MR. BROWN'S VICTIM-BLAMING
The outgoing Administration of Jerry Brown–its time
left in office now measured in days rather than years or months–continues to recede
into the background of Oakland’s consciousness as the city and the region focuses
on the excitement of the incoming new mayor.
That’s a mistake. There were assumptions made and things which occurred in the last
eight years which Oakland citizens ought to examine, now, while they are fresh in
our minds, to see what was done right and what was done wrong, both how, and why.
One of the most insidious aspects of the Brown Administration–[insidious:
1. characterized by treachery or slyness; crafty; wily 2. operating in a slow or
not easily apparent manner; more dangerous than seems evident]–was its masking of
its own failure to mount a serious attack on the root core of many of Oakland’s problems
by attacking, instead, citizens who were trying to solve those problems themselves.
To quote a popular 70’s term, the Brown Administration was
especially adept at the practice of “blaming the victim.” That was never more on
display than in Mr. Brown’s relationships with Oakland’s African-American community.
Oakland is awash in violence, and the African-American sections of the city is a
particular battleground. Mr. Brown never developed or articulated a coherent, organized,
comprehensive anti-violence strategy. Instead, he appeared to embrace quick, headline-grabbing
solutions at points where the publicity got too bad and/or when his future political
goals demanded it. Often that meant attacks on citizens or groups who, in the course
of trying to provide alternatives to violence, became victims of violence themselves.
Most of this is old ground, often covered in this column before.
One of these instances was with the now-defunct annual Carijama Festival,
which once filled North Oakland-West Oakland’s Mosswood Park every Memorial Day weekend
with a celebration of Caribbean, African, and African-American culture. Carijama
stopped in 2005 after several years of violent incidents. Everybody involved–festival
organizers, police and city officials–agreed that there was nothing about the festival
itself that promoted violence. Quite the opposite. The festivals were family and
community-friendly, giving citizens a free place to go during he holiday, and my
memories of the events will always be people sitting or stretched out on blankets
across the Mosswood Park lawn, barbecue pits sending out luscious smells, some folks
up dancing, children playing in the trees, young men and women exchanging smalltalk
and cellphone numbers, and the ever-present Caribbean music coming off the park stage.
The violence–and, again, this was agreed to by everyone involved–occurred with young
people who came to the events late, almost as they were breaking up, who then got
into disputes either among themselves or with police who tried to get them to leave
the area.
Was there a way to prevent the violence by latecomers while preserving the festival
itself? I don’t know, because there never appeared to be a concerted effort by the
Brown Administration to do so. Instead, it was easier to take actions which eventually
ended with the closing of Carijama for good.
That was also the case with Oakland’s downtown African-American club scene. Two of
the area’s longstanding clubs–Geoffrey’s Inner Circle and Sweet Jimmy’s–have either
severely curtailed their activities or gone out of business entirely because of problems
associated with the city’s response to violence near the clubs. Neither Geoffrey’s
nor Jimmy’s catered to a crowd or a type of music normally associated with Oakland’s
street violence. The two clubs were longstanding anchors of Oakland’s downtown scene,
with Geoffrey’s especially bringing positive, national fame to the city as the regular
stopover for celebrities and sports figures when they visited Oakland. Despite the
fact that both clubs invested heavily in security measures, problems of violence
sometimes developed in or around their facilities, as problems of violence often
develop around many Oakland events run by responsible, non-violent entities (the
arrests at Raider games regularly top at over a hundred, for example).
Did Mr. Brown recognize that Geoffrey’s and Jimmy’s both provided positive places
for people to go downtown at night–supposedly a goal of the Brown Administration–and
work with the owners to keep the both establishments open while keeping down the
violence? They didn’t, if you listen to the owners themselves, who said that police
and city officials continuously cracked down on them to do something about violence
that was not emanating from their establishments, and that they had no control over.
Jimmy’s, sadly, went out of business entirely, and Geoffrey’s eventually dropped
his club openings to one night a week, a loss to Oakland’s downtown scene that will
be difficult to overcome. (By way of full disclosure, the owner of Geoffrey’s Inner
Circle, Geoffrey Pete, is my cousin.)
As you can imagine, what the Brown Administration treated badly in regard to organizations
catering to people not usually associated with Oakland’s violence–Carijama, Geoffrey’s
Inner Circle, and Sweet Jimmy’s–was distinctly worse when it came to areas of the
community where the violence was centered.
Nothing illustrated this failure more than Oakland’s sideshow policy in the Jerry
Brown years.
Although the history of the sideshows has been obscured–often deliberately–a
minimum of searching easily reveals what happened. Sometime during the 90’s, young
African-Americans on Oakland’s east side sought safe places to gather in the midst
of the city’s violent-prone street, club, and concert scene. Initially, they gathered
after hours in the parking lot at Eastmont Mall, where sometimes several hundred
people assembled in their cars to play music, dance, exchange telephone numbers,
and, yes, engage in that old-time East Oakland sport of spinning donuts.
Two things stand out from those early, parking lot sideshow days. The first is that
during one of Oakland’s most intensely-violent periods, little violence was associated
with the original events. The second is that there was little or no complaint from
the community about the events, since they were away from a residential neighborhood,
and not taking place in the middle of the street.
Why and how did the sideshows move from the relatively violence-free, non-obtrusive
events of the Eastmont days to the often-violent street events of today?
The first thing to remember in this sad tale is that it wasn’t the wish of the sideshow
participants themselves. Instead, the sideshows were pushed out into the streets
by Oakland police, who broke up the events at Eastmont, and then again when they
relocated to the Pac’n’Save parking lot lower down on Hegenberger. Once on the streets,
the sideshows suddenly became a massive problems within the communities in which
they were operating, leading to increased police crackdowns, including mass ticketings,
arrests, and towing of cars. This contributed to a downward spiral, a sort of self-fulfilling
prophecy in which the police actions drove away many of the saner sideshow participants
who were in it for the socializing rather than the illegal aspect. They were gradually
replaced by participants to whom the game of running from the police was more attractive.
That led to more police crackdowns, tipping the balance in the participants further
and further away from the responsible to the irresponsible, leading us to our current
mess.
More than once, former Oakland Police Chief Richard Word said that breaking up the
parking lot sideshows had been a “mistake.” Unfortunately, that bit of information
got consistently drowned out in the clamor and din to shut the sideshows down.
A group of the original sideshow participants–led by documentary filmmaker Yakpasua
Zazaboi–approached the Brown Administration several times with requests for the city
to set up a legalized sideshow. That may have been the solution to shutting down
the illegal, street sideshows and providing a safe, sanctioned, and legal outlet
for many of Oakland’s forgotten youth. Or it may have been unworkable. So far we
don’t know, since the proposal was never addressed in an adult, responsible way by
the Brown Administration. Instead, the original sideshow participants–the young African-Americans
who had suffered the most under Oakland’s violence and who had tried to find a place
in Oakland to gather where violence wasn’t happening–were rebuffed and dismissed
by Mr. Brown and his associates, criticized from the chairs around City Council,
in the press, and by many adults in the neighborhoods without ever sitting down and
meeting these young people, or listening directly to what they wanted.
Mr. Dellums has started out on a different foot, with one of his neighbor-to-neighbor
meetings scheduled for tomorrow (Saturday, December 2 at Claremont Middle School)
aimed specifically at listening to the concerns and ideas of young people in Oakland.
Perhaps the sideshow issue will surface there and then, from a different perspective.
As my father used to say, there is a many a slip between the cup and the lip. But
the Dellums Administration, thankfully, appears to be trying to drink from Oakland
waters that are far removed from where Mr. Brown used to quench his thirst. Let’s
hope he keeps it up.