Kirin Agustin Rajagopalan
Kirin Agustin Rajagopalan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cultural Studies graduate group at UC Davis. An accomplished Ethnic Studies educator, he works as a Teaching Assistant at UCD, as well as an occasional adjunct lecturer at SFSU, CSU Sacramento, and Holy Names University. Additionally, he also has deep experience working with youth in both the Mission District and central Alameda County, experiences which ground his academic and political commitments. An abolitionist organizer in Oakland, he has been involved in anti-policing projects as well as the current campaign to close the jail at 850 Bryant St. His research focus is centered on understanding the relationship between land, racialized dispossession, and carcerality within larger discussions of colonialism and racial capitalism. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from UCSC, an M.A. in Ethnic Studies at SFSU, and is committed to working for a future free from capital, prisonsettlers, and the state.”
From Below and to the East:
Notes on Crisis, Dispossession, and Containment in East Oakland’s Flatlands
“History is made up of moments, situations, events that synthesize contradictions that until then led their own lives. The contradictions do not lose their specificity but they meet, interpenetrate.”
–Roland Simon, Théorie Communiste
“I rocked house parties on 98th
Even rocked in the 6-9 ‘ville
Might find me on the mic at “Hot Lips” house
Or at the East Bay Dragon’s Spot
All the 8-5 boys with their hands in the air
Screaming “Too $hort just don’t stop!’
Like Arroyo Park, like Plymouth Rock
Birch Street and Sunnyside
Like Sobrante Park and Brookfield
East Oakland, yeah, that’s right.”
-Too $hort, “I Ain’t Trippin’
Eastward, beyond the shadow of Oakland’s trendy, rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods to the North and West, below I-580 and the wealthy enclaves of the Oakland Hills lies East Oakland’s flatlands. A seemingly endless expanse of sloping streets and uneven geographies, the region’s built environment comprises insular neighborhoods made up of modest single family homes, small apartment buildings, schools, churches, and businesses. Along its main East-West arteries of San Leandro Street, International Boulevard/E14th St, Bancroft Avenue, and Macarthur Boulevard, the telltale signs of decades of deindustrialization, organized abandonment, and chronic crisis become difficult to ignore: boarded up buildings, trash strewn on the streets and sidewalks, the omnipresent blue-and-red flashes of police cruisers, scattered encampments of displaced peoples always under threat, sewage systems that back up every time it rains.
Since at least the 1970s East Oakland has gained a certain ‘reputation,’ the kind of place that is rarely mentioned in the media except to report on depersonalized instances of spectacularized crime, poverty, and violence, cloaked in self-justifying rhetoric that naturalizes these conditions. Yet, the flatlands are more than just a physical place or geographical designation; it is a complex, uneven ‘project’ rife with contradictions that make unpacking and analyzing these narratives, discourses, and representations a difficult task. The politics of representation are often mobilized by politicians, police, non-profits, developers, business owners, and even everyday community members in ways that produce, fine tune, and reproduce these varied representations to serve their own ideological ends and material interests, while obscuring the very real fissures of class, property ownership, and political power that separate the discursive category of ‘hardworking, law-abiding, citizens’ from the ‘criminals.’ Particular geographies–often hyperlocal–become ‘marked’ as social problems through racialized discourses of criminality-to be managed and contained by militarized ‘community’ policing and paternalistic and insufficient social services.
Yet, mainstream representations of East Oakland do not neatly coincide with the fragmented and diverse ‘realities’ and everyday practices of survival, resistance, and insurgency. The flatlands have always resisted the various forms and scales of management and containment imposed upon it by the state and capital, through both direct political struggle as well as antipolitical rebellion in the realm of ‘culture,’ which in turn are often criminalized by the state and its proxies as deviance. The Deep East is a project, not a place, and this meaning is the site of intense contestation.
There has been much academic work on Oakland; however, the vast majority focuses on more general histories of development,[1] on political and social struggles,[2] Black movements and the Black Panther Party,[3] the Oakland Police Department,[4] on and youth criminalization,[5] with East Oakland rendered marginal to more general histories of the Town. McElroy and Werth (2019) urge that we “think from the Town,” and pivot away from dominant sociological and urban studies analysis of tech-based gentrification and displacement, to more particularly the role of the Prison Industrial Complex and other carceral processes of state violence. “The longue durées of Black and Indigenous dispossession” are inseparable from the racialized spatial politics of the flatlands.[6] Responding to this call and thinking and theorizing ‘from the East’ illuminates a grounded history of both racial violence and resistance, and the ways in which crisis, dispossession, and various scales of violence are spatialized in particular geographies and specific ‘problem places, while also helping us understand that conditions of subjugation are by no means complete or totalizing; the residents of the flatlands are active agents negotiating, subverting, refusing, and reproducing these conditions in the realm of daily life.
Indelibly marked by the post-1970s carceral spatialization of crisis and surplus, East Oakland’s flatlands also have been fundamentally shaped by its residents’ quotidian practices of resistance and insurgency. Spending any amount of time driving, biking, or walking around East Oakland’s neighborhoods paints a picture of a vibrant street life: Decrepit buildings made alive and vibrant again by taggers and muralists. The sounds of Bay Area hip hop, corridos, funk, banda, and gospel fill the air at all hours, punctuated by the screech of tires, roar of engines, the pop of fireworks, especially after the sun goes down. Groups of people waiting for the bus, hanging out playing dominoes, or engaged in any manner of hustles and survival work. Groups of kids taking ownership of their streets busting wheelies on beach cruisers, or dirt bikes and ATVs. East Oakland is very much alive, but even this realm of daily life is often stigmatized, criminalized, and managed by the multi-headed hydra of the state and capital.
In academic scholarship, it is far too easy to fall into seductive tropes of solely detailing conditions of immiseration; Yet, analyzing and theorizing as an individual scholar can be an important task, but is always a partial effort that tends to reinscribe the ‘terms of order’ of the dominant society rather than challenging their material and ideological basis. As Cedric Robinson reminds us, “the ideas, the structures, the organization of a movement, a social movement, comes from the collective. It does not come out of the individual.”[7] This is the radicalism that actually matters; the practices and ways of being that offer the potential of bringing a different world into being exist in the undercurrents of the daily life of peoples living under domination.
Writing of the broader restructuring of the Bay Area, urban planning scholar Alex Schafran notes that, “certain places are at the center of this mess for a reason, and that much can be learned from the highly specific geography of the crisis.”[8] The extensive historical, political, and geographical context crucial in pinpointing when and where this essay enters the conversation. Given the compounding social and economic crises that have indelibly shaped the geo-historical space that has come to be understood as the East Oakland flatlands, Hall’s conception of the conjuncture is profoundly instructive in shaping my methodological approach, as it turns our attention away from places/events as “things,” but rather as terrains of intense ideological and material contestation and struggle. I understand land as not just a place, but the confluence of the various forces, interests, histories and relationships that give rise to it, following Laura Pulido’s assessment that “relations between races are relations between places.”[9]
Rather than rehearsing spectacularized instances of violence–from police or otherwise–or romanticizing or decontextualizing what the state calls ‘crime,’ it is vital that critical scholarship takes a different route, one that can think and theorize from a particular place and its historical and contextual specificity. Through historicizing and contextualizing the relationship between carcerality, land, and dispossession, this kind of ‘study’ can orient us towards a critical analysis of our contemporary conjuncture; the confluence of events, factors, characterizations, and crises point to a deeper, enduring structure of racialized dispossessions, layers of violence written in the land itself through racial capitalism and carcerality. Beyond the voyeuristic ethnographic and journalistic lens, these modes of inquiry can serve to illuminate grounded abolitionist horizons, ethics, and analytics through which to resist the fragmentation of daily life under racial capitalism.
Undertaking a conjunctural and geo-historical analysis[10] of the coalescence of East Oakland’s flatlands as “the ghetto,” this essay is an imperfect, incomplete exercise in this sort of ‘study,’ ‘mapping’ carceral regimes and geographies in the flatlands and unpacking the relationship between racialized state violence, moral panics around criminality, conditions of organized abandonment and underdevelopment, and antipolitical insurgency, probing questions of how this all came to be. I hope to depart from analyses which take its ‘terms of order’ at face value, instead looking to challenge mainstream narratives, discourses, and representations that more often than not point towards various forms of policing and state management as the solution to East’ Oakland’s myriad issues. What follows is a bittersweet love letter of sorts, a collection of scattered thoughts seeking to both historicize East Oakland’s flatlands as a space of containment, and ‘remap’ the disjuncture between the specter of racialized criminality and the realities of survival and resistance in everyday life in the place.
Entering Oakland: Extraction, Dispossession, & Crisis
The largest region of Oakland and the most materially and culturally isolated, the flatlands of East Oakland have long been constituted as spaces of spectacularized racial criminality and poverty. A surplus place, for surplus people and surplus violence. In 2020, the Oakland Police Chief released a statement that bands of East Oakland youth “as young as 11” have been carrying out armed robberies and car jackings, naturalizing and officializing an always already racialized specter of youth criminality.[11] Space and place, then, are both racialized and racializing. Moral panics over Black and brown youth criminality in East Oakland are by no means a new phenomena; they instead draw on a much deeper archive of carceral logics and specters of racialized criminality. While its boundaries are subject to vigorous debate, the central/deep East Oakland flatlands are composed of a series of diverse neighborhoods spanning from–depending on who you ask–the ‘60s all the way to the border with San Leandro. Bounded by two major freeways (580 and 880), asthma and respiratory diseases occur at above average rates. The rates of foreclosures, pollution burden, COVID-19, life expectancy, police killings, and violence/harm are statistically higher than the city’s mean.[12] Due to its spatial isolation and physical distance from the more ‘desirable’ Northern and Western parts of the city, as well as the traditionally wealthier hills, the flatlands remain broadly working class, albeit rife with often under-analyzed racial and class tensions (more on this later).
Known as Huichin in Chochenyo Ohlone, the physical shape of the land has been contoured by alluvial sediments washed down from the forested Oakland hills by dozens of meandering streams. Centuries of colonial-capitalist development–from the Spanish to Mexican to US periods–has capped the now subterranean streams in concrete, enclosing them in tunnels and concrete ditches; the former wetlands and floodplains have dwindled to a fraction of their former size.[13] The flatlands sit on top of slick clay soil contaminated with lead and other heavy metals characteristic of urban and industrial expansion. During particularly rainy periods, rainwater seeps into standing pools in yards and potholed streets.
From its genesis, Oakland’s physical geography has been shaped by extraction, exploitation, and dispossession. As the San Francisco Bay Area’s industrial ‘second city,’ strategically located at the nexus of the Pacific Ocean and major land transport routes, Oakland developed as a transit and manufacturing hub throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, drawing thousands of migrants from the eastern seaboard, the south, Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Nearby to productive agricultural regions in the East/South Bay and San Joaquin Valley, a burgeoning economy of shipping, transport, canning, manufacturing, and slew of secondary and tertiary industries developed, especially around the port.[14]
From the expropriation of Ohlone lands by the Spanish and US conquest of California, dispossession has been a constant logic of the boom-and-bust of colonial-capitalist development in Oakland. The violent transformation of land-as-relation into land-as-property over this history has created a situation in which capital accumulation is realized through constant regimes of dispossession and redevelopment. On the reproduction of capital, Fredy Perlman writes that “anything which can be transformed into a marketable good is grist for Capital’s mill, whether it lies on the capitalist’s land or on the neighbor’s, whether it lies above ground or under, boats on the sea or crawls on its floor, whether it is confined to other continents or other planets.” and that “the production of new commodities, the “opening” of new markets, the creation of new workers, are not three separate activities; they are three aspects of the same activity.”[15] Together, these processes of dispossession and accumulation form a unity within the variegated totality of racial capitalist domination and the attendant landscapes of dispossession left in its wake.
Like other western cities, new migrants were quickly sorted into a dynamic and deeply ingrained racial hierarchy, with Protestant whites at the top, followed by European immigrants, with Mexicans, Chinese, and other racialized groups making up the largely invisibilized and criminalized bottom rungs of society. Immigrant groups were largely concentrated in densely populated West Oakland or the city’s rural and semi-rural lands.[16] Aggressive policing and criminalization of ‘problem’ groups–especially racialized newcomers–served to cohere a political economy shaped by the domination of Anglo property owners and emerging business elites. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, Oakland was transformed by waves of southern Black migrants, who entered into society profoundly stratified along lines of race, class, and religion. Drawing from a much deeper archive of struggle, Black migrants organized themselves and transformed local politics and social relations through labor organizing, anti-police brutality campaigns, and anti-segregation efforts.[17]
Oakland’s development has been deeply shaped by segregation, being divided geographically between the wealthy Oakland Hills, the slightly more diverse middle and upper middle class Lower Hills, and the historically working class flatlands. Mostly peripheral semi-rural and agricultural land until the early/mid 20th century, Oakland business leaders and politicians developed East Oakland’s flatlands as an idealized, middle-class ‘industrial garden,’[18] for the region’s burgeoning and upwardly mobile workforce.
Over several decades, mid-century development projects like urban redevelopment, interstate freeway expansion, the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system, functioned as engines of displacement. The dispossession of Black communities in Oakland through redevelopment has been fundamental to the reshaping of public space and the built environment along the lines of what George Lipsitz calls the white spatial imaginary. “Grounded in a long history of housing discrimination,” the white spatial imaginary has both deep cultural and social consequences in terms of both how spaces are organized, managed, and policed, as well as the ways that they are given meaning in the dominant consciousness.[19] The white spatial imaginary seeks to police and contain the boundaries of the ghetto, the reservation, the barrio. It is an idealization of ‘pure space,’ free from the contaminants of race and class.
While West Oakland was the heart of Oakland’s working-class Black community, a racially segregated East Oakland became linked with white worker’s aspirations for property ownership and class mobility. Yet, by the 1960s and 70s increasing numbers of working and middle class Black folks had made homes in the region, challenging racialized housing covenants and white vigilante violence. Confronted with capital flight and deindustrialization in Oakland, alongside racialized class anxieties, white East Oakland residents largely left the neighborhood for the whiter suburbs which disproportionately benefited from regional economic planning.[20] The social, economic and political crisis that spurred demographic and structural transformations is also the genesis of the contemporary Prison Industrial Complex.[21]
The close of the so-called ‘golden age of capitalism’ by the early 1970s in global capitalism brought with them a profound series of chronic crises that deeply reshaped Oakland’s political economy. While by the late 1970s Black power movements and grassroots organizing led to the formation of a new Black political regime in Oakland, a disparate coalition of white homeowners and realtors motivated by white resentment and property interests carried out a counterrevolution in California. In 1978 the California legislature passed Proposition 13, which broke with the previous labor-liberal coalition of the welfare state, slashing property taxes, greatly diminishing state funding.[22] For cities like Oakland who’s municipal budgets were already in crisis, this spelled ruthless cuts to social spending and an increasingly punitive form of statecraft as conditions in the flatlands continued to deteriorate, producing a condition that Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms organized abandonment, with dire consequences for nearly all aspects of daily life.[23]
Unemployment skyrocketed in the 1980s as Oakland’s industrial economy continued to shrink, a trend which occurred along racial lines. From 1981-1988 the city lost 12,000 manufacturing, transportations, communication, and utilities jobs. By 1992, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services designated every census tract in East Oakland “as medically underserved, based on the prevalence of poverty, infant mortality rates, and the shortage of primary-care physicians.”[24] La Paperson details how the restructuring of public education in the ‘ghetto’ produced new forms of dispossession, resulting in “the new institutionalization of failure through high stakes testing and exit exams, the drop-out rate for urban teachers, the bark and the bite of school closures, the state takeover of bankrupted school districts.”[25] For Paperson, this condition of dispossession experienced by youth and families in the flatlands amounts to what they terms ghetto colonialism. As evidenced by the recent struggles against school closures in Oakland, perhaps most seen most notably the 2021 grassroots occupation of Parker Elementary in Deep East Oakland by parents, students and community members–these forms of dispossession continue to disproportionately impact the flatlands.
This seemingly unending cycle of dispossession structures East Oakland’s flatlands as a space of dislocation. As Paperson argues, “the dislocatable are always subject to renewal,” leaving a wake of “obliterated communities, organizations, schools, people [who] are rarely important enough to leave more than a trace in official records.”[26] Indeed, particularly in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, evictions, foreclosures, and other forms of displacement underscore the centrality of dislocation in the lives of those who live in the margins of East Oakland. From 2010 and 2014, Oakland lost 4 percent of its Black population.[27] Between 2007 and 2011, over 10,000 homes were foreclosed, mostly concentrated in the flatlands of East and West Oakland. Schafran notes that “foreclosures in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt can partially be explained by macroregional economic forces – the rampant speculative urbanism and real-estate driven economy in one case, and the decline of the industrial economy in the other.”[28] Oakland sits at the juncture between both of these economic shifts. While the tech-based gentrification that has reshaped much of downtown, North, and West Oakland has been much slower in East Oakland, the centrality of displacement remains, and while foreclosure rates have declined, evictions have not.[29] From 1994 t0 2017, census tracts in deep east Oakland were subject to some of the highest concentrations of Unlawful Detainer evictions. This is by no means a new phenomena, but rather rests on longstanding racial formations and dispossessions that necessitate a deeper geo-historical interrogation into Oakland’s specificities.
Perhaps conditions of chronic dislocation have led to the reliance on mobility-as-resistance, as is evident in the region’s vibrant particularly oppositional sideshow and street culture. The refusal to be contained, despite the state’s best effort to manage, incarcerate, and contain the people who it deems as the source of social problems.
Containment & Rebellion
In April 2017, SFGate reported that “40-60 youth”–reported to be underage by BART spokespeople–boarded at the Coliseum BART station and “commandeered at least one train car,” robbing seven commuters, before “retreating from the station into the surrounding East Oakland neighborhood.”[30] As a sensationalized media spectacle, this story fit perfectly within the controlling images of the region within the white spatial imaginary: East Oakland, that boogeyman-like ‘no-man’s land’ riddled by crime and violence. Or so it would seem in the popular imagination; an imagination that is not independent of larger material, social, and ideological terrains. Here the juxtaposition between the ‘innocent’ passengers, and the depraved/lawless (presumably) racialized youth represents a historical public consensus shaped by ‘moral panics’ around crime.[31]
The flatlands then are a racially marked place whose representation is deeply shaped by an antiblack animus, which for Paperson, is also racially marking; extending the “classical analysis of the ghetto as black to signify a blackness beyond phenotype (i.e., the ghetto is not where black people live but where blackness is contained.)”[32] Paperson discusses how the SF chronicle characterized flatland violence as “the plague,” reflecting a “moral cartography overlaying discourses of pathology and contagion upon neighborhoods, and by easy inference, upon race.”[33] Within the racialized spatial dynamics of cities like Oakland, containment, then, has become a logic way through crisis is spatialized and managed, ultimately serving to (attempt to) stabilize the violent contradictions of racial capitalism. The boundaries of Black and white, colony and metropole, good citizen and deviant must be constantly policed.
In the 1960s, governmental social programs partnering with local organizing efforts were utilized as a tool through which to manage social problems in the flatlands, aimed at addressing the symptoms of the broader crisis-driven structural transformations both within the region specifically as well as within global capitalism more generally. By this time, many of the formerly white middle and working-class neighborhoods were transitioning from the idealized ‘industrial garden’ into urban slums. Philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation became key levers through which political and business leaders sought to manage social problems and the potential for unrest.[34] East Oakland’s Castlemont neighborhood was selected as a part of a federal antipoverty program known as “The Gray Areas Program,” “exemplify[ing] a twin concern with economic development and security…[seeking] to engineer better citizens.”[35] This period is notable because Oakland officials identified this area of East Oakland “a neighborhood with a variety of social problems” that is not yet “a slum,” and sought to address social problems in the neighborhood through job training, youth programs, increased coordination among penal institutions, and other programs.[36]
The federal government sought to mediate its racial and class contradictions through social programs, an approach which presaged the carceral turn, as economic development became indelibly bound with security. Notably, the “Gray Areas” program was “ a program of government,specifically designed to govern territories of poverty,” as well as a theory of poverty, of poverty’s ongoing problematization for intervention, and thus as the precursor to the War on Poverty,” conjoining “programs of government and “poor people’s movements, ” which were shaped by the possibilities of radical action, as they also shaped, in turn, the horizons and imaginations of radical movements.”[37] This and programs like it functioned as antecedents to the contemporary Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which served to cohere the interests of ‘civil society’ with those of the state. The rise of Non-Profit private-public partnerships of the neoliberal statecraft that would characterize Oakland politics for the next several decades.
As we discussed in a previous section, crisis is felt first on the margins. And by the 1970s, East Oakland was very much a marginalized section of the city. Yet, by the late 1970s and 1980s, despite the efforts of social programming, the East Oakland very much would be seen as a ‘slum,’ and the dialectic of economic development/security slid towards carcerality as a catch all solution to the social problems faced by increasingly precarious communities in the flatlands. As the crisis deepened and East Oakland underwent a demographic transformation–from being majority white in the ‘50s to majority black in the ‘80s–the management of crisis-amplified social problems was articulated through race and class . In the ‘80s and ‘90s increasing numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans began to move to the area, as well as smaller but significant numbers of migrants and refugees from East/Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. As McElroy and Werth note, “this increasingly structural poverty made communities of colour especially susceptible to the violent drug economies that pushed into this city’s low-lying flatlands (“flats”) during the Reagan Era,” which in turn fueled the ever expanding enforcement arm of the carceral state.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, ‘Felix the Cat’ (Felix Mitchell), a founder of the local street organization 69 Mob, came to control the area’s lucrative heroin trade, bringing in upwards of $5 million a year. An infamous figure, Mitchell was venerated in many neighborhoods for his success and contributions for the community. In 1985, he was arrested in an OPD operation, and was later murdered in prison in 1986. Yet, his controversial popularity and legacy was evident: Mitchell’s funeral paraded through the streets of East Oakland’s flatlands thronged by thousands of onlookers, an event that was largely demonized in the media as glorifying a ‘ruthless criminal,’ despite his popularity and reputation among some segments of the surrounding community. In this sense, this celebration can be understood as a repudiation of dominant characterizations of life and criminality in the area. Following his death, struggles between hyperlocal and informal ‘turf’ organizations and control over valuable underground markets sparked a war enveloping much of the flatlands over the coming decades.
Since this time, East Oakland’s flatlands have largely been represented as a zone of violence, a trend that can perhaps best be seen through its media portrayals. The 1982 PBS documentary Children of Violence follows the Parkin family and members of the 60’s gang/Los Sesentas in the Seminary district of East Oakland and their struggles to survive limited opportunities, rival gangs, and police brutality. Displaying a clear-eyed analysis of the issues, Mrs. Olivia Perkins lays out the crux of the problem: “There’s no jobs around. There’s nothing the kids can do. They really can’t help it” A uniquely sympathetic portrayal of the life of young people involved in street organizations, the film paints a picture of rebellious youth who are proud of the place they come from, yet caught in cycles of violence outside of their control. As Carlos Parkin underscores, “only the strong minded and fast people survive.” Chillingly, during the film, Jerry Parkin is beaten and arrested by an OPD officer, and later dies in his jail cell. This is later covered up by police who term it a suicide, demonstrating the brutality through which the state addresses issues in the flatlands.[38] Despite the implicit voyeurism of the documentary film-makers gaze, this film of how racialized young people make life in a situation of dispossession, containment, and violence.
On the other hand, dominant controlling images of East Oakland’s flatlands are much more spectacularized, a form of representation best seen in sensational television programs like Gang Wars: Oakland (2009). Painting a picture of irredeemable ‘superpredators’ running wild, the opening narration of the first episode asserts:
Oakland California: home to some of the most violent gangs in America. Here almost 10,000 gang members rule with deadly force, recruiting young teens, running drugs, selling guns, and murdering on a whim. Now an elite police unit made up of just 8 men fights to bring justice to the streets and the top gang lords are arrested to make Oakland safe again.[39]
The ultimate takeaway for the viewer is that the Oakland Police Department is outmanned and outgunned and needs more support to address street violence, which is always already the responsibility of individual ‘criminals’ and ‘youth delinquents.’ The second episode chronicles the conflict between two street organizations in East Oakland: Norteños and Border Brothers. Interspersed with images of guns, drugs, jail, and police activity, the episode follows a group of friends from Deep East Oakland associated with a set called the “9400 Boys.” Rather than discussing the structural dynamics contextualizing rising violence in the streets, the filmmakers predictably fall back on superficial tropes of gang members spiraling out of control.
The management of racialized youth has long been a key aspect of how authorities seek to contain the specter of criminality. Jennifer Tilton describes how in East Oakland, crisis-driven neoliberal governance–characterized by an increasing devolution of state responsibilities to the private sector and local communities–has intersected with Black middle-class homeowner organizing to produce a number of diverse forms of community partnerships, producing “deep generational and class divides in Oakland’s politics.” For Tilton, “race and class remain linked, as do race and space, but far less categorically than before the civil rights movement,” as Black middle-class activists actively mobilize law-and-order politics as part of their vision for remediating urban crises. The ultimate consequence of this is the increasing criminalization of poor youth in the flatlands, fears which in Oakland are “neither confined to the white middle class more focused solely on black youth.”[40] Discourses of containment, discipline, and anti-violence have become deeply interwoven within the political economy of public safety. These class and generational tensions within the flatlands remain undertheorized, but continuously resurface in East Oakland politics.
The spatial and class politics of East Oakland are complicated by property ownership, community policing, urban citizenship, and community belonging. This is a crucial thing to understand that is too often neglected in mainstream narrativizing about social problems and violence in the flatlands. In 1994 OPD made community policing their official strategy, aimed at building more collaboration between ‘community members’ and the police and resulting in the formation of Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils (NCPCs). This ultimately has reshaped the ways “black homeowner activists defined their community and framed their rights as citizens in Oakland,”[41] producing new forms of differentiated citizenship oriented around deserving/undeserving, criminal/law abiding, lazy/hardworking, redefining the “root causes of crime in terms of problem places or problem people instead of economic or racial inequalities.”[42]
By the late 1990s, what Victor Ortiz terms “the youth control complex” was alive and well in Oakland, manifested through racialized policing and containment of public space in the flatlands. By this time, the Eastmont mall–once a center of civic and social life in East Oakland–was in a state of disarray, and its large parking lots consistently drew crowds of young Black and brown people for sideshows and hang-outs. Sideshows, which originated in East Oakland in the 1980s as a way for young people to show off their cars, and later evolving into mobile, rowdy, unsanctioned car shows where drivers would show off their prowess, have long been a thorn in the side of local authorities. In 2000, the mall was purchased by a developer and an OPD substation was constructed there alongside another government and social services. Sideshows and reckless driving became a key priority for the Oakland police department, and alongside it, anti-nuisance laws and increased surveillance in the name of violence prevention.
In the coming years, Nuisance laws, gang injunctions, foreclosures and other legal/carceral mechanisms have been central to the containment of the specter of racialized youth criminality. Describing the Elmhurst NCPC, Tilton elaborates how Black neighborhood activists viewed local youth as in need of discipline and policing rather than services and came to support building partnerships with police and supporting ‘community policing initiatives.’ Alongside the ‘soft’ side of partnerships, came intensified crackdowns on ‘quality of life’ rimes like cruising, loitering, and drinking in public. This aggressive edge to ‘community policing’ can perhaps best be seen in OPD’s rime Reduction Teams (CRTs), undercover operations aimed at suppressing open air drug sales. On March 23, 2000,a CRT carried out a sting operation on 73rd Avenue and Holly St, arresting and savagely beating thirty-six-year-old Jerry Amaro. After being released from Jail–and receiving no medical attention–Amaro died several days later from his injuries.[43] The collateral damage of containment policing.
Community policing initiatives became a way for Black homeowner activists to define and frame their rights as citizens. This demonstrates some of the internal class tensions that complicate the political terrain and defy simplistic narratives, that pits more established homeowning residents at odds with their more precarious neighbors, often excluding “poor families, renters, immigrants, and youth from the moral community constructed in these meetings.”[44] Instead of orienting neighborhood activists toward addressing root causes of issues in the flatlands, community policing instead encourages residents to focus on ‘governing through crime,’ and targeting particular problem people and places, who are always individually responsible for their actions. Through this, community investments in idealized strong family values, discipline, and communal responsibility are subsumed into the carceral state, serving to smooth over the racialized class contradictions within ‘the community,’ and “rearticulating the relationship between black citizens and the state.’ Yet, rather than representing a unified community voice, the NCPCs actually served to foreground the outlook of older homeowners, deepening class divides.
In the face of organized abandonment and low-intensity domestic warfare, these political investments and attitudes continue, as evidenced by a July 2021 anti-violence rally organized by families who had loved ones lost to street violence, the Department of Violence Prevention in collaboration with the Oakland Police Department espousing pro-police rhetoric in the name of community safety for people in East Oakland. The very real problem of layered multiscalar violence becomes further mystified in the name of an amorphous ‘safety,’ that ultimately drives grieving families and mainstream anti-violence efforts into the arms of the police, rather than addressing the structural context that enables and fosters intercommunal violence. The sheer scale of trauma and violence and the ways that this shapes worldviews, desires and ideology is something that anti-police organizers and abolitionists must attend to in much more substantive ways.
Yet, containment is never complete. The desires, dreams, and rage of people living under conditions of various scales of violence and dispossession will always exceed. In 2003, during the neoliberal, law-and-order regime of Mayor Jerry Brown, who sought to bring investment back to Oakland by suppressing its problems through force, East Oakland erupted in flames in a manner unprecedented since the 1960s. Following the Raiders’s superbowl loss, rowdy fans and local residents took to the streets to both mourn and celebrate their camaraderie, with riots breaking out on International Blvd/E14th St between 35th and 90th avenues, with police cruisers being trashed, sideshows breaking out, and several instances of arson.[45] While it was largely characterized as a sports riot, given the context and conditions, I argue that it also represented a struggle against containment and dispossession.
As evidenced by the seemingly irrepressible vitality of sideshow culture–not only in East Oakland but across the region–this undercurrent of rebellion continues. As does its repression and criminalization. Indeed, as evidenced by the episodic phenomena of car caravan robberies and mass looting of commercial districts, these criminalized actions might also be understood as part of a deeper archive of proto-abolitionist, anti-political struggle against containment. We continue to weave together the threads of this conversation by delving into a particularly tragic moment, an entrypoint, a window into the contemporary conjuncture, chillingly representative of the confluence of processes that constitute daily life in the flatlands.
One Night in June
On Friday, May 29th, 2020 in downtown Oakland—over 6 miles and a world away from the flatlands–over 7,000 people took to the streets in open rebellion. Marches, demonstrations, and rallies of various stripes continued over the coming weeks and months, as both formal organizations and autonomous networks agitated to enact their own often incommensurable visions of social change. Yet, alongside these emergent possibilities for broader social transformations, came the beginnings of a growing ‘law-and-order’ counterinsurgency and reactionary ‘moral panic’ that would characterize the coming months and years. But more on that later.
While the increasingly brutal and militarized Oakland Police Department was scrambling to contain the first wave of burgeoning popular rebellion downtown during that first weekend, in East Oakland surrounding areas of the East Bay, the picture looked very different. While protestors marched and rioted downtown, the Oakland Police Chief described a “roving caravan of robbers and looters” hitting large shopping centers in Emeryville and San Lorenzo, alongside smaller caravans breaking into retail businesses across Oakland and San Leandro. Notably, that weekend over 70 Dodge Hellcats and other high end sports cars were allegedly lifted from a San Lorenzo car dealership. The San Francisco Chronicle described the scene in East Oakland in particular as “total chaos,” with caravans breaking into marijuana grow operations, the Durant Square shopping center, and other businesses along the E14th St/International Boulevard corridor.[46] It It is crucial to understand the events of the night of June 6, 2020 in the context of this moment of crisis and rebellion.
On June 6th, the California Highway Patrol pulled over 23-year old Erik Salgado and his pregnant partner Brionna Colombo on the 9400 block of Cherry Street in Deep East Oakland. They were pulled over for driving a red Dodge Hellcat with stolen plates, a vehicle allegedly associated with the dealership robbery a few days early. The stop ended with CHP officers firing over 40 bullets into the car, wounding Brianna, and killing both Erik and their unborn child. All in front of his mother’s house. For days afterward, Brianna’s family was prohibited from visiting her in the hospital.
Erik Salgado’s murder provoked intense community outrage in East Oakland, with vigils, marches, and rallies held to hold his murderers accountable, and adding fuel to the now-stagnant grassroots campaign to defund OPD. However, in April 2022, the Alameda County District Attorney declined to charge the CHP officers who murdered him.[47] An alleged member of the Border Brothers–a prominent predominantly Latinx street organization in the deep East, particularly the ‘90s and ‘100s.[48] Whether or not he was actually a member is beside the point; Salgado had already been represented by the police and media as the embodiment of the racialized urban criminal and thus excluded from narratives of respectability or “innocence,” that would have rendered his murder legible as state violence to civil society. While today the memorial and the “RIP Cakuu” tag in front of Elmhurst United Middle School has long since been buffed over, Salgado’s family and community allies continue to organize for accountability and justice. As of this writing, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price has not yet reopened the case.
Yet, the phenomenon of car caravan expropriations not only continued, but intensified in the coming months. These insurgent tactics and organizational forms–characterized by the media and the State as the product of out-of-control lawlessness and criminality–persisted throughout the fall and winter of 2020-21, often (but not always) coinciding with protest activity. Notably, on election night 2020, large caravans looted businesses–notably marijuana dispensaries and grows—from Richmond down into San Lorenzo. That night, less than seven blocks from the site of Salgado’s murder, police shot and killed a 20-year old on 1400 block of 92nd Avenue.[49] The specter of racialized criminality was embodied in the caravan disrupts the mythology of white spatial imaginary and unraveling its violent contradictions.[50] The innovative development of direct expropriation–described by the police as “a growing trend that transcends any one group or crew”–points toward deeper issues of racialized dispossession, organized abandonment, and criminalization of poor and working class Bay Area communities of color, a conjuncture most evident and concentrated in areas like the flatlands of East Oakland.
Police, media, and activists invested in respectability politics, were careful to distinguish these instances of car caravan looting from the ‘George Floyd protests.’ However, in this wider context of extreme economic precarity, enduring forms of racialized dispossession, and compounding structural crises, it is imperative to draw connections. Particularly given the moral panic around rising property crime and gun violence renewed both reactionary pro-police sentiments and political pushes for calls for more police alongside draconian budget cuts for social services and non-police violence prevention even among residents of the flatlands. This is by no means a new phenomenon, and highlights the undertheorized contradictions of race, property, respectability and class that exist as much within these communities as without, and the cleavages between the ‘good, hardworking,’ residents and the ‘lawless youth, ‘transients,’ and ‘criminals.’
Coda
In this essay, I’ve attempted to think ‘from below and to the East,’ and sketch out an analysis of the conditions, processes, and dynamics shaping contemporary East Oakland, as well as the ways in which the flatlands have been represented in the dominant imaginary. A critical analysis of containment and dispossession is fundamental to understanding the contemporary dynamics of East Oakland’s flatlands, but it is crucial to underscore that a place and its people are always more than the conditions they live under. As I have shown, at every step, everyday people under conditions have resisted and rebelled in ways that are both overtly political as well in ways that might be illegible as such.
At the time of this writing we’re teetering at the edge of a new recession, and a renewed moral panic around crime. It remains to be seen how this will play out. Yet, signs of ‘imagining otherwise’ are springing up all over the flatlands: from Homies Empowerment’s FREEdom Farm and FREEdom school, to the Black Cultural Zone, to POOR Magazine and Homefulness, that are seeking to challenge conditions of dispossession and containment from below, radically rejecting the terms set forth by the racial regime of capital. Yet, we must also be attentive to the ways in which ‘community’ can be mobilized to further the ends of the carceral state, and careful how we articulate our analysis of the issues facing our neighborhoods. This means remaining skeptical of local politicians, ‘social justice’-minded developers, and Non-Profit organizations that seek to domesticate, manage, and contain challenges to the ‘terms of order’ of the dominant society, seeking to quell the sparks of insurrection rather than foster and expand revolt. It is imperative that our ‘community’ work is anchored in an abolitionist ethic grounded in the land and the deep archives of struggle and dreaming of the people who live there.
[1] Schwarzer, Mitchell. Hella town: Oakland’s history of development and disruption. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022; Self, Robert. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Power in Postwar Oakland. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.
[2] Rhomberg, Chris. No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004
[3] Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party; Murch, Donna Jean. Living For the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.” Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2010
[4] Winston, Ali, and Darwin BondGraham. 2023. The Riders Come out at Night. Simon and Schuster.
[5] Tilton, Jennifer. Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America. New York City: NYU Press. 2010.
[6] McElroy & Werth. “Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland, Ca.” Antipode (51:3). 2019
[7] Robinson, Cedric. “The First Attack is an Attack on Culture” On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance. London: Pluto Press. 2019. 74
[8] Schafran, “Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure” 2013
[9] Lipsitz, George, How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2011. 6
[10] I learned of this concept of “geo-history” from Dr. Ofelia Cuevas.
[11] Arredondo, “Oakland police cite ‘alarming’ trend.” East Bay Times (December 18th, 2020) https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Oakland-police-cite-alarming-trend-of-15813120.php
[12] Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. PM Press. 2021
[13] Oakland Geology, “A paean for the flats.” https://oaklandgeology.com/2020/12/07/a-paean-for-the-flats/
[14] Self, American Babylon.
[15] Perlman, Fredy. 1969. The Reproduction of Daily Life.
[16] Self, American Babylon.
[17] Rhomberg, No There There; Murch, Living For the City.
[18] In response to a crisis in capital accumulation downtown, Oakland’s business class sought a spatial vision of a diversified industrial economy interspersed with communities of single family homes. They “embraced a vast program of vigorous regional economic development that was supposed to harmonize class relations and prevent a return of economic depression. It was the class vision of a regional commercial and property-owning elite.” (24) Self, Robert O. American Babylon. 2004.
[19] Lipsitz, George, How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2011. 29
[20] Ibid.
[21] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press. 2007
[22] Self
[23] Gilmore, Golden Gulag
[24] Rhomberg, No There There. 186
[25] Paperson, La. “The Postcolonial Ghetto: Seeing Her Shape and His Hand,” Berkeley Review of Education, 1 (1), 2010. 26
[26] Ibid. 21
[27] Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, “Oakland Unlawful Detainers, 2005-2015.” Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. PM Press. 23
[28] Schafran, “Origins of an Urban Crisis.” 665
[29] Mcelroy and Werth, “Deracinated Dispossessions.”
[30] Bulwa, “BART takeover robbery,” SF Gate (April 24, 2017) https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50-to-60-teens-swarm-11094745.php
[31]Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Macmillan International Higher Education.
[32] Paperson, “The Postcolonial Ghetto.” 15
[33] Ibid. 17
[34] Allen, Robert L. Black awakening in capitalist America: an analytic history. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press. 1992.
[35] Roy, Ananya, Schrader, Stuart & Crane, Emma S. Gray Areas: The War on Poverty at home and abroad. In Ananya Roy & Emma S. Crane (Eds.) Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South (pp. 289-314). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 2015
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Children of Violence. Directed by Bill Jersey, Public Broadcasting Service, 1982.
[39] Gang Wars: Oakland. Discovery Channel. 2009
[40] Tilton, Dangerous or Endangered? 17
[41] Ibid. 34
[42] Ibid. 61
[43] Winstont and BondGraham, The Riders Come Out at Night.
[44] Tilton, Jennifer. Dangerous or Endangered
[45] “Riots on International Blvd Following Raiders Super Bowl Loss.” Indybay, 26 Jan. 2003, www.indybay.org/newsitems/2003/01/26/11072.php. Accessed 28 June 2023.
[46] Matier, “Caravans Full of Looters,” SF Chronicle (June 3, 2020) https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Caravans-of-cars-full-of-looters-it-s-not-15312328.php
[47] Gartrell, “DA Won’t Charge CHP Officers.” San Jose Mercury News. (April 24, 2022) https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/04/da-wont-charge-chp-officers-who-killed-erik-salgado-but-say-questions-remain-about-what-happened/
[48] https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Henderson_Declaration.pdf
[49] Rubenstein, “East Bay on Alert.” SF Chronicle (November 6th, 2020) https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/East-Bay-remains-on-alert-for-caravans-of-15707947.php
[50] Pinguini, G, “The Great Sideshow Army: An Oakland Story,” The Transmetropolitan Review (August 2, 2020) https://thetransmetropolitanreview.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/the-great-sideshow-army-an-oakland-story/