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“I am Oscar Grant.” Actually, I am not Oscar Grant. I am a 50-year-old white woman, perhaps the least likely target of BART police brutality. And yet I am still debating what to do when the verdict comes down, perhaps today. I want to show my solidarity. I want to march peacefully with my community. I want Oscar’s little girl, Tatiana, and his mother, Wanda, to see faces of every age and color in the crowd. I want a verdict of voluntary manslaughter, at the very least. I want peace, I want justice. But if there is no justice, there will be no peace. And what even constitutes justice in a community where a young woman remembers being terrorized at 16 by the Oakland Riders?
On Friday afternoon I rode the BART home from San Francisco to the Fruitvale station in Oakland, the scene of the crime, a few blocks from my house. It was becoming apparent there would be no verdict that day but the tension was still palpable. A man on the train was lamenting his decision to park his car at Fruitvale that day. Even though I’d seen TV footage of the merchants of downtown Oakland boarding up their windows, or plastering them with posters of Oscar (or both), it was still a shock to discover the Fruitvale BART station sheathed in plywood.
The weekend was quiet yet ominous, filled with pleas for calm from religious organizations and city leaders (if you can call Ron Dellums a leader these days). Without a verdict and without cameras in the courtroom, all the news has to cover is the runup to the riot. There is a veritable tent city of responders set up near downtown Oakland, with plans in place to call out the National Guard if necessary. OPD just purchased an LRAD – the new sonic weapon for crowd control. The police chief keeps saying that they will be there to protect our right to peaceful assembly (if not our eardrums).
I spent the weekend reading about Oscar Grant in the alternative media as a means of counteracting the stereotypical “what can you expect from Oakland but violence” drumbeat coming from the MSM. I didn’t live here in 2009 when Oscar was killed and I needed to be reminded that without the uprising from the community, Mehserle may never have been charged at all. I needed to read this poem about Oscar, written by San Francisco poet Dee Allen. Dee read at a party I attended a couple of weeks ago so I was able to hear his voice in my head. His words made me weep. I expect to be crying again, if not today, then soon. Tears of joy or tears of sorrow, one or the other.
In the meantime, Oakland waits.
3 Comments
Now we wait some more – one juror has called in sick and another is being excused to go on vacation, so deliberations have been suspended until tomorrow, when they will have to start over again from scratch.
Hello,
As a lifelong resident of the Bay Area and the wife of a local police officer who is slated to go on patrol after the verdict, I am aghast at the posts of anarchists and others who wish to start a riot just for the sake of starting trouble. Does this not speak to the very heart of the issues that plague Oakland and other Bay Area cities? When the four police officers were killed in Oakland last year, no one took to the streets in violence. In fact, there was a vigil for the man who killed those officers. And people wonder why police are up in arms? My husband is not a police officer because he wants to oppress or harm anyone; he got into police work because he thought it would be a noble way to serve the community. But now that he is in the position of defending himself against anarchists who wish to “kill pigs”, it puts things into a whole new light for me and my family. My husband is not a fascist suppressor of freedom, just as so many well-intended law enforcement officers are not. To lump them altogether and make blanket statements about them being part of the “establishment” and part of the “police state” that is an artificial construct of people who wish to incite violence is misguided and incendiary. I’m not coming down on the side of anyone in the Mehserle trial; I don’t have the evidence that the jury has, and so I can’t really make an informed decision. All that I know is that there are people out there that want to riot and cause violence just for the sake of it; to dissect the reasons would be a sociological dissertation beyond the scope of this posting. My husband is responsible for keeping the peace, for serving and protecting the people. And he does a wonderful job. Ask me how many rapists,murderers, women-beaters he’s arrested? And people have the nerve to lament the presence of police??? Police are just people. If one made a mistake, or worse, then let justice be done. But for anarchists and thrill-seekers to publish the fact that they want to “kill pigs” and cause riots just for the sake of doing so speaks to the ignorance and hatred that fuels the fire and discord between the public and police, the very heart of the problem. At the end of the day, I want my husband, the father of my children, to come home.
I don’t think anything in my post identifies me as an anarchist or advocates rioting just for the sake of it or killing police officers. I specifically said I wanted to march peacefully. Where are you getting all of the inflammatory language and the quotes in your response? Those are your words, not mine. I certainly don’t want anyone – police or citizens – to be hurt after the verdict. I want your husband to come home too.