The Unspeakable Oscar Grant
by zunguzungu
In the days leading up to the Mehserle verdict, the bay area media maintained a steady drumbeat of warning at the riot that was surely coming. They eventually got one, but in looking so carefully for the riot that they had been preparing for (to the extent of seeing a traffic jam and declaring it a city in flight, as if a traffic jam at rush hour was some bizarre never-before-seen phenomenon) they told very little about the actual lived experience of the Oaklanders for whom the name “Oscar Grant” has come to mean something almost unspeakably important. Meredith Fenton’s “What if the Police Threw a Riot and No One Came” is worth reading, as is the Bay Citizen’s “Untold Stories of the Mehserle Verdict”. What does it mean to walk around Oakland and see so many shops and restaurants boarded up not because they were vandalized but because their owners were 100% sure they would be and fled? Who dehumanizes Oakland more, the legal system that showed no signs of prosecuting Mehserle until broad public rage made it necessary, or the entire establishment apparatus that pounds it into everyone’s heads that mindless (black) violence is in the offing, without trying to imagine where it might be coming from, what they might say, or how silence and violence are so often entwined.
A good friend of mine, who spent that afternoon trying and failing to find an open restaurant in Oakland (eventually had to eat in Berkeley) and who walked past armies of massed riot police to attend a peaceful rally that would be un-spoken in favor of the vandalism and failure to disperse that would later occur on the same site, wrote this:
I kind of feel speechless and want to have words to explain my numbness… my inability perhaps to react, the distance I feel from something I think I should be more connected to. This is about worlds divided by racism… those who in fear evacuate and those who shut down and can’t hear the truth by running away. This is not about one man, Messerle, it’s about a system of oppression that operates through its invisibility. What is visible are assumptions and close-ups of looters, when what are hidden are all the small acts of violence which create worlds of division, oppression, that are painfully visible to some, while totally unbelievable to others. And the way incredible black and brown people, young and organized, became invisible when they were speaking out, speaking a truth to power that only the few of us who attended the rally could hear. All the other reports blasted images of what several youth explained– “fools they had expected us to be.”
I am remembering my dear friend Verlon at these times, and how shocked I was not only that he was killed, but also just how far I was from worlds in which people are killed, how shocked I had been on his 31st birthday when my congratulations were met with his response that he never would have believed that he’d make it to 30. I never even considered that people in MY world had questions or thoughts about whether they’d grow old. We worked together, we sat together, we slept together, and while we had our shared moments, it was all the conditions and people, the police, teachers, newscasters, that created the world that he lived in and created a different world for me, that kept us apart. How can we talk when our experiences of our worlds represent such different places? And yet, now that I have experienced death, and his loss, and the meaning of MURDER, which took place in his room, a place that I shared with him, I have had this small window opened.
I did see my world turned upside down for a moment, I do know that things are not as they seem. Must death happen to us for a crack to open, for us to see through the window clearly? I see friends who have changed their facebook profile, “I am Oscar Grant and my life counts.” I want to feel that I am Oscar Grant, I know in my head and can speak words that say how wrong this verdict is, how grossly disappointing it is to see a system that first kills you, and then a legal system that calls such killing involuntary, and finally a media apparatus that convinces you to be afraid of the people who are OBVIOUSLY angry having been once again disappointed by the JUST-us system. But I can’t seem to get my heart and my emotions in line with the words. And then it occurs to me, that just as a million perspectives on the shooting didn’t seem to find what most of the world could see, my words certainly can do no more than the pictures for all to see. I am caught once again between worlds, unable to translate and make visible what is as obvious to some as it is nonexistent to others.
It is in this caught between position, a place which I have lived my life, trying to find the cracks in the system, the truths which are visible only to some, and abhored, shut out, policed, and ignored by those who have the power to do something about it. I hope to find my emotions here, so that I to can say confidently that I AM OSCAR GRANT and that MY LIFE MATTERS. Until then, I suppose you’ll have to settle for stream of consciousness and confusion of one who feels too distant to know how I feel, and therefore what to say.
zunguzungu 
Thanks for posting this. “This is not about one man, Messerle, it’s about a system of oppression that operates through its invisibility. What is visible are assumptions and close-ups of looters, when what are hidden are all the small acts of violence which create worlds of division, oppression, that are painfully visible to some, while totally unbelievable to others.” Yes. And this also applies to the coverage of the Oscar Grant case that makes most visible the precise specifics of what Mehserle did, what his intention was, what he can be found guilty of beyond a reasonable doubt–that also keeps invisible the deep system of oppression operating here.
Thanks for your posting and for writing.
What abhorred me about that night was the way that our media and our police department kept grinding out a hysterical narrative that placed a penchant for violence firmly onto the shoulders of the African American community in Oakland, rather than putting the spotlight on BART, on the City of Oakland and on the OPD for systemic racism and violence. With so many people in Oakland and around the country tuned in seeking to understand, the media and OPD kept it up – planting fear and deep division. What a shame.
The media and police made me afraid. Afraid that violence – theirs and ours – was going to subsume my community and city that night. Afraid that the cracks, divisions and canyons formed by years of white supremacy are too big to ever heal, overcome with justice or eradicate. They made me want to hide from my neighbors and fear their intentions.
The media and police skillfully blurred the message – who really was found guilty?! We were coached to wait with baited breath for the first signs of any violent reaction from the African American community. The mainstream media did little to ask for insightful reaction and commentary. Instead, they honed again and again on: what will you do to keep the peace?! When will violence break out?
We were guided away from these critical questions: how was Mehserle developed & trained?! What’s the next step toward justice and healing for the system & supervisors that trained him with violence, racism and a reckless ability to wield those weapons during times of fear or concern –– in the name of community protection! How was the system preparing to address, atone for, understand, internalize killing someone who was much too young, completely innocent…how would that system create a real peace that night – the kind that comes w/justice – …and tomorrow, the next day. What in the world do we constructively do with such deep grief and anger?@!
Despite the OPD and media hype about the ‘violent reaction in Oakland,’ so over the top that they handed out boards to businesses and encouraged apartment-dwellers to evacuate, thousands of people gathered together at 14th & Broadway for hours, facing our own fears of riot cops and police brutality, facing our own racism and facing our fears of each other. The police state was not just present and active, it was overhyped & out in force, with reinforcements. I was afraid for my loved ones.
What I saw at the corner of 14th & Broadway was the outpourings of grief, fear, pride & determination of a community to not let the corrosive power of white supremacy destroy our lives, our city or our earth. I saw an incredible integrity that still brings a chill to my skin and tears to my eyes. Because no community should have to face brutal violence and loss, generations of barriers to education, institutional racism time and time again – and yet this community comes together to continue the struggle, exonerating each other and all of us to not take on the violence of the oppressive system, but to embody a different way of making change, of taking power, of creating protection and justice. So many people – including members of Oscar Grant’s family – feeling such deep loss, grief and righteous rage – urged us all to find a higher ground and to seek justice and fairness. Now that’s humbling, that’s power. I’m so grateful that my fear didn’t get in my way of showing up and getting to know the people who gathered & this part of Oakland.
The integrity, grace, power, and overwhelming determination toward justice was lost to most, since the media and OPD didn’t allow for, plan for, encourage, cover & embolden those reactions. But like all the times before, the community reaction is what healed and soothed the incredibly disconcerting verdict most; what helped us all see that there must be a ‘next step’ and another day and weeks and years of working for justice to keep our souls, spirits, young ones, and communities well protected, intact and living in peace.
Temescal was open for business, though the justice for Oscar Grant signs in the window at Pizzaiolo looked a little, shall we say, contrived.
I know, I know, Temescal might as well be Rockridge, and Rockridge is really Berkeley. But no, it’s Oakland.
I liked your piece
thank you
It is frustrating for me
to try to talk with privileged people about
racism’s relationship to injustice
because it is so interwoven into the fabric of the hologram
in which they reside
More than 70% of Americans do not have passports
and of those who travel
how many have traveled outside the context
of a safe vacation destination?
That’s not to suggest that travel is a requirement
for the development of critical thought
it just illustrates
how few opportunities there are for privileged Americans
to find themselves either physically or intellectually
outside the boundaries of the hologram
Of course those who are members of oppressed groups
within the U.S. understand this stuff all too well
I read a funny little piece the other day
about how the American zeitgeist of a particular period
vis-a-vis our collective fear is well represented by the types
of ‘monsters’ in horror films
currently the reigning monsters are zombies
so for the first time ever
America’s fear is not ‘The Other’
but ourselves
[…] and just about in time for the delivery of an involuntary-manslaughter verdict in the case of the unspeakable Oscar Grant—a U.S. citizen who was suddenly not a citizen, because he was lying face-down on the ground, a […]