mehserle SENTENCE FRIDAY 11/05/2010
The coming Mehserle sentencing: Redrawing the line on ‘outside agitators’
November 1, 2010
by Mike King
In Oakland’s Black youth, the fightback legacy of the Black Panther Party is in the blood. – Photo: Jay Finneburgh, IndyBay
As the sentencing for convicted Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer
Johannes Mehserle draws closer, Oakland waits impatiently. While many
people are hoping he will receive the maximum sentence of 14 years on
Nov. 5, there lies a definite possibility he will get a lesser sentence
and perhaps walk with time served and probation.
The rebellions of January 2009 that brought about Mehserle’s arrest
could very well be set off once more, regardless of the sentence,
admidst widespread community sentiment that justice has not been served.
As we move closer to the fifth, the very real possibility of further
rebellion hangs in the air.
This case, and the movement that has grown around it, is a window
into today’s Oakland, replete with stark contradictions of race and
class, the dialectic of state violence and popular resistance, as well
as contests over power and voice in the public sphere. However,
listening to various official voices, these issues have been set aside,
whether by the media or by the non-profit sector. What was transmitted
in July, in the lead-up to the verdict and what will be harped on as we
draw closer to Nov. 5, is the mantra of “outside agitators.”
In the lead-up to the verdict on July 8, 2010, a discourse was
whipped up by the police and city officials and parroted non-stop by the
media and non-profits who carry their water – that of “outside
agitators.” The story went that crews of white anarchists from outside
the city were going to dupe Oakland residents into violence and that any
violence that came out of the verdict would be white-led.
This “outside agitators” frame may sound familiar to you. It has its
origins in the Jim Crow South. Back then, the white power structure
referred to civil rights organizers as outside agitators coming to the
South to disturb the supposed “peace.” Leave it to the city and the
non-profits to be brazen enough to harken obvious parallels with their
white supremacist predecessors.
Aside from the lineage of the phrase is the condescending nature of
the argument. Implying that people of color can’t lead themselves or
that forays into the territory of reciprocal violence are somehow the
invention of the white man is not an aberration for politicians or these
non-profits who patronize the people of Oakland daily.
The whole structure of the city, which this coalition of politicians,
police, media and non-profits seeks to maintain, tells ordinary
Oaklanders, in myriad ways, that they cannot and should not have a say
in what happens in their communities or to their kids. The broken
windows and the looted stores smashed the illusion that Oakland wasn’t
enraged, the burning dumpsters and the blankets of graffiti resounded
the fact that Oaklanders will have their say, not just in the case of
Oscar Grant, but in building a different social order where mass
incarceration and police executions are a thing of the past.
The outside agitators idea is also premised on the idea that there is
one unified Oakland, an Oakland that is just going to ignore one of the
gravest discrete injustices in recent history at that. As with any
city, there are two Oaklands: one of the upper-middle class and one of
the working class and lumpen.
Oaklanders
will have their say, not just in the case of Oscar Grant, but in
building a different social order where mass incarceration and police
executions are a thing of the past.
The politicians, media and non-profits would have us believe
Oaklanders all share the same interests and values. The same people
gentrifying North Oakland and Fruitvale, using overtly racist gang
injunctions to hasten the process, are some of the loudest out there
hollering about “our Oakland” and “outside agitators.”
Oakland is, as Malcolm X used to say, a racial powder keg. A city
with such stark inequality and social exclusion as Oakland is far from
unified. The above-mentioned coalition is hell bent on dampening that
powder keg, on trying to gloss over the very deep contradictions of race
and class that define life in this city.
Aside from the origins of the term, and beyond the patronizing
middle-class con artistry of those who echo it, is the obvious attempt
to erase the history of Oakland and the various histories of Black and
Brown struggle in this city. Everyone knows there is a living history of
struggle against racial oppression that has taken place in Oakland.
The unfulfilled vision of the Black Panther Party exists in the minds
of tens of thousands of Oaklanders. You need to look no further than to
former Panthers active in the Justice for Oscar Grant movement and to
the younger people versed in their history and politics to see the true
lineage of Oakland, apart from the picture the currently powerful like
to paint. Militance and opposition to police violence are not being
imported into Oakland; they are embedded in its culture and politics and
can be traced back generations.
The fact that most police live in the suburbs and most protesters,
including a large cross-section of anarchists, live in Oakland is
another point not lost on those in the movement. I suggest a peoples’
poll to identify who the real outside agitators are. On the one hand, we
have anarchists who are for racial and economic justice for the people
of Oakland – and are willing to fight for it – and on the other we have
police and the politicians along with the corporate press and the
non-profits that do their PR work who do their best to maintain the
existing order.
Militance
and opposition to police violence are not being imported into Oakland;
they are embedded in its culture and politics and can be traced back
generations.
Furthermore, the Oscar Grant case and the issue of police violence is
bigger than Oakland. Oscar didn’t live in Oakland and police violence
is everywhere. The BART stretches all over the Bay Area. There isn’t a
zip code limit on protesting against an injustice.
All of the facets of this discourse serve to stifle dissent and
attempt to divide people of color from white anti-racists. By parroting
this discourse some non-profits are seeking to white-wash Oakland’s
vibrant history of resistance.
The currently powerful and members of the non-profit sector who seek
to take their place are attempting to draw stark lines and race-bait the
white anti-racists in the movement while treating people of color in
Oakland like children. The non-profits, many of whom have been working
in conjunction with the Oakland police over the past two years and the
official media will read off of their police cue cards one more time in
the next two weeks and tell the people that resistance is for whiteboys
and that justice has been served.
I believe that clear lines are being drawn, but not ones based on the
values or ideas of those who recycle white-supremacist tropes of the
Jim Crow era. Those who seek to stifle dissent with false moralism and
convenient notions of unity are apologists for police murder at the end
of the day.
The same ruling class of Oakland that robs the working people of the
city and siphons millions from education to pay an occupying army a
six-figure income wants to start a polarizing debate? Bring it.
Who makes those budget decisions that just write off generation after
generation of poor youth of color? Who hassles and locks up people
every day and murders innocent kids on a regular basis before driving
their SUV back to some big suburban house?
Who has been running long tear jerking stories about the poor,
unfortunate Johannes Mehserle? Whose solution to the problem of police
violence revolves around electing “better politicians” like themselves?
The people of Oakland are smarter than these politicians, police
officials, media outlets and aspiring politicians from the non-profit
sector have imagined them to be, and when they get organized they are a
lot more powerful than these apologists for police violence have ever
given them credit for. The process of weeding the real “outside
agitators” out of Oakland is long overdue. And it has just begun.
Berkeley writer Mike King, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
Sociology at the University California, Santa Cruz, can be reached at mking@ucsc.edu.