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Warriors celebrate in Oakland SEE FEATURES PAGE 3
EAST BAY ARRIVES AT WHITE HOUSE
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A FAREWELL TO CHRISTOPHER LEE
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NBA championship festivities overshadow relocation to San Francisco By Louis LaVenture SPORTS AND CAMPUS EDITOR The Golden State Warriors returned home to Oakland on Friday and celebrated their first NBA championship in 40 years with the city and their fans. City officials said more than one million people descended on Downtown Oakland to participate in the festivities that included a parade and a rally where the players spoke to the crowd. “Hopefully this isn’t a one time thing,” Stephen Curry said to the crowd. “We want to do this every year.” Many fans in attendance acknowledged how special this day was, but the lingering relocation of their beloved “Dubs” was on many of their minds. “Great, we finally win one and then we move to San Fran?” Warriors fan Augustine Ramos said at the rally. “All my life I have been waiting for my hometown team to win a ship. We finally get a star MVP player and a ship and now they’re gonna take it from us.” Fans like Ramos are in fear of losing their Oakland franchise to the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, which is the reported site of their new arena. The new building is being privately funded on private land and is expected to be open for the 2018-2019 season, according to the NBA. While Oakland celebrated, lawmakers in Sacramento on Friday made the new San Francisco arena deal a lot easier to finalize when they included an environmental law exemption for the planned Warriors stadium at San Francisco’s Mission Bay in the state budget proposal unveiled last week. The new development requires an environmental impact report detailing
what wildlife and animals will be displaced by construction and the plans to rectify displacement, which will be waived for one year due to the new law exemption. The Mission Bay Alliance is one of the main opponents of the proposed Warriors event center and according to them “The proposed stadium will have a disastrous impact on the health and welfare of thousands of patients and families.” They also stated the new arena would block access to medical services, make parking difficult and cause traffic around the area to hit a complete halt during the 225 events that are planned each year in addition to sports events. The new arena is located near several hospitals, including those specific for women, children, cancer and cardiology. There is a public hearing regarding the San Francisco arena plan on June 30 at City Hall and public input is being listened to at the meetings until July 20. With the move to San Francisco seeming more likely fans will just have to appreciate Oracle Arena for the few seasons it has left. Oracle has become known as one of the loudest and hardest places to play in the league. It has been nicknamed “Roaracle” for the decibel level the fans reach and this season the Warriors were 39-2 at home in the regular season this year. “Hands down this is the best place to play in the league,” Warriors fan and parade attendee John Simon said. “Moving could make all of that different. The crowd isn’t going to be the same and that’s a huge factor when it comes to home-court advantage.”
SEE NEWS PAGE 4
LAYOUT DESIGNER The creation of different graduation commencement ceremonies may seem like a step backwards in social justice, but it can be seen as a large step forward as well. In the last issue of The Pioneer, the article “Grad ceremonies should be combined” was printed about having multiple commencements demonstrates that we still segregate ourselves despite decades of change. CSUEB recently had five commencement ceremonies, all of which celebrated the academic achievement of different minority groups. In generations past, the numbers of those minorities graduating were so few that they were negligible. To have so many different minority students graduating that CSUEB can create individual commencement ceremonies is a testament to the university’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Many of the students have come from a place where they were aware of the stigmas held against them and the adversities that they would have to overcome to reach this level of academic success. These stigmas include, but are not limited to, the belief that certain minorities cannot make it to college without being really good at sports and you have to work harder to get into college because you are not white. As a minority scheduled to graduate in the next year, I find it difficult to recall a single moment when gender and skin color did not coincide with success, because society has still refused to acknowledge ethnicity as only a combination of genetic inheritance, cultural
background and pigmentation of skin. If social justice is put into perspective, no one should get more points for being one ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preference, lifestyle choice, or geological location, but it happens on a daily basis anyway. There is no such thing as quietly breaking glass ceilings. When glass is broken it makes a loud noise and can start uproar. When barriers are broken they do not go unnoticed, and they often bring concerns about the change to the surface. In terms of the separate ceremonies inclusivity, although they are separate, any race or gender can attend. Segregation and exclusion are terrible machinations of so-
ciety that should not be embraced. However, the commencement ceremonies do not forbid individuals from participating. Rather it is an individual’s personal belief of who they believe they are and what they identify as that discourages them from participating in a ceremony that is representative of a population that they do not identify with. The demographics of East Bay are so diverse. Someone within the student population represents almost any culture that you can think of. Each culture is unique from the next, with no culture being identical. With that said different cultures may celebrate differently from each other. By embracing multiple commencement ceremonies a student is allowed to choose whichever they feel most comfortable or most familiar with. In that regard it is not segregation but a choice to be
Summer 2015 Issue 1
Families forgive Charleston shooter By Shannon Stroud EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
PHOTO BY TAM DUONG JR./THE PIONEER
PHOTO BY BRYAN CORDOVA/THE PIONEER
Top: Golden State Warriors fans lined the streets of Oakland on Friday during the championship parade. Bottom: NBA MVP Stephen Curry (right) and his wife Ayesha Curry leave the stage following the rally on Friday in Oakland.
Diversity proves useful for grad ceremonies By Mario Bohanon
THURSDAY JUNE 25, 2015
apart of what feels right, just like a person would do when choosing a club or organization to join. If you take out all the minority debates, culture, diversity issues, and social justice aspects, the fact remains that having additional graduation commencement ceremonies allows for more families and friends to watch and celebrate completing an important milestone. In this year’s graduation, each student was given only five graduation tickets. If you have many family members or important people in your life to share graduation with five is most likely not enough. But they could go to a different commencement ceremony, which is ideally different but important to you all the same, because it represents the same thing. There is no social justice more important than having the right to choose your own path and make your own decisions. As far as I can see, having multiple commencement ceremonies to choose from helps East Bay achieve that right.
GRAPHIC BY TAM DUONG JR./THE PIONEER
On the evening of June 17, a mass shooting took place at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed and a tenth person was shot and injured. Dyalnn Roof, 21, was arrested the following Thursday, where he confessed to the authorities that he committed the mass murder at the church in South Carolina. According to The Huffington Post, Friday morning Roof was charged with nine counts of homicide and possession of a firearm during commission of a violent event. What happened in Charleston has been called a hate crime. According to CNN, when Roof was asked why he committed these crimes he responded, “to start a race war.” All too often mass shootings headline newspapers and each time our nation is shaken. Families mourn, citizens become outraged, communities protest, and government officials scramble to pick up the pieces, yet nothing changes. One thing that as a nation we can do to change is to take note from the families of the nine victims. Friday afternoon five relatives from different victim’s families appeared at Roof’s hearing, where they shared different messages with him, each conveying the same thing: that they forgive him. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, said at the hearing. “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.” These families have come together to do something that we as a nation don’t see often, instead of responding to these hateful crimes with more hate, they went above and beyond to respond with love. “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, this is proof, everyone’s plea for your soul, is proof that they lived in love and their legacies will live in love,” said Wanda Simmons, granddaughter of Daniel Simmons at the hearing. “So hate won’t win. And I just want to thank the court for making sure that hate doesn’t win.” To the families of Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Honorary Reverend Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Zanders, 26; Reverend Daniel Simmons Senior, 74; Reverend Sharonda Singleton, 45; and Myra Thompson, 59; thank you for reminding the nation that in tragedy there is still light.
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PHOTO BY TAM DUONG JR./THE PIONEER