Oakland seniors eager to leave mark in college, and well beyond
Destiny Shabazz, a senior at McClymonds High School in Oakland, launches her words in the cadence of a confident orator.
She captivated me when I met her in March, days before a delegation of Oakland students left to attend March for
Our Lives, a student-led demonstration for stricter gun laws, in Washington.
Destiny, 17, has lost more family and friends because of gun violence than the number of years she’s been alive, and she went to Washington to represent black lives lost.
“It’s been normalized,” the West Oakland native said flatly when I asked about gun deaths. It was the only time during our conversation last week that her tone lacked the usual buoyancy.
Albert Mitchell, one of Destiny’s classmates,
saw his first shootout a decade ago outside a West Oakland convenience store. I shrugged off last week’s earthquake as nothing to worry about, and that’s how Albert reacts to rat-a-tat-tat gunfire.
“When I hear gunshots, I just be chilling,” Albert, 17, told me as we leaned against the wall one day last week outside of McClymonds’ main office. “You’re so used to it, you don’t really have that fear. You just hope it’s not someone you love.”
I didn’t go to the school last week to talk about guns. I went because 60 of the 62 seniors who will walk across the graduation stage next month with Albert and Destiny are going to college.
It’s an accomplishment that should be celebrated, but Destiny and Albert don’t see it as a grand triumph.
Yes, they’ve hurdled barriers — gun violence, access to resources, hunger — to earn their high school diplomas and acceptance letters from places of higher learning. But they want to do more than earn college degrees.
They want to reshape the West Oakland neighborhoods where they were raised, neighborhoods where opportunities are scarce for people of color.
“In our communities, we don’t make it to see 21,” said Destiny, who will enroll at Cal State Sacramento in August. “My people don’t make it to see a grown age.”
One of the reasons she chose Sacramento is it’s our state capital, and she wants to network with politicians. Her conviction to help her community is so resolute that she’s already declared her intent to run for Oakland mayor in 2022.
Destiny’s spent her entire life in the McClymonds neighborhood of Oakland, which is bordered on the north and south by 30th Street and West Grand Avenue, and the east and west by Peralta Street and San Pablo Avenue.
The neighborhood, nicknamed the Killa 20s, is rapidly changing. On one block you’ll see a swept sidewalk, groomed trees and houses with white fences and blooming gardens. On the next block, you’ll see tents crowding the sidewalk.
Destiny wants the changes occurring in Oakland to benefit more than the people who can afford to buy or rent property in the city. She’s thinking about the city’s longtime residents, the people who can’t really afford to live in Oakland — or anywhere else in the Bay Area.
“I do want to see my city prosper, and I do want to see more black businesses and more black people,” she said as we sat in the school’s college and career center. “They’re trying to kick us out. I need to bring us back.”
She wants to train people to be self-sufficient. That’s why her senior project was teaching financial literacy to her classmates before they head to college, where they’ll be bombarded with loan offers.
Destiny told her classmates not to take more financial aid than necessary. She also wanted them to know the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized loans, and to understand terms such as debt, delinquency and deferment.
“We know a lot, because we go through a lot, but we need to know the vocabulary words, because if we don’t know the words, they’re going to use and abuse us,” she said. “We’ve got to know what we’re reading.”
Maybe she should consider a career in money management, because she’s already an expert.
Destiny’s lived on her own since her grandmother died in 2016. That’s when she asked their neighbor, a white woman Destiny got to know while gardening in the woman’s yard as a young girl, if she could rent a room from her.
She lives in a converted office, paying $300 a month. The house is two blocks away from school. Destiny told me she doesn’t have a father and she’s never lived with her mother, who is homeless.
“She’s somewhere around the lake,” Destiny said. “I can have communication with her if I want to. She’s always around the lake.”
Destiny has worked at Target and Safeway in Emeryville. She didn’t work the final semester of her senior year so she could play sports.
“As a teenager, I had to sacrifice a whole lot of things like going out with my friends, parties, flashy clothes,” she said.
Albert, who now lives in West Oakland’s Lower Bottoms neighborhood, has moved around. He’s also called East Oakland and Hoover-Foster, the neighborhood known as Ghost Town, home.
For him, going to college is just the first step toward setting an example of what’s possible for people who are trapped by what seems like insurmountable disadvantages.
“A lot of people just try to better themselves and their family and do what they can for themselves, but the motivation and the influence for the kids and the people that’s still living here is gone,” he said. “We just know who not to be like. We don’t have anybody to be like.”
Albert told me he’d choose between UC Davis and UC Berkeley, a decision to be determined by financial aid packages. He wants to start his own company, maybe something that merges his interests in health and business.
As we spoke, I noticed he was wearing a hoodie with “Black Kings Matter” written on the front. I inquired about the significance of the words.
“It means a lot, because we’re seen as less, so I feel like we should be able to wear something or express ourselves in a way that truly defines us,” he said.
Albert and Destiny, like the other McClymonds seniors going to college, realize they have a future — a — and, to me, that’s what matters most.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr