Our Town

For decades, BOOTS RILEY has been a dynamic voice in his hometown of Oakland, California, which is also the setting of his debut film, the social satire Sorry to Bother You. Here, the rapper and activist takes a ride through the city’s changing landscape

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We used to drive. Drive for hours. Till we ran out of gas and had to fill up again. All the while, the car never traveled more than a mile outside the bounds of Oakland, California. My friends and I repeated our route as often as we could, as slow as we could, playing music out of car speakers as loud as we could. Never taking freeways because all the stuff that freeways tried to avoid were the things we wanted to run into, get lost in: other cars with people in them; red lights that might have you stop on a corner where everybody was gathered, allowing you to run into friends you hadn’t seen since the last time you passed, pulling over to get the latest news about somebody, get a girl’s phone number. Anything to fight the boredom and fill the ride, fill our lives, with details. Details felt like action and excitement, made the place we called “the town” feel more like a city. We wanted to feel like this place was important—which would make us more powerful, relevant. The fight against a feeling of irrelevancy was a long-standing fight against city government and many local businesses. Much of it centered around access to places and legalities of expression. It was a fight that paralleled the fight going on in many cities across the U.S.

When we cruised down East 14th, through downtown, and up San Pablo, we would pass the stores, dive bars, and boarded-up buildings that became the third-wave coffee shops, five-star restaurants, and houses of fine bourbon that Oakland holds today. Past vacant lots and sidewalks that later became camps of homeless people who had been evicted due to pyramid scheme–like development policies and trickle-down solutions.