Tuesday night I was in Oakland participating in the demonstration there against racial injustice. It did not end well.
I’ve attended several demonstrations in my life. Most prominently in my mind: a demonstration in 2003 in Seattle against the looming US invasion of Iraq, a couple of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Oakland at Frank Ogawa Plaza where I was again Tuesday night, and several demonstrations in Nicaragua in 1992. I’m not much of a shouter or chanter, so I’ve always been more of an observer than an active participant, but always aware that I was contributing one more body to the crowd and participating in that sense, and also complicit in that sense.
What happened in Oakland Tuesday night was similar to the 2003 Seattle demonstration in an important way. The protest against Bush’s war in 2003 and the protest against racial injustice Tuesday attracted a lot of people who rarely, if ever, participate in demonstrations or marches – people who feel provoked by current events to make some sort of statement or take a symbolic stand. They arrive, they stand around and listen to the speeches, and they wait to be told what to do. They’ve seen snippets of demonstrations on TV, but they don’t really know how it works.
In contrast to the larger crowd, there is always a small, core group of people who are very familiar with the mechanics of demonstrations and marches, who have arrived as a group with the intention of taking control and guiding the demonstration in what they feel is the appropriate direction. They bring bullhorns, drums, whistles, and large signs. They bring a certain level of skill at organizing demonstrations and they use their bullhorns to coach the crowd on chants and callback responses, and to outline a plan of action and describe the objectives of the march. They bring rhetoric, slogans and fiery speeches about justice and popular defiance which they have no doubt delivered many times before.
This core group is not representative of the larger crowd, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the feelings, thoughts or goals of the larger crowd. They represent a radical, ideological, fringe perspective and they existed as a group long before the current issue arose. They are likely to be communists or anarchists. Members of the group move among the crowd trying to sell literature and newsletters, handing out pamphlets, and trying to get email addresses to add to a mailing list. They’re not always open or immediately up-front about their ideological affinities.
Basically, they’re exploiting the current situation to promote their cause and their views, seeing it as an opportunity to market themselves to a preselected crowd that is frustrated with the status quo. Still, they become the de facto leaders of the crowd because they know what they’re doing, they’ve come prepared to lead, and they have a plan of action.
So Tuesday night the crowd was led by people who hate all authority and all police, who do not want to demonstrate peacefully, but want a violent overthrow of the existing order and don’t believe real change can happen any other way. They don’t want to work within the system to change things, or even to force fundamental changes to the system, but to smash the system completely. Their ideas are extreme, grandiose, unrealistic, and deliberately destructive. Violent expressions of outrage and defiance are encouraged by them. Their goal is to turn the angry demonstrators into an angry mob.
Human emotions are complex and subtle, and impossible to separate with distinct lines, and there was a lot of overlap between the feelings of this core group and the feelings of the larger crowd. Most present were feeling anger at civil authorities and the police. Also, most people probably agree one purpose of a protest march is to confront authority and disrupt the normal routines of the surrounding community. It’s a statement about your unwillingness to let things continue as they have – your refusal to accept the way things are. It’s an insistence that people stop what they’re doing and see that what they’re accepting as normal is not right.
Because of the emotional overlap, the core group can play a positive role up to a point. They do organize the crowd and lead it in expressing itself in predictable ways that the police understand and can control. For much of the night, I felt like the demonstration was going very well, and it was meeting my expectations for a responsible and peaceful protest.
The marchers moved through the streets shouting and chanting, while the police anticipated their movements and redirected traffic accordingly. Based, apparently, on some plan or guidelines, the police would sometimes line up abreast to prevent the marchers from turning down a particular street. Sometimes these unyielding lines of police would become temporary foci of confrontation for the demonstrators. The marchers, frustrated in their advance, would stand in front of the police yelling, accusing them of lacking humanity or understanding, or of serving evil – trying to engage them in argument. The police refused to engage and responded only with a stern gaze and assertive silence, only occasionally speaking to politely warn people to stand back.
The core group was eager to transform these confrontations into something violent. Shouting through their bullhorns, they tried to agitate the crowd and even shame it into more aggressive action. One of the amusing moments during the night, for me, was when a woman with a bullhorn, confronting a line of police at the front of the crowd, turned and shouted to the crowd, “We outnumber them! Why are you letting them stop us?” From somewhere toward the back of the crowd a weak, embarrassed voice replied, “Because they have guns.”
So it went. The demonstrators always ultimately respected the lines the cops drew, and eventually moved on in an allowed direction. At some point, a smaller group at the front broke away at a run and got ahead of the police so that they could charge onto to the 580 freeway and block traffic. The symbolism of such disruptive action is clear, and it mirrors actions taken by protestors in Ferguson, but it escalated the situation and the police became more aggressive in trying to manage the marchers. They tried to break the group up and then keep them apart, diverting stragglers and maneuvering to prevent the unification of the group that had crossed the freeway and the group left behind. Eventually everybody regrouped at Frank Ogawa Plaza, where the march had begun, and a second round of marching began.
By this time, the makeup of the crowd had changed. Most of the people who had shown up in the late afternoon after getting off work had left, having participated to the extent they had wanted to participate. The crowd now was younger and, it seemed to me, whiter. Their anger seemed less somber and more gleeful. The core group was becoming more strident and their audience seemed more receptive. We marched and marched and marched, block after block after block, and this too pared off those who were older or less zealous. I persisted because of a characteristic stubbornness, but my sensibilities were increasingly out of place.
Petty vandalism began to take place, and then to escalate into more serious acts. Car tires were slashed, and then car windows were smashed. Graffiti started to appear, and then store windows began to break. Shadowy figures on the periphery were doing these things and then darting away or leaping back into the anonymity of the crowd. A few of us protested, but nobody was listening. Every destructive act was a justifiable attack on the system – a small victory of some sort. Members of the core group cheered and shouted encouragement.
It was clear to me at this point that things were degenerating rapidly, that it had gone on too long, that nobody had a plan for wrapping things up and sending everybody home, and that, in fact, the core group wanted to drag it out as long as possible and produce an outcome that was as violent and destructive as possible. They had never been interested in making an effective statement about racial injustice, but were indulging in their overwrought fantasies of revolution.
Finally, making another attempt to take a freeway, we ended up far away from the city center in a normally quiet residential district, on a street lined with small, local businesses, many of them Korean. Here, the police confronted us with a larger force than ever, determined to defend the on-ramp and prevent another occupation of a freeway. There was a sense that this would be the final confrontation and a test of the crowd’s determination. Members of the core group were now screaming at people, issuing orders, shouting things like, “Hold the line!” More and more cops were arriving, and surreal shadows spun and swayed around us as the police helicopters lit the scene with their spotlights.
For the first time, fires were lit. Trash bins were overturned and aligned in the street as barricades, and then their contents were set aflame. People began throwing things at the police, some of them glass bottles. The police began moving in a way they had not before, their calm rigidity giving way to tense, combative postures and rapid shifting and repositioning. Their eyes darted in all directions and excited calls went back and forth up and down their line. A couple of flash-bang grenades boomed in the night, causing everyone to jump.
But still the crowd wasn’t willing to provoke the full wrath of the amassed police, and eventually it moved on down the street away from the on-ramp – vandalizing, looting, and burning as it went. As I followed, tired and dejected, I saw a confrontation between a local resident and the man who seemed to be the leader of the core group.
The leader was a white man in his 50s, I would guess, who had spoken at length at the plaza before the marching began. He’s a member of a weird little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party that appears to be built around the ideas of a man named Bob Avakian. I don’t know much about it beyond the websites listed on the pamphlets they gave me, but it seems to be something of an unabashed personality cult. Avakian is their new Mao, and the group is dedicated to promoting his ideas.
The local who confronted him was a black man probably in his 30s. He raged for the damage being done to his community and the small businesses he said were mostly black-owned. He chastised the would-be revolutionary leader for “making us all look bad,” and said, “Now this is what they’ll be talking about on the news tomorrow: how we burned things and broke windows and that doesn’t help people understand why we’re angry.” He was eloquent, but the leader and his entourage weren’t interested. One of the entourage, a young black man, put his hand against the local man’s chest and said, “Come on, brother, we can’t fight with each other. This should be a peaceful protest.” He intended no irony.
The leader listened to the local man for a moment and then shrugged and walked away from him while the man was still talking. The leader was in a hurry to keep moving. He didn’t want to fall behind his mob.
This made me angry, and I followed after the leader, shouting at him to look around at where his leadership had led. “Look what you've done! You’re hurting the people you pretend to care about! You’re destroying the community you say you’re fighting for!”
He stopped abruptly and turned around to face me. His entourage stopped and waited, looking back and forth between him and me. I said, “You hijacked this. You don’t really care what people are feeling. You used them for your own purposes.”
Then he gave me a little smile, and turned and walked away.
And I was done. I let the mob recede into the distance without following. A little later, while I sat on the steps of a church, dwelling on my thoughts, the police came moving up the road abreast, in a line that spanned the width of the street and sidewalks, telling everyone over a loudspeaker to clear off the street or be arrested. I was too tired and apathetic at that point to move. As they passed, they looked at me and I saw a couple of faces that were by now familiar. They seemed to consider for a moment, and then turned their eyes forward again and continued, leaving me to my thoughts.
And one of those thoughts was this: I’m in Oakland. All over the country tonight people are demonstrating against racial injustice, and here I am in Oakland having just participated in one of those demonstrations and it was being led by some cynical, creepy, communist weirdo. It was being led by a bunch of irresponsible yahoos with no serious objective. Why is that? This is Oakland, a city that has struggled with racial issues and issues of police violence for many decades, and I know there must be community leaders in Oakland who speak for the community and have deep ties to the community and a history of leading the community. So where were they? Why weren’t they out here leading? They left a vacuum, and it was filled by people who didn’t care if they hurt Oakland. Why did they let that happen?