Do you want a sticker?
When you’re approaching a stranger with a pamphlet or flier or a sticker, inviting someone just going about their business to hear The Good Word about whatever it is, you have to fight past the feeling that you’re selling them something they don’t want, that you're bothering them, that you are just a little too thirsty.
Jesse’s approach is just to ask, with a big smile, “Do you want a sticker?”
No explanation, no pitch, just the sticker and the smile. A lot of people take the sticker without a word (because who turns down a sticker?) The pressure can be off, then, if they want it; the interaction can be over, and they can go about their evening. They can walk away, peering at the sticker now transferred from your hands to theirs. Sometimes, they’ll double back after reading and ask, Now what is this all about? But because it’s Oakland, because it’s Friday evening at the Pergola and a DJ is playing and everyone is happy, a lot of people are just up for the interaction. They look at what you’re offering, these stickers, and immediately ask, OK, what’s this about, why are we “Cancelling Piedmont”?
What works about Jesse’s approach is that it’s up to them, and you can take your cues from how they respond. If they’re enthusiastic (the most common) you can chop it up with gusto; if they’re confused (a lot of folks are) you can start from the basics; if they’re skeptical (as are more than a few), you do what you can, and answer their skepticism with your doubled down commitment to the slogan. They’re virtually never aggressive, but if they are, you just walk away. You let them tell you how to get into it, whether it’s the conceptual problem of municipal borders or the long history of deep racism, whether we go for an aggressive desire to drag down Piedmont property values (that are built on being Not Oakland while using our city’s services) or a kind of “lets all be Oakland together!” bonhomie. With some people, it’s just, “This is a class war.” With others, Alex’s discovery that all the Flock cameras in Piedmont point outward toward Oakland is a useful thing to mention, as is our ORBish pet peeve that Piedmont doesn’t have their own public library. We tell people the history, how it happened and why, and we sort of vaguely gesture past Lakeshore towards Our Enemy, up there, looking down at us.
Mostly, though, people are less interested in hearing what you think about Piedmont than in telling you what they think. This is a good thing. And they say wild stuff, once you get them going; this is Oakland on a Friday evening, at the Pergola, so a lot of them have had or lit a few; a lot of them are ready to talk about Piedmont. And what works about the “cancel” slogan is that it’s so vague, but also a little aggressive, that people get their defenses up, initially, and then when you’re chill and cool about it, when you start asking them what they think, they get relieved and they open up, and you can just chat.
We first got our hands on a bunch of Jesse’s stickers when we met him at an anti-Flock protest; he was the guy with the “Cancel Piedmont” shirt, and we were like “oh damn, you must be the Cancel Piedmont guy?” And he was! We’d seen his stickers around town, and as dedicated Piedmont haters, we'd been curious; there’s no name or handle on them, no way to follow up. But he was happy to explain once we found him, and as happy to talk with us about it as he was when the Chromicle came to him to ask “Why is there a push to ‘cancel’ one of the wealthiest Bay Area cities?” He printed the stickers up about a year ago, just on his own. But it’s not a “movement,” even though a lot of people do think, when you hand them a sticker, that there must be an organization, a candidate, a ballot measure, or a legislative initiative in the works. But no, handing people a sticker and having a conversation: that’s it, that’s the endpoint of this. And he’ll be quick to admit, for example, that he doesn’t really imagine actually annexing Piedmont to be in the cards, at least in any foreseeable future. The enclave’s citizens would have to vote to unincorporate, and why would they choose to do so? Living in a white-flight cop-encrusted perma-sundown town of a tax shelter is the point, whether they’ll admit it or not; every one of them has already made the deliberate choice not to live in Oakland.
When word of Jesse’s efforts reached the California Post–the even more cursed and insane offshoot of Murdoch’s already-pretty damned cursed New York Post–the headline they put on their human-slop-aggregation of the SF Chronicle article was: “Civil war breaks out in rich, white California town as activists from crime-plagued neighboring city demand it’s ‘canceled’.” Because of course that’s what the headline was. But although Jesse often finds ways to bring up Oakland’s Flock contract or Nate Adams’ campaign (which he’s wearing a pin for, and has moved most of his campaigning efforts toward lately, now that he’s down to his last thousand stickers or so), there is often a point where the people you’re talking to want to know what the plan is, or what we’re trying to achieve. They can get a little frustrated, even, when you tell them that “hand you a sticker and then talk shit about Piedmont” is, literally, the full plan. It’s hard to explain that the goal of giving people stickers is not, for example, to support a ballot initiative in November to raze Piedmont to the ground; when you tell people that the reason we’re out here, giving people stickers, is to be out here giving people stickers, a lot of times, their first reaction is to demand more.
(For those people, by the way: ORB will have a session at Bathers’ upcoming Summer Symposium—early bird passes available!—in which we’ll launch The Seize Piedmont Community, Art + Design Perennial, asking “What if eating the rich is really just a design-thinking challenge?” We’ll have mugs and postcards, a teach-in, and we’ll sort of put our heads together generally. We’ll be threatening, in the friendliest way possible.)
Some serious old white people—if we’re going to generalize—give us a strong “no thank you” and remain sternly uninterested. One white-haired dude in a baseball cap took a break from taking a sticker to take a call, and then came back to, let’s say, “engage” more with the philosophical underpinnings of this sticker-giving action; he tells us he’s offended we would hand out stickers but not have an answer to his “Then what?” And when we ask him what he thinks should be the outcome of canceling Piedmont, he says something about funding Oakland schools. We agree with him (“Sounds good!”) but for some reason having to come up with the answer himself only infuriates him more.
We give a sticker to some kids to put on their bikes, because socialism should start young. An Asian-American woman takes a sticker, looks at it, and then takes another for her friend in Piedmont. Also there’s the woman who takes one look at the sticker and gleefully, vehemently agrees: “CANCEL ‘em!” One white-ish looking guy asks why we’d want to do such a thing, and his Black friend turns and Well let me tell you-s him. A Black woman seethes at the Piedmont cops who arrested her. A white lady shouts that the community pool at Piedmont costs $25 to get in, what the hell! A Black guy tells us that he always wanted to buy a house in Piedmont or Montclair. And we get to hand stickers to Deseree, a climate justice organizer friend who is at the lake for a birthday party, and to Sulaiman, who hosts the weekly dance party at the Pergola, and we already know each other and they already know each other, of course. Oakland is such a town, sometimes.
When a few people who maybe moved here from somewhere else say, But I like Piedmont, and It’s so nice there, so beautiful and clean, we gently suggest that maybe the Piedmontese could share some of the money that keeps it that way with the rest of us, maybe Oakland could have some of that too? Another guy here, visiting a friend, starts telling us about the Piedmont in his town. We tell him about ORB; he says he’s sorry he’ll miss our party.
When we stop a cluster of folks walking in a tight group, one of them—whose general vibe gives “recovering addict”—tells us he grew up near Piedmont, in Temescal; another in the group suggests we should turn it around, suggests Invite Piedmont instead. A ludicrous suggestion, but they’re such friendly folk, and it’s delivered so earnestly, we’re very “Oh interesting! Yeah, maybe?” Eventually the reveal: they’re a group in Christian fellowship, who having found God and each other, walk the lake to talk about it; suddenly, we’re being lovingly proselytized to join them on their journey with Jesus. Since one of us comes from four generations of missionaries, we respect the game. But we also keep talking up the cancellation of Piedmont until they all take a sticker, in the end, and we all walk off thanking each other for our service.
When you hand a “Cancel Piedmont” sticker to someone, at the Pergola on a Friday night, one thing that keeps happening is that you get a very specific kind of very searching question about what you’re doing from people who (it will shortly become apparent) already know quite well why. The most skepticism might even come from this kind of person, who has so long since cancelled the Piedmont in their heart that they’ve almost forgotten why. This especially happens with Black folks of a certain age: “So why are we cancelling Piedmont?” they ask, and almost before you can finish starting to explain, they’re like, “Besides all the racism?” The more you talk to such people—who go from skeptical defensiveness to genuine warmth quite quickly, if you stick with it—the clearer it gets that what we’re doing here is absolutely not Informing or Raising Awareness; the awareness is raised, and folks who’ve stayed in Oakland already get it. The work is just saying the words, to make the too-obvious-to-be-said thing back into a thing we might occasionally say out loud.
There’s also a measure of not self-hatred, exactly, but often a kind of deep cynicism about Oakland, from Oaklanders, that makes Piedmont an object of admiration, or at least respect. There was a long conversation with an “Ok, but devil’s advocate?” guy, who observes that not wanting Oakland’s issues is a not totally unreasonable desire, and even though he sees our point, we also see his, in the end; it must be nice to be a little less concerned about stupid property crimes or random mayhem than you sometimes do have to be, in our town. Were Oakland to annex Piedmont, then they’d have our problems too. Sure.
We say “sure” a lot. We are very mild agent provocateurs, with our green and yellow stickers, and shirts in the colors of the teams that left Oakland. The good part about being a three-deep phalanx of t-shirted sticker evangelizers is that people see you coming, and if they seem to be open to talking, you can, and when they aren’t, you don’t. We remind the people who feel bad for Piedmont that it’s just a sticker, they don’t have to take it, and we wander off to find more sticker fans, which is what most of everyone else is.