cineSOURCE magazine

Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis
by Doniphan Blair

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Oakland police carefully count the 73 rounds discharged on October 15th, 2021, right behind author Doniphan Blair's building in West Oakland. photo: D. Blair

Jump to Part II here

ON OCTOBER 20TH, SHORTLY AFTER
sunset, I was at my desk in West Oakland, California, when I heard that telltale, deep-throated sound—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—six shots, very loud, in front of my building, or so it seemed.

I crept to my window. No yelling or tires screeching, traffic passing normally. I called the police, although some of my Oakland friends say never do that, due to the Oakland Police Department’s long record of abuse, corruption and murder. After two busy signals, I got through.

I went into my hallway. A young Chinese woman, who moved into the building last year and goes by Jasmine, since she thinks no one can pronounce "Mengjiao," her Chinese name, and a friend were coming up the stairs, chatting. Had they heard shots? “No, we just parked and must have missed them.” Did they know about lying down when they hear shots nearby? “Yes, of course,” Jasmine said, laughing.

It turned out Rashad Brinson, a 28-year-old African American man, had been murdered in front of our corner liquor store. That makes him at least the twelfth person killed there in my 32 years living here. Brinson was "unhoused," i.e. homeless, so he didn’t get the traditional street memorial with flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, and tea candles spelling out his name, like most young Black murder victims in Oakland. But at least we have his name.

Brinson was killed in a drive-by shooting for no apparent reason, it turned out, which surprised me, since I assumed he was a casualty of a turf war over the crack corner a block away. Indeed, less than a week earlier, on October 15th, that corner was hit with a military-style assault in broad daylight, although no one was actually hit.

My space is on the far side of the building and I was in a storage room, so I didn’t hear the 73-round barrage fired right behind our parking lot, which must have sounded like a war. About an hour later, however, I did notice the cops had closed all three west-bound lanes of West Grand Avenue, which runs along the side of my building. A bit rich, I thought, until I got closer and met another new neighbor, an African American man named Jermaine, who saw the entire incident from our loading dock.

A car pulled up and out stepped a 20-something African American man with an assault rifle and a few teenagers with pistols, who seemed scared, Jermaine said. They went to the corner and started firing toward the crack corner a block away, hitting mostly cars, including one belonging to Jermaine. He waited over two hours, while the cops marked where those 73 shells landed, to see if they wanted his eyewitness account. They didn’t. It is no longer unusual for shootings in Oakland to involve dozens or hundreds of rounds.

A street memorial for a young man killed around June 25th, 2022, in DeFremery Park, where the Black Panthers used to gather. photo: D. Blair

Oakland is not unique. Murders leapt up across America during the pandemic, 30% on average, although that figure is 47% in Oakland since the prior year the city had an extra low murder rate. Nevertheless, if we look at Albuquerque, Nashville and Detroit, three cities slightly larger than Oakland, which have tiny, medium and large Black populations, respectively, we see that Oakland’s 2019-21 per capita murders are similar to Albuquerque’s and Nashville’s and about one third of Detroit’s. But neither Albuquerque, Nashville nor Detroit is located on the prestigious San Francisco Bay.

The killing increase is obviously due to pandemic-driven poverty, isolation and depression, which also added to the suicide rate, and the ability to move around masked. But there are many other factors, like Trump’s machismo and rejection of rule of law. Although African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, some Black men support Trump; their numbers increased about 6% from 2016 to 2020 (see BBC report); and they included figures like superstar rapper Kanye West.

Five days after those kids bullet-sprayed my street, there was a shootout at a gas station about a mile away, also in broad daylight (1 pm, October 20). It killed Desoni Gardner, also known as “Li’l Theze,” since the 20-year-old from Vallejo, 25 miles away, was a rapper. He was also African American.

Gardner’s crew wounded the man who shot him, Ersie Joyner, a retired captain in the Oakland Police Department, also African American. The station’s security cameras showed them rifling Joyner’s pockets, making it a robbery until Joyner whipped out his gun. But one of my Oakland friends thought it might have been a vendetta against a dirty cop.

Four months earlier, on June 25th, a young man was murdered on that same street behind my building, due to an altercation between a father and his baby momma’s current boyfriend, according to my neighbors who heard it. The dispute involved a child and someone getting in or out of a car, they said, although they were unsure of who murdered whom. My neighbor Hannah, an emergency room doctor and white, heard the shouting and shots and ran down to see if there was anything she could do. There wasn’t.

Within a day or two of that murder, a young man was killed six blocks away on the basketball court in DeFremery Park, where the Black Panther Party used to hold rallies. The Panthers started in West Oakland in 1966. The closest court to my building, I have been playing there for three decades almost without incident. Going to shoot around a few days later, I was surprised to see a street memorial courtside, although the candles were scattered by then, and I couldn’t make out the name. I called the OPD to see if they knew the names of those two young men. They didn’t.

Six months earlier, in January, four miles from me in East Oakland, Dinyal New lost both her teenage sons, Lee Weathersby (13) and Lamar Broussard (19), within three weeks of each other. Horrific tragedies by any measure, they were especially egregious since there was no apparent motive for either murder. There were no arrests, since community members are reluctant to “come forward,” i.e. snitch, and murders are hard to solve without motives or eyewitnesses, even by the best-funded police departments. Lee and Lamar did get street memorials, however, as part of the rituals enacted by the kids, families and communities to address the trauma of losing so many, so young.

Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who took over at the beginning of the crisis in 2021, is from West Oakland. photo: courtesy Oaklandside

It’s not just young men. On January 22nd, the house of LeShawn Buffin, a 52-year-old grandmother, was bullet sprayed for no reason. She died. On October 6th, the same thing happened to the car of a man who got into an argument with another motorist. His 15-year-old niece died. On November 8th, the passengers of two cars were having a firefight as they hurtled down Interstate 880 in Oakland and accidentally hit an Asian-American toddler. He died.

Many of Oakland’s young men are extremely angry, obviously. Not mature enough to control their rage, minor disputes often trigger major arguments, which easily escalate into shootings, since so many are packing guns. Sure, they are casually taking a life and throwing away their own, if arrested and convicted, but they are desperate for what the killings provide: elevated status and self-expression. It gives voice to their own immense trauma. In this way, the inner-city killings parallel America’s increasingly frequent mass shootings, although those are perpetrated almost exclusively by angry white men.

“It’s like a war zone,” said Oakland’s Deputy Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong at LeShawn Buffin’s funeral, according to the San Francisco Chronicle article of February 2nd. “We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of high-powered firearms.” The killings don’t follow identifiable trends, Armstrong said, in terms of gang violence or victims’ race or age, which is another frightening new national trend.

Random killing also increased in Albuquerque, which has a 3% African American population, ruling out that subgroup’s cultural factors. The randomness appears to be driven by the chaos of the pandemic and Trumpian times, plus the new availability of “ghost guns.” Assembled at home and with no serial numbers, ghost guns are impossible to trace.

“She was a loving mother to her daughters and grandchildren,” said Armstrong, also African American, who was a family friend of Buffin and called her his “god sister.” “She was a caring person in the community, who would open her home to help anyone. She will be truly missed.”

Armstrong was born and raised in West Oakland, where he lost a brother to gun violence. He attended McClymonds High School, six blocks from my building, and asked to be sworn in there, a nice nod to our hood, when he was appointed chief of police, shortly after Buffin’s funeral.

Armstrong has had a stellar career since joining the OPD in 1999, both as an officer and advocate of progressive policing. An early participant in Ceasefire, Oakland’s highly innovative violence intervention program, he led the Stop Data Collection Project, which cut police stops of African Americans by over half, and has participated in numerous national programs and classes, and taught some himself.

Chief LeRonne Armstrong and his predecessor, Anne Kirkpatrick, who came to Oakland in 2017 from heading Spokane's police force. photo: unknown

On April 8th, 2021, Chief Armstrong was the only law enforcement official invited to Washington D.C., for the announcement of new executive orders on gun control, where he met with President Biden. Armstrong succeeded the three-year-tenure of Anne Kirkpatrick, who headed the Spokane, Washington, police department but was way out of her league in Oakland—for perfectly understandable reasons, not merely because she is a woman and white.

“It’s just overwhelming,” said Guillermo Cespedes, the head of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, who has a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, according to the same SF Chronicle article. Cespedes was an anti-gang activist and city official with that portfolio in Los Angeles, which has many gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the vicious El Salvadorian super-gang. “These have been the most difficult conditions I have ever worked under.”

For over a year, Oakland residents have been hearing—if not seeing, if they don’t live in the hood—their city descend into chaos: a lot more sirens, shots and helicopters. There were other indicators: stores not stocking shelves due to shoplifting, people running red lights, the respected 170-year-old Mills College, which borders on a tough hood, announcing it would close (it will continue in diminished capacity under Northeastern University, Boston), and increased attacks on Asians.

For comic relief, Oakland’s entire school board was forced to resign after some of its members bitched out parents for pleading with them to open the schools, saying, “Parents wanted their babysitters back” and “more time to smoke cannabis.”

Most Oaklanders see their city is in distress, although many are reluctant to discuss it. Why bring each other down with useless complaining? And the threat is comparatively small if you are white or if you don’t run with drug dealers or argue with road-ragers. To add insult to injury, you never know where people stand on the intricate issues involved, meaning a discussion can easily slip into politically-incorrect territory.

On a few occasions, I have been criticized for opining on the affairs of my hood because I am white. Skin color, speech and other cultural attributes do form large parts of our first impressions of each other, but to privilege them above the overall relationship or our ethics or insights, or to value racial categories and histories more than shared humanity and equality is a big mistake, I feel.

I learned this philosophy from my neighbors growing up in New York City across the street from Grant Houses, one of the tougher projects in Harlem, and playing in the Harlem Little League, during the riots of the summer of 1964, and in the Pop Warner football league, where I was the only white kid. I have also called West Oakland home for almost half my life, which provided me some unique experiences: mostly fun, a few harrowing, many revealing.

Politically correct self-censorship proved problematic when Trump’s China-insulting and race-baiting helped trigger unprecedented attacks on Asians. Residents of Oakland’s large Chinatown endured a rash of robberies, beatings and a few murders.

A graffito in praise of Molotov cocktails by a member of Oakland's large anarchist community. photo: D. Blair

In July 2020, a 32-year-old Vietnamese-American man, Quoc Tran, was shot in neighboring “Vietnamtown” when his driving annoyed a handsome, 25-year-old Oaklander with a long rap sheet. Tran died from his injuries 16 months later. In March 2021, Pak Ho, a 75-year-old man originally from Hong Kong, died two days after being shoved down during a robbery by a man whose arrest record indicated he targeted elderly Asians.

Significantly stranger, Lai Dang, a 58-year-old man of Chinese heritage, was murdered in cold blood seven blocks from my house in broad daylight on January 11th, 2021, for no apparent reason. Surveillance videos and witnesses indicate a father and son were driving through West Oakland, stopped to urinate, spotted Dang, shot at him, ran him down and killed him—open season on Asians. They were arrested four days later in Tracy, 50 miles from Oakland, and held without bail.

That the anti-Asian assailants were almost entirely African American men was usually omitted from news reports or statements by representatives of the Asian community. Excluding racial descriptors is an understandable attempt to limit implicit bias or the fear some Asians have of African Americans, while allowing Asian spokespeople to maintain people-of-color solidarity. But it puts potential victims at a disadvantage doing threat assessments; everyone was already talking about the races of the individuals involved; and to pretend that is not a relevant fact is a fantasy. Some of the attackers also appear to have mental health issues.

Along with discussions about inadequate health care, institutional racism, endemic poverty, and pandemic-driven job loss and school-dropout rates, we need to broach the subject of Black Lives Matter. Considered the biggest activist movement in American history, Black Lives Matter helped inspire fantastic changes in corporate, media and overall culture, in America and around the world. In Oakland, many residents readily adopted its tenets, joined marches and posted BLM signs on their properties or vehicles. But there were also negative repercussions: reduced police services, the partial destruction of downtown, increased tribalism.

Focusing on racial justice issues, without fortifying it with democratic successes, in a mixed and egalitarian community like Oakland, pushes people to tribe up and displace their grievances onto the “other.” A problematic position in general, this is more dangerous in Trumpian times, given the racialized fearmongering of Trump and many Republicans. Moreover, once othering is established as a practice, it can be applied to internal divisions.

Othering people from different hoods, gangs, races and social classes is one factor fomenting Oakland’s murder spree. Another is: after a prosperous period diminished the need for gangsterism, a new generation of thugs is taking the opportunity to accrue power. Throw in political upheaval, which put the police on their back foot and reduced morale and leg work along with funding. Last but not least, a scofflaw spirit is sweeping America, from ex-president Trump on down.

“If multiculturalism can’t work in Oakland, with so many activists and artists of all races and mixed races, as well as the immense number of social services and political organizations, what hope is there?” I’ve heard a few Oaklanders say, or something like that. Indeed, Oakland has to take a leadership position in this regard, given it is one of the most racially-mixed cities on the planet, with a 29% Black, 27% white, and 21% Latinx population, according to the 2020 census. In addition to its plethora of talent, Oakland is comparatively wealthy.

Illegal dumping in front of Stay Gold Delicatessen, one of West Oakland's best as well as few beer/sandwich shops. photo: D. Blair

The 16% of Oaklanders who are Asian are disadvantaged by their large number of recent arrivals and English-limited elderly, and their lack of thugs or martial artists, who could help with community defense. Ad hoc accompaniment of old people shopping and patrols soon began, but Chief Armstrong asked them not to arm—one man was arrested for brandishing a weapon at attackers—and said the OPD could provide protection. Many Asians fear it can’t, however, and that “Oakland has become the wild West.”

Local newspapers with limited budgets, like The Oakland Post or The East Bay Times, were slow to cover Oakland’s civic collapse, although the latter has done excellent longform reporting on the OPD, as has Berkeley’s left-centric Pacifica Radio station, KPFA. Colorful crime stories out of Oakland have long made Bay Area or national news but the new, unprecedented levels were not emphasized until recently. When I began mentioning the rash of murders around my building, a few friends dismissed it as typical—“Oakland bats last against gentrifiers,” as one put it—but some longtime neighbors said it is the worst they have ever seen.

In November, Rebecca Kaplan, a liberal council person and Oakland’s vice mayor, was talking up her initiative to cleanup illegal garbage dumping, which is a notorious blight across West Oakland. Then she moved on to the huge homeless crisis. While both are terrible, they hardly compare to the slaughter, although all three can be connected through the “Broken Windows Theory.”

Some progressive pundits and friends of mine blame the OPD for not doing enough to investigate crime in the hood, despite the 10% budget cuts, and for retaining bad officers. In fact, the OPD remains under the Federal supervision imposed in 2012, as part of the 2003 trial of a gang of corrupt cops. In 2016, the department was rocked by another massive scandal, when over a dozen officers were found exploiting a young, woman-of-color sex worker. That precipitated three police chiefs in one week.

Be that as it may, the primary person addressing Oakland’s killing crisis is Chief Armstrong, who was opening press conferences at the end of 2021 with over two minutes of silence, one second for each lost Oaklander. “We can be vocal about certain things, but I just don't understand why this community cannot be vocal about 100 lives lost," Armstrong said on September 21st, on the occasion of Oakland’s 100th killing in nine months, almost as many as the entire previous year.

"We can scream and yell about anything the police department does wrong but, in this time, we can't speak up about what's plaguing all of us—and that's gun violence.”

On July 10th, between 60 and 200 people joined the OPD’s march, “Stand Up for a Safe Oakland,” around Lake Merritt, the large lake which serves as the town’s centerpiece and site of its intercommunal Sunday promenade. The small march ended up at a lake front park, which became Black Oakland’s weekend gathering spot and street fair during the lockdown. It was also where seven people were shot, one fatally, three weeks earlier during Juneteenth, the celebration of liberation from slavery, which President Biden declared a federal holiday that very day.

Also on July 10th and at the lake, the Anti-Police Terror Project had organized a car caravan and barbecue. Shouting ensued.

A family enjoys the weekend street fair favored by Black Oaklanders that emerged during the pandemic on Lake Merritt and featured minimal masking and social distancing. photo: D. Blair

Oaklanders responded to the anti-Asian violence with a 1000-strong, mostly-Asian showing at a park near Chinatown on February 13th, 2021. Black activists joined with their Asian counterparts, especially after the March 16th mass murder of six of Asian women and two others by a white man in Atlanta, Georgia. But Asian and Black activists broke over whether to support or defund the police.

It is not lost on the kids or gangbangers as well as Chief Armstrong or many Asians that in 2020 there were dozens of BLM marches, which attracted tens of thousands of people and crisscrossed Oakland, to protest the brutal police killing of George Floyd thousands of miles away but not for Lai Dang, the Chinese-American murdered near my house.

The root cause of inner-community violence is institutional racism, poverty and poor services for kids of color, which can’t be solved by additional police, according to proponents of BLM tenets. Indeed, Albuquerque, Nashville and Oakland have one officer for every 550 to 625 residents, while Detroit, where the murder rate is three times Oakland’s, has twice that, one cop per 300. Hence, we have to switch our policing, education and social work, according to defund-the-police supporters, and accept some collateral damage until it takes effect.

Oakland’s murder rate almost doubled in 2021, from its record low of 72 in 2019, a level only last seen from 1998 to 2001 or in the ‘70s, to 137. Although mortality peaked in 1992, with 165 killings, comparing the crack epidemic to today is like contrasting apples and oranges, given Oakland’s recent renaissance. The 2010s were probably the city’s most prosperous decade since the ‘40s, including for many low-income locals—if they weren't displaced by gentrification, of course.

Along with pushing up rents and homelessness, gentrification brought hundreds of new businesses, many of them restaurants, which provided jobs as well as places to get a decent bite. There were also scores of new music venues and art galleries, welcome outlets for local artists, including those driven here by the much higher rents in San Francisco, which has been occupied by overpaid techies. The first Friday art crawl, started in 2006 by the Art Murmur gallery association, blew up over five years from a few hundred to over 20,000 attendees. The majority were Oaklanders enjoying each other’s company, but the bridge and tunnel crowd’s copious eating and drinking, if not art buying, turned it into a cash bonanza.

Gentrifiers can be disgusting and destructive, of course. Unscrupulous house-flippers preyed on impoverished families. High rents exacerbated the homeless crisis. Foodies drove up taco truck prices. Black families were forced out to distant suburbs, like Tracy or Vallejo, where they sometimes felt like foreigners. I had to bitch out white new home owners, on a couple of occasions, for whining about petty thievery which bordered on racism. Didn’t they look around before plunking down a half a million dollars, say, for their house?

Other times, it’s tone deafness. Two blocks from me, in the opposite direction from the crack corner, is a brewery and pub called Ghost Town after the nearby neighborhood. Alas, Ghost Town didn’t earn its moniker by having a quaint, old graveyard (see cineSOURCE interview with a local activist).

Oakland hasn’t become a hot art market, except for a couple established galleries, like the nationally-known Creative Growth, which features artists with developmental disabilities. But the galleries often have work by, and a few are run by, people of color. Ditto the scores of vendors with tables, booths or trucks that feature everything from art and handicrafts to fashion and food. There are also performers doing music, magic, juggling or “fire arts,” since Oakland is home to many organizers and enthusiasts of the world-famous desert festival, Burning Man.

Oakland's famous First Friday art crawl/street fair, which drew a diverse crowd of 20,000 before the pandemic, restarted in October, 2021. photo: D. Blair

A buddy of mine from art school, who is also a West Oakland neighbor, Richard Felix (white/Jewish), sets up large canvases and pots of paint, which attract Black middle schoolers from Ghost Town, only a few blocks away, alongside white suburbanites and tattooed-piercers. Indeed, those six blocks of Telegraph Avenue had become a fantastic monthly carnival, impressing even seasoned world travelers, until the pandemic shut it down.

In the last decade, West Oakland became imminently livable. Once a food desert, it now has Mandela Foods, a Black-owned, collectively-run, organic grocery store in its 12th year, haute cuisine like Korean fusion or Middle Eastern, or the unfortunately-named but airy and pleasant Ghost Town Brewing.

Oakland also has a burgeoning film scene, which I tried to cover and support in this magazine, cineSOURCE, which I started with some friends in 2008.

After Oakland’s decade-long boom, I assumed it could endure the pandemic. I was inspired when I walked around Lake Merritt on March 26th, 2020, one week after the statewide shelter-in-place order was issued, which I covered in a cineSOURCE article, "Oakland in the Time of Corona". My socially-distanced fellow strollers were Black, white, brown and even Asian, which is not always the case; they were straight and LGTBQ, bolstered by Oakland’s large lesbian community; some were even bridge-and-tunnelers. Surely, we were creative, resilient and tolerant enough to handle Covid-19, I thought. Alas, the Oakland promenade didn’t include a few critical groups.

Although the vast majority of Oaklanders masked up, helped their neighbors and eventually got vaccinated, the economic shutdown and switch to online teaching hit poor Black kids especially hard, feelings aggravated by political upheaval. As amazing as BLM’s achievements have been in white-dominated towns, industries or police departments, the combination of illness, poverty, protest and reduced police services proved catastrophic for Oakland.

Protests have been popular in Oakland since 1946, when a city-wide strike by 146 different unions, against discriminatory hiring of African Americans, shut the city down. By nightfall, however, it had become a party, with union officials getting bars to put their jukeboxes on the street, where interracial dancing ensued.

Oakland was long been known for its adventurous, artistic and activist working-class types, typified by its premiere native son, author and socialist Jack London. During the Depression and war, it attracted poor Blacks from Texas and Louisiana and poor whites from Oklahoma, and vice versa. A rugged and less-educated population, that immigration fed the Black Panthers, on one hand, and the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, also based in Oakland, and the police force, on the other.

In the ‘60s, there were demonstrations against the draft and for Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Panthers, who was from West Oakland and convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing a cop a mile from my house. More recently there were large protests against the murder of Oscar Grant by a BART (subway) cop, in 2009, and during the Oakland Occupy, two years later. In addition to outraged activists and sympathetic liberals, recent demonstrations have attracted rowdy young men who are Black, and sometimes associated with gangs, or white, and sometimes associated with Black Bloc, an anarchist movement, or suburban hooligans.

After one night of looting, on May 29, 2020, the dozens of other Oakland marches protesting George Floyd's killing were peaceful, even festive. photo: D. Blair

On May 29th, during Oakland’s first march protesting George Floyd’s murder, those two male cohorts and a smattering of women broke hundreds of windows and looted at least a hundred stores across downtown Oakland and in neighboring Emeryville, where the malls have more goodies. One of my radical friends was almost gleeful as she insisted it was a legitimate expression of rage, a minor inconvenience for shoppers, and an insurance write-off for stores. But the looters also broke into small, Black-owned businesses, according to my research and an article cowritten by my friend Aqueila M. Lewis-Ross for Oakland Voices, a respected site.

Some marchers tried to stop the looters, I was told by the Palestinian-American owner of The Twilight Zone, a large smoke shop on Broadway, Oakland’s main march route, who had over $70,000 of glass cases and inventory smashed. Some marchers also came back the next day to help him clean up, he said.

Unfortunately, a year and half later, downtown Oakland, which the city has been struggling to revive for 30 years, remains partially boarded up. Those boards are covered with magnificent murals by local artists, which are sometimes toured by tourists, but many businesses are not coming back; some people have moved out; and that one night of destruction—almost all the other dozens of marches were completely peaceful—ended some much-needed jobs.

One Black Lives Matter march I attended was organized by the Oakland Black Officers Association, then headed by Armstrong. It consisted almost entirely of people of color, in contrast to most of Oakland’s other BLM marches, which were often largely white, and it had elegantly-dressed women in front belting out gospel. Armstrong didn’t speak at the central police station on 7th and Broadway, where the marches often ended, but the officers who spoke did an artful job of explaining their competing concerns.

Alas, neither they nor most other BLM spokespeople seemed to find the sweet spot between aggressive activism and sophisticated civil society development, an error in the time of Trump, I believe. Indeed, the general discourse of the Black Lives Matter movement was suffused with talk of white people in blanket terms, without the balancing spirit of equality and goodwill established by King and Obama as well as Lincoln and Jefferson.

All humans are created equal; judge not by color of skin but content of character; there are not two Americas. In addition, defining people through DNA is a slippery slope; shame is not a stable motivator; and multiculturalism is about accepting people from groups you don’t like, not just allies.

“All Lives Matter” is considered racist for good reason. Who is to tell anyone what to call themselves? The BLM organization started in 2012, long before the national movement. And “All Lives Matter” was adopted by racists in a mimic-and-ridicule game.

But, of course, all lives do matter. And that would have been a better name for the movement by virtue of its emphasis, right in the name, on building a cooperative community instead of protecting one tribe. All lives matter would have better modeled equality, in contrast to fetishizing privilege or adjudicating racism. If organized by African Americans, it would have implicitly conveyed the message “Stop murdering Black people” and tacitly included Black-on-Black violence.

Most BLM activists do not mention, let alone emphasize, Black-on-Black violence, as far as I know. They seem to feel that broaching the subject in the same breath as state violence would be a copout, whataboutism or straight up racism. It is certainly true that everyone fights with their family and neighbors more than strangers, and those commonplace crimes need increased investigation and abatement by the police and community.

Speakers from a BLM march of Black police officers and their families, in front of the Oakland Police Department's central station. photo: D. Blair

Nevertheless, Black-on-Black violence does kill massively more people than the police. And it has played a major role in traumatizing both African Americans, who have lost a horrific number of family and friends per capita, and police of all races, who fear a well-armed, trigger-happy citizenry. In 2009, an African American parolee, trying to evade arrest and automatic return to prison, killed four officers within as many hours in East Oakland, surely shocking even the most enlightened cops.

The longstanding conflict between police and African Americans is a direct result of slavery, systemic racism and endemic poverty, but it is often aggravated to an extreme by the need of both parties to obtain respect in the moment of confrontation. While policing is based on respect, so is the self-esteem of many men, and some women, who have little else.

Growing up as a white kid in Harlem, I have been mugged over a dozen times. Hitchhiking as a hippie through thousands of miles of redneck country, I was stopped by cops dozens of times and jailed a few. Along the way, I learned to respect the powerful players, be they muggers, cops, gangsters, border guards, convicts or rednecks, while maintaining a semblance of dignity. Groveling invites abuse from deranged machos of any profession or race.

Even a minor gesture can escalate an average traffic stop or thug encounter into suicide by cop or mugger. If we research the interactions leading to cop killings, I think we will often find some trigger of disrespect. Indeed, that is also what leads to most Black-on-Black murders. Yes, American laws and culture entitle us to speak our minds, but it is ill-advised to play disrespect chicken with deranged machos.

The flats of Oakland were thought to be pretty tough in the 1970s, when I was living in hippie San Francisco. But I knew and visited a couple there, an enormous, ripped Black guy named Wetback, who was from a California border town, favored red bandana headbands and had done time—although he didn’t mention it much and our chats were more about Buddhism, fitness and weed—and his young, white girlfriend, Donna, the daughter of a police officer. They seemed to accord both sides respect, while enjoying the already-developing, hipper side of Oakland.

If you treat people with basic respect, typified on the street by a glance and nod in passing, they will often return the courtesy. When confronted by thugs or muggers, if you honor them with warrior status, while remaining calm and respectful, as difficult as that might be, you usually get a pass. If not, just hand them your wallet, while casually asking for a few bucks back to get home or buy milk. One time, I stepped into my corner liquor store on a Saturday at midnight, a massive mistake, I realized upon seeing it was full of severe-looking Black men. When one said loudly, “How’s it going?” I responded at a similar volume, “Slick as a dick,” and won a wry smile from him and some of his crew.

Oakland did have a corrupt white mayor in the early ‘60s, John Houlihan. A nationally-known expert on urban issues and a liberal Republican, he presided over the construction of the Oakland Museum and other major projects but had to resign during his second term for embezzling. He served two years in prison.

Oakland had a large Ku Klux Klan chapter until 1924, and racist sympathizers long after. In the ‘60s, the OPD was only 2% Black, notoriously harsh, and its officers often tormented and sometimes killed men of color, which inspired the formation of the Black Panthers in 1966.

Huey Newton deduced his innovative tactic of police monitoring in the Merritt College law class of Edwin Meese, eventually Reagan’s Attorney General, no less. It consisted of following patrol cars, observing their stops at a legal distance, advising detainees of their rights, and standing by with legal long guns, in case problems arose. Until California repealed open-carry a year later, neither side fired a single shot. Respect.

BLM marchers listen to speakers at an amphitheater on the edge of Lake Merritt, Oakland lovely' centerpiece and intercommunal promenade. photo: D. Blair

There was a cabal of corrupt cops, the Riders, which preyed for years on West Oaklanders. After I moved here in 1989, I often saw Black men face-down and spread-eagle on the pavement during cop stops. As part of the OPD’s 2003 settlement for the Riders’ abuses against 119 plaintiffs, who received almost $11 million total, it was put under federal management.

Despite these correctives, some of my Oakland friends suspect there are still bad cops, that the court-appointed monitor is benefiting somehow, or that the nine-citizen police commission, which was established in 2016 and can discipline officers, direct policy or sack a chief, is still mired in Oakland’s old patronage political system.

On the other hand, Oakland is in Northern California, a center of progressive politics, environmental beauty and immense wealth. In addition to state assistance, Oakland has an enormous number of not-for-profits, faith-based social services, art organizations and political-activist groups. Although Oakland is the most income polarized of any Bay Area city, with a substantial number of hill dwellers in large houses with bay views, they often help with the philanthropies.

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Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Jan 07, 2022 - 01:32 AM