Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Oakland and Alameda County lost 16,000 blue-collar jobs in the first half of the 1980s alone. By the year 2000, even a boosterish local history, The Spirit of Oakland, was describing flatlands communities by referring to “persistent unemployment and its byproducts” like the city’s 25 percent poverty rate, and the “struggles” of a community “without an industrial base.” When Ishmael Reed toured the heavily Mexican American neighborhood of Fruitvale for his 2003 book Blues City, he noted, “Unemployment is up here because the source of income, heavy and light manufacturing jobs, has relocated to cheaper labor markets or is being replaced by hi-tech industry.” Chris Rhomberg in No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland, noted that in 2004, because of this trend toward a two-tier economy, “80 percent of Oakland households would not be able to afford a two-bedroom unit in the new developments” that Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is promoting to “redevelop” downtown Oakland. As Rhomberg observes, Oakland rents rose by 65 percent between 1995 and 2000 and two out of five Oakland families had already been struggling to meet housing costs before this surge in prices.4

  Along with the loss of good jobs and rising housing costs in Oakland came the flight of banks, supermarkets, and the white working class. For instance, the number of banks in East Oakland south of 73rd Avenue, eleven in 1982, had fallen to two by 1990. Without much capital, East Oakland, home to the Coliseum where the Raiders play, has little with which to rebuild. Those who fled the neighborhood left behind what one Oakland Tribune reporter called a “no-store zone” where the Millsmont Certified Farmers Market, which opened in the summer of 2003, was pushed by City Council member Desley Brooks to compensate for “the absence of a major supermarket in the district and the need for economic vitality that would boost neighborhood pride.” Retail business has also been hit hard as Rhomberg documents, “By the ’80s, major retail stores were rapidly leaving the central city for the suburban malls: In 1977, Oakland’s central business district could still boast seven department stores; ten years later, there were only four across the entire city.” As for white flight, in 1960, when the Raiders were born, the East Oakland community of Elmhurst was 80 percent white, but by 1980 the neighborhood was less than 10 percent white. The East Bay suburbs grew and prospered while Oakland suffered. As some affluent whites begin to return, many fear that the result will be gentrification and displacement of working-class minority residents rather than a bottom-up renewal of the city.5

  This ghettoization of East Oakland along with rest of the flatlands, combined with the loss of industrial jobs, commercial services, and tax dollars, has exacerbated the decline of the area’s schools. Before the state takeover of Oakland’s schools in the summer of 2003, only five of Oakland’s ninety-nine schools met state standards, with widespread failure in math skills and English proficiency.6 In an insightful article in the Oakland Tribune, Jill Tucker explained how Oakland’s poor kids are having the bar of expectations raised while receiving an education that is “among the worst in the nation” from a system that “favors white and wealthy kids.”7

  Hence, Oakland’s flatland schools reflect the condition of their community and, as a result, only 25 percent of incoming high school freshman graduate, with 40 percent quitting and the rest falling off the radar screen of the Oakland school district altogether. These kids drop out into a dismal Oakland job market where the overall unemployment rate as of this writing is 10.4 percent compared to 6.9 percent statewide, and the unemployment rate for young people is 22 percent across the state and a stunning 56.3 percent among African American youth. If they get sick, the unemployed and uninsured can expect to go to a struggling county medical center that is underfunded and worse than most facilities because of a shortage of beds. The overall healthcare situation is bleak: as Rhomberg shows, “Every census track in East Oakland (and many in North and West Oakland) was designated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as medically underserved, based on the prevalence of poverty, infant mortality rates, and the shortage of primary care physicians.” Thus it is not hard to see why some of East Oakland’s most marginalized young people, with the social fabric fraying around them, might turn to other sources of meaning and identity.8

  As Diego Vigil, a scholar of “street socialization” puts it, “It is when social forces and influences do not function as they should that street subcultures arise to fill the void.” For young people, like the twelve- to twenty-year-old kids on the street during the riots in East Oakland, “Socio-economic factors such as poverty, economic dislocation, divorce, single-parent households, and racism place severe stresses on many families, so that home life is regularly unstable.” This leads to a situation where, as Vigil tells us, “Alienated youths whose lack of education and occupational opportunities preclude their entering the respectable status system face severe problems in establishing a social identity for themselves.” In this context, “periodically acting loco elevates a youth’s social status and enhances his street reputation.” This might mean, in a small minority of cases, joining a gang or, more likely, going to a “sideshow” where you do donuts in the street in somebody’s car, or simply feeling the need to act like a badass or crazy Raiders fan. As Jim Zamora put it, “A lot of people feel Oakland has a reputation to live up to. A tough, gritty, urban identity. The Raiders are a way to get in touch with your inner thug.” What is surprising in the socio-economic context of East Oakland is not that young people sometimes get out of hand, but that people are surprised when they do.9

  What happened the night of the Super Bowl was not on the scale of the Los Angeles riots, but a smaller series of flash riots that spread along International Boulevard for more than fifty blocks. The week before, rowdy celebrations of the Raiders’ AFC championship victory occurred on International Boulevard as well. Jubilation had also veered into vandalism around Jack London Square downtown, leading to 25 arrests (compared to 55 at the Coliseum itself, which was 15 above the average of 40 per game). The Super Bowl week, however, the police had blocked off the gentrified area around the square, leaving East Oakland as the sole site for street parties. A crowd of 200 or so gathered at 37th Avenue and International after the game and started marching up the street yelling, “Raiders rule! Fuck the police!” Police in riot gear reacted with what some observers called a “zero tolerance” approach, making use of rubber bullets, tear gas, and flashstun grenades as their fellow officers in squad cars, on motorcycles, and in helicopters teamed up with California Highway Patrol officers, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies, and a SWAT team to suppress the crowd of young Raiders fans.10

  Some residents of the neighborhood hotly condemned the “Raider Nation people” and welcomed the police, chanting “OPD! OPD!” as the riot troops passed by, while others resented having tear gas shot toward them as they sat on the steps in front of their homes. A week before, Liz Estrella had complained of a police overreaction in the Oakland Tribune, saying, “You never see this much police presence when there is a murder in this area. If the Raiders win the Super Bowl, it’s going to be twice as bad.” They lost, but even so she was right as the night yielded twelve car fires, numerous street bonfires lit in trash Dumpsters or started with discarded Christmas trees, some damage to businesses, and eighty-five arrests. Of those arrested, seventy-two were from Oakland and some were as young as twelve years old.11

  33rd Street off International

  At one point during the night, the small army of police was clearly outnumbered by riotous fans and had to retreat from a barrage of rocks and bottles. Other fans, however, did not fight with police, preferring to take part in sideshows or just stand on the sidelines and watch the chaos unfold. There was much drunkenness. According to Zamora, no businesses with “Raiders stuff ” in the windows were damaged, but cars with 49ers stickers got trashed. He also notes, without claiming that the rioters were angry antiglobalists, that while the McDonald’s at 64th Avenue was burned, the locally owned Kwik Way across the street was still open and serving burge
rs throughout the mayhem. Members of the multi-ethnic crowd (about half Latino and a quarter black, with the remainder whites and Asians) identified themselves as Raiders fans throughout the night, not just by wearing gear but by directing the battle like a game. “Raiders fans, roll it back. The tear gas is getting stronger,” one man yelled to his cohorts in the midst of the fray. Neighborhood identification was also clear as one eighteen-year-old barked to a reporter, “You better take your shit home—it’s East Oakland.” Others proclaimed, “It’s town business, it’s what we do!” At least one other fan branded a police van with an anarchy symbol.12

  While it might be wrong to attribute any conscious political agenda to these angry Raiders fans, Zamora does note that “there was a lot of venting at cops. Oakland police have a reputation for having a more aggressive strategy. In this case, it gave people something to engage. The cops may have been doing things that escalated the situation. It’s hard to know in a situation like that. It’s unpredictable.” Some residents were also critical of law enforcement, complaining that the police reaction was over the top in response to what was just a rowdy crowd. One, by the name of B. Town, said, “It was just a gathering of people from Oakland having a good time. The police did too much with smoke bombs.” A group of media students from a Fremont high school who had come into the city to hang out during the Super Bowl thought there were too many cops in the neighborhood and that, though the rioters had gotten out of hand, the police presence was a trigger. “The only reason people acted crazy was because police were harassing them,” said Shakia Green of the anarchy on the street.13

  There is clearly no excuse for random vandalism. However, such questioning of the motives and actions of the police is a reflection of long-held suspicions of law enforcement in Oakland’s flatlands. As John Krich observed in the late seventies:It is not surprising that this city should be the unofficial birthplace of the word “pig”—at least, as that word applies to police . . . Oakland’s “police services” have had a long record of brutality unmatched by any troop of a comparable size. Long before the Black Panthers popularized the jargon that described them as an “occupying force,” Oakland’s cops had amassed a well-documented record of harassment of labor. . . . With the growth of reported incidents of brutality against blacks in the early Fifties, a committee of the state legislature held public hearings on Oakland’s force, the first and only time that has happened in California’s history. Many of the men who enforced order in the ghettos were whites, recruited from the South, who lived in environs like San Leandro, which the NAACP once designated America’s most segregated city.

  Marilynn Johnson concurs, noting that during the forties in Oakland, “Police . . . hounded groups of black men congregating on street corners, forcing them to disperse or face arrest.” Johnson also reminds us of how police routinely “rounded up hundreds of ‘suspicious’ individuals each year—typically non-whites in white neighborhoods” and “selectively enforced the draft law against black and Hispanic men.” Years later, Ishmael Reed, who was concerned enough about drug crime in Oakland to condemn “black terrorists” and “crack fascists” and yearn for a “state of emergency” in the late eighties, was not uncritical of Oakland’s police: “Thanks to the Panthers, the downtown establishment is black but that still doesn’t prohibit the police from continuing to beat the shit out of black people.” During the Jerry Brown era, the image of the police has suffered as a result of “the Riders” scandal, in which four rogue cops were accused of planting evidence, using excessive force, and filing false reports, with one having apparently fled to Mexico before a controversial trial in which the remaining defendants were cleared of eight charges while the jury delivered a hung verdict on twenty-seven others. Angry protests followed as the Riders walked. This scandal and similar problems have raised enough concern to spur reform in Oakland’s underfunded and understaffed police department. Hence the tensions between police and youth on the street should not shock anyone.14

  The mainstream media response to the riots was for the most part predictably scathing. Formulaic, superficial, and sensationalist local and national television coverage was the norm as reporters found the dramatic shots and hopped back into their news vans, and thoughtful reflection was subsumed by the image of a burning car accompanied by a predictable condemnation of the rioters. The Oakland Tribune, along with many Raiders fans, kicked the young people on the street out of Raider Nation, proclaiming, “Those thugs were not real Raiders fans.” Upset at the damage to the city’s streets and image, the paper pulled out all the stops, calling the rioters “hooligans,” “outlaws,” and an “unruly mob.” Rejecting any attempt to understand the root causes of such outbursts as “excuses,” the editorial proclaimed that “although society in general and Oakland in particular do have problems, that is no rationale for what happened.”15

  Monte Poole’s column on the riots also took pains to distinguish the street revelers from the majority of “true Raiders fans,” but did not cast them out of the imagined community entirely. Instead, he called them “the fringe element of Raider Nation.” Noting of the kids on the street, “They are of this community, and they link themselves to the team,” Poole bemoaned the fact that the Raiders organization had done nothing in the wake of the riots. Reminding Raiders players that “athletic figures sometimes fail to realize the impact they can make with even a token effort,” he called on them to show up in East Oakland and help heal the city. It never happened. Laudable as Poole’s sentiments were, they were based on the notion that professional sports teams have an obligation to the community in whose name they play, an idea which, if it ever had any currency, has long since been cast into the dustbin of history by corporate sports organizations throughout the country.16

  Letters to the Tribune ranged from one that condemned the “low-life jerks” who rioted as, yet again, not “true and loyal” fans to another that went beyond recrimination to look at the bigger picture. “Aren’t you tired of all these politicians, especially our City Council president, telling the police in his district, ‘You should have used more force’?” asked Mickey Hall of Oakland. As for the fans, he chided, “It would be so much better if we used all this energy to fight the city for things that are more important than a football game. There are plenty to fight the city for. For example, education for our children is horrible. Let’s help the ones who are actually fighting for us and our children.” 17

  At the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center website, one could find some interesting on-the-site reporting from Oakland residents as events unfolded. Rachael Montgomery contributed this post:I and a few of my housemates were also hit with tear gas while we stood in front of our door on International and 48th. A huge line of police were walking down the street with several rows of squad cars behind them and yelling at people to “GO HOME!” When they got to us, I began taking photos, and telling them, “I am home.” They responded by shooting tear gas right at our feet, so we were forced to go inside. Three of us were stung by the gas in our faces, and I wasn’t really able to see straight for about 20 minutes.

  Another report from 38th and Foothill Boulevard also complained of tear gas, “despite the fact that the activity on the street (celebration) appears to [be] much more mellow than last week after the Raiders’ playoff win.” Yet another accused an unnamed journalist from a Bay Area newspaper of racism for telling someone on a cell phone that he was afraid to go into the crowd because he was white. This observer then lambasted “racist ‘rich person’s’ reporting” and claimed that “patterns of corruption in the police force and police aggressiveness against poor or black/Mexican people were to blame for the violence that occurred, which was mostly some property destruction and a lot of violence against humans committed by the police.” A good number of pictures were posted documenting massive police lines, vandalized squad cars, rubber bullets, and several arrests.18

  When it came to analyzing the significance of the disturbances, the debate on th
e Indy Media website was over whether the Raiders riots were a manifestation of revolutionary class war, excessive police brutality, or reactionary thuggery by an unredeemable group of drunken, sexist, homophobic, lumpenproletarian gangs. One report by “black mamba” surmised:Pent up sub-conscious rage against the fascist police state we live in seems to me to be behind the violence. This display indicates that large segments of our society are at the point of revolting against the oppressive nature of our society, why else would people burn their own neighborhood? The propaganda and phyc-ops [sic] are so effective though that the rage is only related to state sanctioned events like the Super Bowl. If some one could only find a way to channel this rage to change the oppressive nature of our society, things would change quickly.

  Another post said, “Revel in the beauty of a burning McDonald’s,” while still another asked why no banks were burned. This was greeted with, “To the person with the bank question—where are you from mutha fucka? Very, very obviously not Oaktown. If you were you’d know that in the free fire zone, along International/East 14th between like Fruitvale and the 90s there are hardly any banks—if there is even one.” The rioters-as-revolutionaries crowd was assailed by people pointing out the absurdity of seeing “lumpen thugs” as revolutionary and others defending the Oakland woman who owned the McDonald’s franchise or calling for the police to “unleash the beast” on the fascist football hooligans devoted to “corporate Raider Nation.”19