This month marks 30 years that I have been a resident of Oakland. I came to the Bay Area right after college to make a new and independent life, away from everything I’d known (and disliked) in Southern California. I knew little of the area and so originally planned to live in Berkeley, but the apartments were too expensive, so soon found myself walking the affordable streets of Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighborhood, ringing manager’s doorbells on promising-looking buildings. I became entranced by a 1920’s brick fortress that looked a bit like The Dakota in New York and moved into a studio apartment with an Art Deco green and black bathroom and a closet big enough to sleep in.  It was the first place I lived in on my own and I loved it dearly, even if that reasonable rent consumed half my pay in those recession-riddled years.

 I lived in the Lake Merritt area for the next 16 years, enjoying its multi-culti, working class and easygoing vibe.  For a decade, I caught a bus outside my apartment for the short ride to my job in downtown Oakland – in a building at 14^th and Broadway, the site of today’s largely peaceful protests in response to the Mehserle verdict in Oscar Grant’s death and of tonight’s looting and violence, perpetrated mostly by non-resident (and white) “anarchists” who couldn't answer a local TV reporter's question about what stealing athletic shoes has to do with Oscar Grant's death.

Looking at the local news tonight and watching images of the action both peaceful and violent, I think of the thousands of times I walked those streets. In the early 80’s, the area was incredibly seedy with failing businesses and empty storefronts, dirty streets and drug deals right outside our modern office building. The grim scene left most of my surburb-dwelling co-workers afraid to go out other than to scuttle to the garage or BART station to go home – not that there was anywhere much to go to, even to grab lunch.  But as the years went on, the downtown was cleaned up, restaurants and other businesses opened and blossomed, noontime concerts were held on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside our office, and people began to enjoy taking walks at lunchtime.

It was a sad day when my office was relocated east to a suburban office park. I hated not only the lengthier commute (by car, not my convenient city bus) but the sterility of the area. By contrast, many of my suburban co-workers were thrilled with the move – and never more so than a couple of years later, when rioting began in L.A. after the verdict in the trial of police officers who’d beaten Rodney King.  As the word of the violence in L.A. reached us, we were told that all non-critical offices, even ones as remote as ours, were being closed so people could get safely home. 

 But my co-workers were certain my home would not be safe. They feared for my life heading back into Oakland, and some offered to take me in for the night.  One even made a crude joke about smearing my face with shoe polish to protect me from what her racist assumptions led her to believe awaited me.  But I had only a little fear, and when I arrived home, my faith was justified.  It was a beautiful spring day, and people were out in my neighborhood doing ordinary things – strolling babies, taking walks around the Lake, running errands. I soon joined them, walking to the local grocery store just to revel in the normalcy that surrounded me, so unlike the images burning on the TV from L.A.  I noticed that people were being elaborately kind to each other, far more so than normal, making a point to look each other in the eye, smile and nod, especially any time a black and a white person crossed paths, even briefly.  The African American cashier who rang me up at the grocery store smiled and touched my hand just a little longer than usual as she gave me my change and I beamed back to show I understood her message.

 “Not here,” I heard everyone silently saying.  “We have no such trouble with each other here.” 

I had never been so proud of my neighborhood and much-maligned city than that day.  I’d spent over a decade defending it by then – explaining that yes, there was a lot of crime, and economic struggle, and the city never seemed able to catch a break.  But really it was a wonderful, vibrant, beautiful place to live, and people who judged it just didn’t know it, but got their impressions from the news or the grim views as they passed through on the freeway. And most of all, while the corrosive effects of racism were quite apparent in the poor areas, there was for the most part a surprising equanimity between the races among ordinary citizens.

But while we came through those terrible days seemingly unscathed by the violence in L.A., something changed in its aftermath that I can’t begin to explain. The friendly, seemingly color-blind nature of the neighborhood shifted, first subtly and later more disturbingly. Tensions began to arise. The peaceful summer festival held at the lake each year began to lead to rowdy, after hours crowds and some violence. The neighborhood became a weekend cruising area, driving residents to despair.  And when a “mini-riot” occurred right in front of my apartment building after a local festival, I knew it was time to leave.

And I did what white people have always done – I fled to the hills.  I moved from the working class neighborhood I’d loved for a decade and a half to the woodsy upper reaches of the city, where some modest housing exists but million dollar homes are also not uncommon.  I was still in Oakland, but it was hard to tell.  My neighbors were still multi-culti, but not nearly as much so, and the only thing that might make them riot was an increase in property taxes. I hated that I’d given in, left the urban life I’d been so proud to lead, and sought the safety of the middle class life that I’d disdained for so long.  But as I walked the streets in my new neighborhood, I also felt an enormous relief. Yes, everything in the local commercial area was dead after 9 PM, but that was the beauty of it.  There was still crime – burglaries and car thefts – but it seemed muted and unthreatening. The only violent crime in recent years here came when an affluent software executive murdered his wife and hid her body in the woods. As long as you didn’t marry the wrong person, you were probably safe.

And so it’s with a strange sad distance that I watch the news on TV, feeling a million miles away from an intersection downtown where I once spent much of my waking life.  This isn’t the Oakland I know now, although it’s an Oakland that I’ve known. It’s the Oakland everyone who’s never lived here imagines, and the one that we locals know is both true and false.

It’s the Oakland that is my city, and yet it's a place I’ve never been.

Latest update on the aftermath of the "riots" can be found in an SF Chron article.  Of the 78 people arrested, three-fourths were not Oakland residents.  It also bears repeating that while this killing occurred at a BART station in Oakland, BART serves the Bay Area as a whole and has its own police force, to which Mehserle belonged.  (He was not an Oakland police officer, but a BART police officer.)  In short, it was mere chance that it happened in Oakland, and it could have just as easily occurred in another station in one of the many other cities that BART serves.

In these difficult economic times, which have hit our city especially hard, it is infuriating and sad that Oakland businesses (especially, as the above article indicates, small "mom and pop" stores without insurance to replace broken windows) were made to suffer the consequences of the behavior of a very small subset of an otherwise peacefully protesting crowd -- all the more so as their motives seem  far murkier and less honorable than wanting to honor Oscar Grant or even protest the verdict in his death.