Mother Jones: A radical housing activist wants to upend Oakland government from the inside
Fife’s decision to run for office is simply the latest iteration of a dilemma that’s been at the heart of Black leadership since Reconstruction: Can a democratic system built specifically to exclude Black power be adapted to work in favor of it?
Fife, at least, is going to try. With local economies gutted and as many as 40 million people facing eviction, more Americans—in particular more Black Americans—will be living with the type of desperation that drove the moms in West Oakland. So Fife’s mission will be urgent, and it will be blunt: Extract the system’s resources and redistribute them. She wants to take $150 million from the police budget and spend it on community programs, violence prevention, and land trusts that could provide affordable housing.
“I want to create,” she tells me, “a real transparent process where I try to engage democracy.”