Death and Insecurity

Feeling the heaviness of  Oscar Grant, murdered by a BART cop a couple of days ago. Over in Oakland, at the Fruitvale BART station, some kind of ruckus occurred, and in the video clips below, you can see it unfold. After the police had corralled several youth, one was squirming facedown and a cop tried to suppress his movement, after which he stands up, unholsters his gun and shoots Grant in the back, killing him. Unbelievable. But real.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXAETrZghn0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgzNBpjCNX8

This kind of behavior, ostensibly to enforce “security,” is parallel (on a small scale) to the insane barbarism of Israel’s assault on the Palestinians of Gaza. Wildly disproportionate violence is inflicted to protect the “security” of mass society. Lots of people I know are sick about Israel’s criminality, and watching this video of a police murdering a kid in Oakland brought it all home to me.

I grew up in Oakland from 1967-1974 and I have seen a lot of this kind of “police action” over the years, though not often leading to cold-blooded murder. I’ve also had the shit beaten out of me by criminal thugs, so I’m not oblivious to the fear and loathing that can erupt suddenly and for no apparent reason on the streets, in the trains, wherever. When it does it’s easy to wish for a cop to save you. But the violence that sits just beneath the thin veneer of “civilization” is as extreme, and to understand the day-to-day anger and violence that erupts so unexpectedly one has to look at the deeper violence of this society: the matter-of-fact use of aerial bombardment as a tool of foreign policy, the intensely armed presence of police inflicting steady harassment and intimidation in neighborhoods “of color” every day, the absurd levels of incarceration, etc. ad nauseum.

I just finished reading “Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of  a Black Power Icon” by Jane Rhodes. This is a masterful work, providing a great deal of detail on the events that make up the history of the Black Panthers, especially in Oakland and San Francisco during the 1967-1972 period. But even more crucial almost 40 years later is her fantastic “reading” of the media coverage at the time, and subsequent to events. The individuals in the Panthers worked hard to gain attention via newspapers and television, and succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination, burning into the cultural landscape a phalanx of black militants garbed in black berets, leather jackets, opaque sunglasses, and wielding rifles and shotguns in a theatricalized expression of Black Militancy. Not that their guns were mere props. They were used on many occasions, since the deeper story involves intense police harassment up to and including open assault with massive firepower. Rhodes is at her best in the conclusion where she draws out the critical historical thinking that does not try to glorify the Black Panthers, or excuse or deny their occasionally anti-social behavior, but seeks to place them in their own historic agency and context.

“To call the Black Panther Party a “media-made” movement is too easy; it assigns the power of representation to media institutions rather than their subjects. This assertion ignores the dialogic relationship–the interdependence–between media producers and media subjects and erases individual and group agency. Rather, we might see the great power of the Black Panthers in their ability to create, manipulate, and subvert mass culture… The Panthers weren’t invented by the media–Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, Kathleen Cleaver, Fred Hampton, and a handful of other actors invented themselves and delivered the goods to the mass media.

“The cultural matrix of the black power movement, which integrated fashion, soul music, street theater, underground journalism, African spirituality, and urban vernacular, disrupted basic assumptions about how politics is conducted. For many observers, then, the Black Panthers inhabited a hyperreal state in which it was unclear whether the meaning they embodied was superseded or replaced by the signs, symbols, and rhetoric that swirled around them. This lent credibility to the idea that there was nothing behind their image but Oz-like wizardry. The Panthers’ very materialist perspective argued otherwise–that it was their claims of race, class, and gender prejudice, not cultural context, that encouraged most elites to deny their importance.”

I’ve always felt a peculiar connection to the Black Panthers, perhaps because I grew up very near to their stomping grounds in North Oakland. I remember well being afraid to go to Bushrod Park (where the surviving Panthers held a 30th anniversary reunion in 1996), a place that I was sure I would be attacked. But I was attacked on my elementary schoolyard not far from there, albeit in a harmless way (spit in the face, stolen baseball mitt and bat, that sort of thing); I also spent countless hours shooting baskets with lots of guys, mostly black, at St. Augustine’s on Alcatraz while I was age 11-14, and in one memorable afternoon I was playing one-on-one with a guy who must’ve been 17 and had me laughing so hard I almost fell over. I was wearing some cutoff jeans that my mother had patched with some black patches on the worn-out rear, and this guy (who I was holding my own with for a while, even though he had 6-8 inches on me) started a whole legend about how I was the leader of the infamous Black Patches, and as he spun the story full of allusions to recent events involving the Panthers I fell apart and couldn’t keep playing, helpless with mirth.

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Jane Martin, a Force of Nature

I’m beginning to write for a new local effort, sf.streetsblog.org, but tonight, the night before the big debut, I cannot log in… so I’m going to post my piece here, having failed to blog for a while…

Jane Martin, hands in soil.

Jane Martin, hands in soil.

Jane Martin is a force of nature. A longtime resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, a licensed architect, and an avid gardener, Martin is the founder of PlantSF, an informational website dedicated to reconfiguring the design and use of urban spaces, primarily sidewalks and to a lesser extent, residential streets. PlantSF started in 2004 after Martin had spent considerable effort establishing a sidewalk garden in front of her then-home on Shotwell between 17th and 18th Streets.

“Before I thought to organize [PlantSF] I just wanted to put in a garden. We have these really wide sidewalks all over town and they’re relatively underutilized. [The garden] also had the added benefit of reducing driving and parking on the sidewalk.”

Jane Martin's original garden on Shotwell between 17th and 18th.

Jane Martin's original garden on Shotwell between 17th and 18th.

This block of Shotwell was infamous for sewage backups and blackwater flooding during heavy rainfall. Only a few years ago most of the neighbors had to stockpile sandbags during winter to stop their garages from flooding with sewage. After Martin figured out how to get through the city bureaucracy, and ultimately helped create a streamlined permit process for anyone to follow (downloadable here http://www.plantsf.org/HowTo.html), many of her neighbors on the same block opened their sidewalks and put in permeable driveways and gardens. Even PG&E, just south of 18th between Shotwell and Folsom, got into the act.

View across Shotwell towards Martin's original garden on east side.

View across Shotwell towards Martin's original garden on east side.

East side Shotwell Street at 18th.

East side Shotwell Street at 18th.

Just around the corner from Shotwell on 18th, north side.

Just around the corner from Shotwell on 18th, north side.

South side of 18th Street just east of Shotwell, side of PG&E property.

South side of 18th Street just east of Shotwell, side of PG&E property.

She started out as something of a lone ranger, using her professional skills to navigate the city’s many rules and regulations, and originally thought the sidewalk-as-park would generate its own enthusiasm.

“I didn’t get very far trying to convince people that it was a nice place for a park. When I realized the connection between the depaving part of the project and getting storm water out of the sewer system and into the ground, that’s when it got more attention, especially from the City because our aging infrastructure with the sewer system is at the point of collapse in a number of areas.”

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When the Kids are United…

Been in one of those zones where I get really preoccupied watching the news come in, but finding it difficult to summarize or work up anything particularly exciting to blog about. Luckily a lot of others are keeping it going in various places (thus, I spend too much time reading other people’s blogs!… but that’s ok too)…

The Greek Uprising, or insurrection, is really inspiring. Here’s a link to a very intelligent summary/account of it from Pavlos Stavropolous who has been on the ground in the midst of it. It’s a fascinating listen, in no small part because as he describes it, it’s still at the earliest stages where thousands of people are just joining, trying to figure out what ELSE they can do than keep reproducing an unsatisfactory life day after day. For the youth of Greece, the sour joke is that they’re all stuck in a $1000-a-month job for life, the window to upward mobility having been shut after the preceding generations crawled through it. But as Stavropolous describes, the reasons for the protests, occupations, riots are as numerous as the people carrying them out. It’s very much a revolutionary situation, though as yet uncertain about where it will all go… maybe a bit like Argentina in 2001, where a huge population suddenly discovers its own power and only wants to throw out all the existing politicians and business leaders… “que se vayan todos!”…

I was very struck by the reports of 11-, 12-, and 13-year olds besieging police stations in various cities in Greece. Amazing! A week ago I joined a SF Art Institute class to evaluate final projects and the prof, Tammy Ko Robinson, started the class by putting a website up that shows images of a mass movement in South Korea this past summer (which I hadn’t known anything about). I forget the details of the demands of the half million protesters occupying Seoul, but it was an anti-privatization mobilization, and the most remarkable part of it, according to Tammy, was that it started with some 13-year-old girls sending text messages to each other and on to their wider circles, and from there it just took off.

Last week my daughter participated in an occupation of the New School for Social Research, an inspiring intervention that has caught the imagination of many people all over the place. They were mentioned yesterday during some public comments made in front of the now-defunct New College here in San Francisco as a small crowd of marchers in solidarity with the Greek Uprising paused there:

Demonstrators in solidarity with the Greek Uprising pause at New College on Valencia Street in San Francisco, Dec. 20, 2008.

Demonstrators in solidarity with the Greek Uprising pause at New College on Valencia Street in San Francisco, Dec. 20, 2008.

Continue reading When the Kids are United…