Nowtopian

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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