.”
Your comment is clearly meant to mislead. The “disparaging” high numbers is because of the disproportionately high rates of black crime. Blacks represent about 13% of the population but commit almost half of all violent crimes.
“Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America” written by Charles Murray is worth reading if one is truly interested in a thoughtful and data driven discussion about the subject.
“Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America” written by Charles Murray — HB
Anyone who expects or pines for congruity in human behavior or social outcomes is intellectually incapable of handling any of the truths mandated by natural selection, exposed by interaction, or revealed by honest research.
sronin wants a world that doesn’t exist, demands that humans be what they are not, and expects life to play out as it does on the Hallmark Channel. There have always been such people, but never in such numbers, and never with so much influence over decision-making. We are turning out society over to children.
Excellent article. Well researched. Well written. Educational. This is the kind of unique content that elevates sanjoseinside.
To PHU: Worse than children, we are turning our society over to avowed Marxist racists — most of them are stupid as bricks.
Yes, with the nature of “progressive” politics in particular on the Left, and with more recent generations’ arrested development, we indeed are turning society over to children. This already includes children instead of adults in California governments insofar as behavior and policy are concerned, and a number of candidates for local office featured here or in the Spotlight, in particular, exemplify this.
As for Murray, one note is of interest, the quote by itself:
“If working-class and middle-class Whites adopt identity politics, disaster follows[.]”
Murray could join the inner circle in disparaging Trump as others have done without grasping the message behind 2016 that it was largely a negative vote as well against arrogant, conceited, removed elitist people in office with alien politics driving policy (at least governing others, if not always themselves). However, an obvious additional thing that is happening that even honest liberals familiar with the situation know is that in no small part the same kind of warped politics finding favor in government, with related policy as with immigration, have had some degree of responsibility for the rise of the Right and notably the uglier Right in Europe. As such discord and alienation you create, you on the Left …
Those allied with developers want San Jose to be like the west valley and the new, shifted, sprawled new site of so much in tech, the southern Peninsula. It’s a place for $$$, including from Northeastern metro money-to-play-with sources (boom town rats extraordinaire) and a lot of international interest, too.
There’s also the San Jose contingent who wants their city to be a real city and a big city someday, even arranging political to get the high-speed route through San Jose and trains to and from LA through Diridon Station. What so many people denied for ages, that the project is not a glorified expanded commuter system but real high-speed rail to compete SF-LA with air, is now the project being pitched as “Silicon Valley to Central Valley” with open appeals to the attractiveness of cheaper housing far down the line outside the Bay Area (and San Jose).
Thanks to Ms. Lauer for this fine piece of historical journalism which helps to place San Jose and San Jose State University (SJSU) on the modern political map. Professor Edwards, who was already a well-known scholar/activist in the mid-1970s when I attended SJSU, is an important figure in that history and the present.
Edwards was (and is) a very public intellectual before that concept or that phenomenon emerged in the 1990s. Professor Edwards is a contemporary of Angela Davis, one our most important living intellectuals, and both prefigure the emergence of some of the more well-known Black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Julianne Malveaux and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Edwards, Angela Davis and Cornell West, in particular, understand the enormous responsibility that knowledge places on people of conscience. In that sense, Professor Edwards is a shining example of Edward Said’s definition of the public intellectual:
[T]he intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma…, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.” (Edward Said
Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York, Vintage Books, 1994))
The Trumpist libertarian HBO: “Blacks represent about 13% of the population but commit almost half of all violent crimes.”
Elite wealthy white men with political and economic power have never been more than 5% of the U.S. population and yet have been responsible for 100% of the slavery, 100% of the genocide against native peoples, 100% of the wars against Mexico and Canada, 100% of the imperial wars, invasions and occupations in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East during 1890s-2020s and for 100% of the resulting in deaths and injuries in the millions and the massive destruction of public and private property far and wide. No “congruity in human behavior or social outcomes” here HB (I mean Putanella).
Facendo Guaio, like the fanciful sronin, finds strength and righteousness in criticizing the indelible reality of nature’s handiwork. Yes children, the unfortunate truth is that harmless little Bambi is a food source favored by savage beasts; that suffering is the outcome most likely for weak or disadvantaged beasts and tribes; and big decisions, good or bad, are almost always made by humans holding power.
For example, Aztec leaders, certainly never more than 5% of the population, were responsible for all the slavery, genocide, and aggressive wars in their part of pre-Columbian America, as were the Mayan and Inca leaders in theirs. For powerless indigenous Americans who never encountered a European (or any other foreign bogeymen), incongruity in behavior and outcomes was every bit the day-to-day reality nature had decreed — despite the racial homogeneity of their society.
For more than fifty years America has been preoccupied with finding ways to excuse African-Americans for their disproportionate failures (social and economic) by finding someone or something else to blame. Not only has this destructive form of feedback destroyed many lives, it has become an industry that race-industrialists (like the many named by Salem) will never surrender to progress. Like the military-industrial complex that needs its missiles launched at someone, so too does the race-industrial complex need its propaganda put into battle against white America.
If hatred could be measured in harm done, no one hates African-Americans more than the self-righteous frauds who continue to tell them they are hated, remind them they don’t have a fair chance, convince them to suffer historical pains they never experienced, and dictate to them in whom and in what to put their faith.
TO: Facendo:
OK, we get it, you are a racist and you hate America. Simple answer: MOVE! If you don’t like America, you are free to move wherever you want.
You might want to ask yourself why millions of people from all over the world risk life and limb to get to the USA. The reason, contrary to your hate-filled Marxist propaganda, is that it is still a great country, and it would be even better if a few hundred thousand of you malcontents would moved out! Would love to see you badmouth the Marxists who run Venezuela if you were living there.
I note that you don’t dispute the current crime figures in my post.
HBO: Shouldn’t you and the other libertarian social Darwinists (e.g. Putanella) be asking the far-right and alt-right militants who account for the vast bulk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. to leave the country? (see https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states) If they are so violently opposed to the current political and social arrangements, shouldn’t we send them back to where they came from (mostly Europe)? Wouldn’t that be a better solution?
Afterall, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s assessment last year stated clearly that “…[R]acially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSE)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland…WSEs have demonstrated longstanding intent to target racial and religious minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, politicians, and those they believe promote multi-culturalism and globalization at the expense of the WSE identity. Since 2018, they have conducted more lethal attacks in the United States than any other domestic violent extremist movement…” (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ 2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdf).
As law and order citizens who support the police, wouldn’t you want the violent supremacists removed from the country? Or are you the type of libertarians who support the rights of everyone to freely express their views, however odious or dangerous?
To Facendo:
I have no objection to you taking as many white supremacist as you can carry with you when you leave. They are every bit as big a cancer on this country as you are.
So, when are you leaving? May I suggest Cuba, Venezuela, or even better, Iran or NK. I hear NK is lovely this time of year. Oh, you might want to bring some snacks. I hear NK seems to have a lot of famine years. And one more thing, they don’t seem to be too welcoming to LGBTQ either – – so I would keep that proclivity on the down low.
Happy trails, and yippee-ki-yay ….
“the far-right and alt-right militants who account for the vast bulk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. to leave the country?” — Facendo Guaio
Let’s see, upon what should I form my conclusions about safety: the subjective reports of political organizations or the voluntary behaviors of free Americans? Were I to choose the former, I would seek out the least white cities and neighborhoods in the country, which would leave me house shopping in the relatively few (and disproportionately safe and expensive) Asian communities, or in the many dangerous and relatively affordable black neighborhoods in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and D.C.. However, were I to choose the latter (and buck the “trusted sources”) I’d have my choice of the many safe and affordable white enclaves in Red States.
Since I don’t long to witness drive-by shootings, live next door to unwed welfare moms, encounter drug dealers outside the corner store, have my children assailed as racists, or get carjacked on the way to work, the way I see it I can either dig deep and buy into an Asian neighborhood (which, trust me, will not be warm and welcoming) or do what hundreds of thousands of Californians (of all races) have done in escaping progressive politics, which is to go live among white people in the low-crime, highly patriotic Red States (paying-up to dodge white trash areas).
At a time when the government, the media, and totalitarian enterprises like Google and Facebook are desperate for misleading and divisive information, institutional declarations need to be treated with extreme skepticism, if not outright hostility.
In other words, Progressives, take your hype and shove it, I ain’t believing it no more.
1st comment by Don referred blacks not living south of Santa Clara St. They were in the fall semester 1966.