Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Other responses went beyond condemning Raiders fans to rejecting and stereotyping Oakland itself. “People burn their own neighborhoods because Oakland is the shithole that EVERYONE in the Bay Area, and now the NATION, thinks it is. I have the misfortune of working downtown and it is a SCARY place! When five o’clock rolls around, everyone with half a brain GETS THE HELL OUT!” One of the uglier posts not only mocked the pretensions of would-be revolutionaries but went on to say: “The bums and welfare clowns who rioted did so because they are ignorant cretins who were upset at their pitiful team getting its ass handed to it. Today they will get up (around noon), watch some TV (Springer), and wait for Friday (welfare checks). Have a nice day.”20

  While the worst nightmares of both the vast majority of law-abiding citizens who comprise Raider Nation and Oakland’s boosters were embodied in the Super Bowl riots, the impulse toward the easy condemnation of a mythologized “mob of thugs” does little other than appease the pious. No matter how much Raiders fans might want to excise the young rioters from their imagined community, they will continue to exist. No matter what linguistic artillery is launched at them by the local press, they will still live in Oakland—and marginalized inner-city youth have been demonized for so long that one doubts that the papers’ efforts did much damage to their sense of self, which was probably already dependent on not being respectable. Already outsiders looking in on mainstream American life and the Super Bowl show, the rioters’ sense of agency came from their transgression of becoming participants in their own contest. Neither inhuman monsters nor angry revolutionaries, the young Raiders fans who got drunk and stirred it up on the streets of Oakland are a symptom of blight more than its cause. The reaction they provoked is instructive but not unique in the history of the city.

  From Salon Culture to the California Barbarians

  Headlines in the March 1943 Oakland Tribune announced the arrival of a major crime wave on city streets. Criminal activity and juvenile delinquency had become “intolerable,” said the Tribune, and “decent citizens [were] afraid to got out at night.” The city’s evening newspaper, the Post-Enquirer, urged city officials to take immediate action, calling for a “drastic tightening and strengthening of the forces of law and order. We cannot allow rape, murder, prostitution, robbery and gangsterism to flourish and increase in our midst.”

  Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush:

  Oakland and the East Bay in World War II

  As early as the 1920s, the nativist Protestant white middle class in Oakland (many of whom were sympathetic to the Klan) were up in arms over the “saloon culture” that helped foster the ethnic machine politics of Mike Kelly. Rhomberg observes, “Opposition to booze went hand in hand with calls for greater controls over other forms of deviance as well. In March 1921, residents of 29th Avenue complained of gambling and loitering among young men attending night classes in Americanization” at a school in East Oakland. The police proceeded to arrest fourteen youths “with names like Gomez, Carelli, Cravalho, . . . and Prussino-vski” for “vagrancy.” More violent forms of “law and order” were meted out in the 1920s when middle-class East Oaklanders beat, tarred, and feathered the editor of the iconoclastic Free Press. In yet another example of mob violence in the twenties, there was “a prolonged standoff between armed homeowners and the Streets department” over a sewage spill that suburbanites felt the city had not responded to properly. Such efforts to impose a nativist Protestant white middle-class hegemony by legal or extralegal means would ultimately fail to quell fears of disorder. By the time the forties rolled along, Rhomberg informs us that the “sudden mingling of groups in the shared space of downtown” had created new tensions: “Old Oakland residents were shocked at the unruly crowds and the seeming breakdown of moral order, yet for many workers the experience was a liberating release from social barriers.”21

  In 1944, the 12th Street riot left one dead and four wounded after an angry crowd of 5,000 black swing fans were turned away from the Oakland Auditorium where they had come to see Cab Calloway. Shut out of the sold-out show, the crowd smashed doors and windows and fought with white sailors on a city streetcar. Hundreds joined in and the anarchy spread down Broadway where truckloads of military police joined local cops to battle the angry swing dancers. Police cited no rationale for what they termed a “spontaneous outburst,” ignoring the obvious racial undercurrent of the disturbance. At the time, the rioters were lectured by the Oakland Observer:The riot on Twelfth Street the other day may be the forerunner of more and larger riots because we now have (a) a semi-mining camp civilization and (b) a new race problem, brought about by the influx of what might be called socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old and peaceful understanding between the Negro and the white of Oakland, which has lasted for so many decades, but who insist upon barging into the white man and becoming an integral part of the white man’s society.... Right there is where the Negro is making his big mistake. He is butting into the white civilization instead of keeping in the perfectly orderly and convenient Negro civilization of Oakland, and he is getting himself thoroughly disliked.22

  In Oakland, and in other East Bay cities, the forties did not see just a racial panic but a wave of hysteria over crime, juvenile delinquency, and drunkenness. A good number of “the greatest generation,” it appears, were out of control. The Alameda Times-Star was worried about “shiftless, irresponsible fellows who [do] little else but go out on ‘binges’ which usually land them in jail, at the expense of the city, after every pay day.” In Richmond, the Independent was railing about a wave of “alcoholic playboys” and calling for a “concentration camp” to house them. As Marilynn Johnson points out, the urban conflicts and social anxieties of this era laid the groundwork for much of the turmoil of the sixties.23

  In 1968, Amory Bradford of the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce published the book Oakland’s Not for Burning to tell the story of how Oakland avoided a Watts-style riot due in part to his (self-described) noble efforts. Despite his overly sunny view, Bradford does document the rage that many inner-city residents, who were threatening “to have a Watts here, and kill and bomb,” felt over the lack of jobs in the city and urban renewal policies that looked more like “Negro removal.”24 East 14th Street was a flash point on several occasions as Bradford recounts an incident during the long hot summer of his stay in the city:A group of youngsters had broken some store windows on East 14th Street. When the police arrived, a large crowd gathered, and moved into a construction lot nearby to pick up bricks and pieces of wood. More police came and dispersed the crowd, chasing some of them down side streets. There was no shooting, but a number of arrests were made. There were no serious injuries. There was some criticism by ghetto leaders of what they felt to be an excessive show of force by the police, who came in special riot cars, each carrying five men, equipped with crash helmets, riot batons, and shotguns.25

  East 14th Street was the host of yet another disturbance that year when “several thousand high school students were out in the streets with nothing to do, looking for trouble. They began to form large groups and roamed up and down East 14th Street, the main thoroughfare of East Oakland, breaking store windows and shouting at passers-by.” Not surprisingly, Bradford notes, “The police were ready and turned out in force. Holding their clubs ahead of them with a hand over each end, they formed a solid wedge and cleared 14th Street, pushing the students ahead of them.” He also notes the famous shoot-out between the police and the Black Panthers where Oakland cops killed Bobby Hutton and wounded Eldridge Clever, taking two casualties themselves. Still, he asserts, Oakland made it through 1966, 1967, and the first part of 1968 “without a serious riot,” but was still “on the edge of violence, until far more than is now in view can be done to improve life for those who dwell in the ghetto.”26

  For a contemporary observer sympathetic to the plight of urban America’s poor, Bradford is depressing reading. He earnestly outlin
es the conflict between serving America’s “urban needs” and “the expenditure of $30 billion per year in Vietnam” and proclaims:We cannot afford not to spend what is required to solve the problems of the ghettos because the failure to solve them is endangering the future of our cities.... And even if, as some propose, we could contain this danger through repressive police action and limited welfare palliatives, this would merely postpone the day of reckoning. As a nation committed from the beginning to the principles of equality and opportunity, we could not for long continue to deny both of these to the large segment of our urban citizens now prevented from attaining them by historical and economic forces beyond their control.27

  A year later, a Los Angeles Times headline would tell readers, “Oakland Minority Job Program Labeled ‘A Pretty Big Disaster.’” The EDA program had created only thirty-three jobs. In 1973, Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky published Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland, where they argued that “the urban experiment had raised expectations but had delivered only meager results.” Rather than saving Oakland, the jobs program never delivered a huge influx of capital. One of the only outcomes they could point to was the construction of the Hegenberger overpass to the Coliseum, which failed to provide a single job for the hard core of unemployed Oaklanders. Indeed, by 1969 only $3 million of the promised $23 million had been spent. Consequently, Pressman and Wildavsky argued, Oakland could look forward to being a “service center to the East Bay region” rather than a proud blue-collar manufacturing town. It was also, they concluded, a place where, increasingly, people of color lived and whites from outside the city worked. All of this was a far cry from a Black Panther Party plan, which, as Rhomberg reminds us, “called for a radical redistributional agenda, including a 5 percent capital gains tax on transfers of income property and the property of large corporations, a 1 percent tax on intangible stocks and bonds, increased rental charges and fees at the Coliseum” as well as “a residency requirement for all police and firefighters.”28

  The war on poverty, which, as Martin Luther King pointed out during the sixties, was never adequately funded because of Vietnam, gave way to a growing suspicion of the ability of government to solve social problems and an assault on “big government.” With the rise of the New Right, poverty programs and other social spending were slashed and slashed again and tax cuts, the drug war, and the prison-industrial complex became the new holy trinity for America’s inner cities. In California, Proposition 13, which has restricted the ability of the state to provide services since the late seventies, embodies the logic of the New Right. Rhomberg points out, “In its first year Proposition 13 cut the city’s resources by more than $14 million, causing service reductions, closures of facilities, and layoffs of city employees.” More important, this conservative counterattack continues to have a profound impact on economically blighted communities like Oakland: “The fiscal constraints imposed on local governments made any substantive redistributional agenda more difficult and reinforced public dependence on private investment in the city.”29

  By 1991, Ishmael Reed lamented how over a decade of “selfishness and greed” had affected Oakland as flatlanders and hill residents squabbled after the disastrous fire that devastated Oakland’s more affluent sections by noting that few people “place the blame where it really belonged.” The real enemies of the city’s social fabric, according to Reed, were “the blow-dried, face-lifted commodities called politicians” and what he termedThe California Barbarians, who got through Proposition 13, created the conditions for the Oakland Hills conflagration when they passed a measure that told the poor and public school students to go stick it. These are the hoarding fatuous who have lynched our educational system, are in the process of destroying one of the world’s great universities, and have closed libraries. They’re the reason we don’t have firefighters or the equipment. They’re the reason we don’t have enough police on the streets, so that our neighborhoods both urban and suburban, have been taken over by crack dealers, both the Nike-wearing type and the bankers who hold their money.30

  Things would improve briefly for Oakland and the state in the mid to late nineties as the economic boom poured tax dollars into state and city coffers, but by 2003 the bubble had burst and a Republican minority had succeeded in recalling California’s mediocre Democratic governor and jamming a draconian budget down the throat of the weak Democratic majority in the State Senate and Assembly by refusing to vote for a single tax increase to help close the budget gap. On the federal level, the Bush administration was pouring billions of tax dollars into Iraq while the states were drowning in red ink at home. It was yet another defeat for “big government,” and students, the poor, and those in need of healthcare and city services would continue to pay for it.

  Even during the late nineties boom, California’s marginalized inner-city young people have seen more stick than carrot. As Diego Vigil has pointed out, the “backlash against the Great Society, and all the rest of what the sixties represents” has led to a strategy of “unilateral suppression” of kids and young adults like the ones who rioted after the Super Bowl. Prison spending in California increased by ten times between 1980 and 1994, and with the recent passage of Proposition 21, a juvenile crime initiative, more teenagers can now be tried as adults and be sent to serve time in the state’s burgeoning prison-industrial complex. Even Oakland mayor Jerry Brown, “governor moonbeam” image aside, was elected in 1998 on what Craig Thompson of the East Bay Express describes as a “four-point platform: ten thousand middle-class residents downtown; a no-nonsense crackdown on crime; remaking the city into Northern California’s art Mecca; and, of course, liberating children from the shackles of their own public schools.” Brown, who signed Proposition 13 into law in 1978 despite his reservations, has arguably failed on all four fronts, but his brainchild, the Oakland Military Institute, is still seeking to instill an “iron will” into “disadvantaged ghetto kids”31

  Still, after decades of bashing the sixties, assailing government, and criminalizing and imprisoning inner-city young people, events like the Super Bowl riots persist. Consistently refusing to address the deep, seemingly intractable structural economic and social problems that are the breeding ground for events like the Raider riots, California has chosen instead to moralize and punish, mocking attempts to “understand” as failed liberal relics and speaking piously of “family values” and “personal responsibility.” As a result, our society has become what Barry Glassner has called a “culture of fear” that blows events like the Super Bowl riots out of proportion, making demons out of young “Raider thugs” and blaming them for conditions not of their making. Glassner’s analysis of our culture’s fear of criminal youth is an apt explanation of why the fringe of Raider Nation has come, in the national imagination, to stand for the monstrous unruly other:Our fears grow, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves.32

  Hence voters continue to prefer funding prison beds rather than community college classes or antipoverty programs. Perhaps we can even pass a law making it punishable for kids under eighteen to wear Raiders gear on the street.

  Terroristic Hyperrealism

  Raider haters frequently like to point to events like the Super Bowl riots and claim that they are representative of Oakland as a whole (or Los Angeles before it) and show Raiders fans to be the worst of the worst. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, such rampages are so common that sociologists have invented terminology to describe them. “Post-event riots” have occurred many times over the last forty years in North America in places like Detroit (in 1968, 1984, and 1992), Pittsburgh (in 1971 and 1975), Chicago (in 1992 and 1993), Toronto (in 1983), Montreal (in 1986 and 1993), Hamilton (in 1986), Dallas (in 1993), Vancouver (in 19
94), Cleveland (in 1995) and many other professional sports cities. Post-event riots have also occurred after college sporting events in towns like Westwood, Madison, Columbus, East Lansing, and a long list of other places. One scholar counted post-event riots between 1960 and 1972 and found evidence of 313 incidents. If we go back further into North American history, the list is too long to cite. Many of these post-event riots make the disturbances in Oakland look like a tea party. In Vancouver, 70,000 people participated in a rampage. There were deaths in Detroit, and, in Pittsburgh, a crowd watched and cheered a rape. A look across the Atlantic shows us that the Raider riots, where no one was seriously injured, should not even be mentioned in the same breath as the soccer hooliganism in Heysel during which thirty-nine were killed in 1985. Equally horrifying “soccer wars” have erupted in Latin America as well. As the November 2004 brawl between Detroit Pistons fans (in the pricey courtside seats) and the Indiana Pacers showed, the world of sports fans, like it or not, is often a violent one. Hence the stereotype of the “Raider thug” or “hooligan” as an exceptionally violent fan is an unsupported myth employed selectively by critics, frequently as a way to lambaste their multi-ethnic working-class fan base.33

  Some scholars insist that occurrences like post-event riots are best explained by pointing to socio-economic factors like those cited earlier in this chapter. Unemployment, poverty, or other forms of disempowerment are the triggers for such outbursts, they argue, citing examples like the Vancouver riot, where half of those arrested were unemployed. While it is clear that those socio-economic factors were indeed present in Oakland, it is also worth exploring other factors that some might say contributed to Raider rage. In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford seeks to explain British soccer hooliganism by exploring the meaning of the crowd. Rejecting a socio-economic analysis, Buford sees things in universalist terms. In the crowd, he claims, we are attracted to “the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one—the present in its absoluteness.” Being part of a crowd, Buford argues, is a crossing of the boundary between self and other that has similarities to religious ecstasy, sexual excess, drug-induced states, and pain. It is “nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.” This has nothing to do with our particular social or economic context because “the crowd is in all of us . . . the crowd holds out certain essential attractions. It is, like an appetite, something in which dark satisfactions can be found.” While interesting, Buford’s analysis essentializes crowds, narrowing their meaning to a “dark” surrender to “nihilism.” For Buford, all crowds are, in essence, fascist.34