Rioted out of my stupor
It’s been forever since I’ve posted, I know. I fear I may have lost what miniscule readership I had. The only excuse I can give is that it was Intellect Overload. Between the absolute saturation of the election news cycle, in which I was glued to my TV and computer screen constantly monitoring and forming and opinion on every word that came out of the candidates’ mouth, and finals, in which I tried to remember and synthesize and regurgitate and analyze everything I have crammed into my skull in the past four months, I was fried.
I spent an entire month — more, probably — not watching news, cursorily skimming the headlines that popped up on the New York Times website (but only because it’s my homepage and can’t be avoided). Not until last week was I jerked out of my news stupor and remembered that I actually am interested in what happens in the world.
What shook me out of my stupor was fear, and fascination, and outrage. On January 7, Tess and I were in our regular positions in the living room, cozied under blankets watching something unimportant — the previous night’s Daily Show, maybe, or the newest Top Chef — when Jeff came in the door and immediately changed the channel. Three local news channels were covering breaking events — riots unfolding in downtown Oakland. When we started watching, protesters had recently taken over Fruitvale BART and were beginning to set cars on fire. No one had been arrested yet, and police were trying to stop them as they headed into downtown. As we watched it unfold that night, and over the next few days, it became clear that it wasn’t just a protest taken over by a few stray anarchists. 105 people were arrested and over 300 businesses were damaged. It was a full-blown riot.
What struck me so deeply about my initial shock about the riot was, this is what you miss when you don’t pay attention. The shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART policeman (the unjustified and unexplained shooting, of an unarmed man who was lying on his stomach with his hands behind his back) happened the night of December 31, and I hadn’t heard a word about it until January 7. And I live in Oakland!
I realized two things: first, maybe those riots were necessary. Second, I really should read the news.
One of the main reasons I read news is to hear what people are saying about current events. Of course I need to learn about current events, but how many times do you have to read blog posts and listen to blathering pundits talk about the same thing? Well, I’m constantly curious about how both the media and non-media people are reacting to things and analyzing things. I quickly noticed that media echo surrounding the Oscar Grant killing was strangely hollow: I found very little outrage, very little sadness. There was a lot of speculating: maybe the officer thought he was reaching for his Taser. Maybe he meant to scare the kid and accidentally fired. There was also a lot — a whole darn lot — of grandiose sighing statements about the tragic state of young black men in this country, that they are likely to die young, that the real issue is black-on-black homicide rates, that the real issue is poverty, blah blah blah. I don’t mean to discredit that idea, because yes, it is absolutely true that young black men are in a pretty dire state as a group these days. But that is just as true today as it was yesterday, and today the issue is not how many black men kill each other on the streets or in drug fights or as part of gang violence. Today, the issue is how one white police officer used his state-sanctioned authority and his state-issued weapon to kill one of those young black men for no reason at all. Let’s talk about that today, and save the sighs about that tragic state of urban black youth for another day.
I was a pretty small kid when the Rodney King riots tore up LA, and even Amadou Diallo barely registered on my thirteen-year-old radar. But from the way those two events are remembered in my age group’s cultural memory, everyone was outraged. Maybe the Rodney King incident was more notorious for the riots that followed than the beating itself, but the police brutality aspect of it is pretty unequivocally remembered as a racist miscarriage of justice, as far as I can tell.
Why is that sense of obvious outrage not present in this case? The incident itself was was far worse than Rodney King, both in terms of being one-sidedly unjustified and in terms of the ultimate consequences. Perhaps it was less gruesomely symbolic than Amadou Diallo, but was perhaps even more unjustified. So why can’t we say that? Why aren’t there more op-eds and blog posts and people being filmed on TV saying, “What happened was horrible. A young life was taken for no reason. We must examine racism and trigger-happiness in police forces, we must train our officers better, and we must bring this man to justice.”
If we could agree that that’s the message of this situation — not a rowdy train car, not angry mobs breaking windows in small business, and most definitely not the sad state of affairs of young urban black men — then maybe Oaklanders wouldn’t feel the need to bang on cop cars, throw bricks through windows and set trash cans on fire.
10 months ago