Compassion in The Face of Violence
By Nicole Lee
Director of Urban Peace Movement
As I sit down to write this article my heart is heavy. A well respected member of Oakland’s beloved Motorcycle Club, The East Bay Dragons, who, just last month, came out to support Urban Peace Movement’s Turf Summit Event and who was affectionately know as “Ike” was recently murdered in their clubhouse. Oakland now has nearly 90 homicides for 2011 and our city was named the “most violent city in California.”
As a lifelong member of this community I, like many others, struggle to make sense of it all. How did we get here and why is this happening? I was recently interviewed by a reporter from the Oakland Tribune who had gone out on the streets of East Oakland and who told me that many people he talked to attributed the violence to Oakland’s young people (young people of color) and that he heard people say over and over, “Its the youth, they’re just crazy.”
While I understand the frustration and anger that Oakland’s flatland residents may feel – being one of them myself – I want to offer a more complex and possibly more compassionate answer to the question “Why is this happening?”
The West Oakland neighborhood that I live in is affectionately known as the Lower Bottoms. It was once regarded as the “Harlem of the West Coast” with over 65 blues clubs attracting performances from some of the giants of American music such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Ike and Tina Turner. There are still reminders of that time scattered throughout the community in places like the Continental Club and Esther’s Orbit Room.
In the 1940’s African Americans from Southern US states such as Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas moved to cities like Oakland and Richmond in search of economic opportunity and to escape the harsh realities of life under Jim Crow racism. With the wartime economic boom, there were jobs in this region in shipyards, manufacturing plants, auto plants, and the like.
West Oakland and later East Oakland emerged as strong working-class African American communities – places where people could get a job in a factory, make a livable wage, own a home, and raise a family.
But the promise of prosperity did not last forever. Over time jobs moved toward the southern part of Alameda County, and discriminatory housing policies prohibited Black families from moving with the jobs. Eventually many of the jobs left the region and the country all together.
In the mid 1980’s what is now understood as the “Crack Epidemic” hit urban communities who had already been economically devastated throughout the country. Oakland was hit hard. For some, the drug trade seemed to offer economic relief in a time where good paying jobs were more and more scarce.
Fast forward to where we are standing now in 2011. The young people of today were born in the early 1990s during the height of that epidemic. Many of the young folks that I have worked with were raised by extended family because it is as if this epidemic wiped out an entire generation. And, unfortunately, many of their parents were impacted by the social and economic crisis that was happening in the flatlands of Oakland. Some of their parents ended up incarcerated, some ended up struggling with substance abuse and addiction, and a few of our youth even lost their parents to violence.
I often hear older adults lamenting about their perception that the younger generation lacks a respect for authority – but if you understand Oakland’s history, then it begins to make a bit more sense. It makes sense that young folks in Oakland might be frustrated with adult authority or that they might feel somehow abandoned or betrayed by the adults, for whatever reason, were not able to be present for them.
I am not of the opinion that our young people are “just crazy.” The perception that urban youth are “crazy”, that they are “like animals”, or that they are entirely to blame for the crisis of violence (often perpetuated through the media) adds fuel to the fire for public policies that seek only to punish and lock our young people out of opportunity and into the criminal justice system.
And, my personal experience with these very young people could not be further from this perception. The young folks I have worked with are incredibly resilient, intelligent, and creative. And, yes, many of them are struggling to make it in a world that has not been very supportive of them and not very compassionate toward them and what they’ve been through.
I don’t have an easy answer to this crisis of violence, what I do know is that we have a lot of room to grow in terms of treating ourselves and each other with more compassion. Often in times of crisis we grow increasingly angry, fearful, and frustrated and then we act out of that anger and fear. It gets reflected in the way we speak to each other, in the way that we act toward one another, and even in the social and public policies we enact in our society.
Recently, some members of Oakland’s City Council wrote a letter in response to the tragic killing of a three-year old boy by a stray bullet in East Oakland this past summer. The letter proposed Gang Injunctions and Teen Curfews in an attempt to curtail the violence. These policies have not been proven to make us safer in the long-term and, in my opinion, they railroad people (mostly young people of color) from our communities into the revolving door of the criminal justice system making matters worse. There are other more effective practices such as street outreach, restorative justice, and community organizing, that make us safer and that encourage us to hold ourselves and one another with respect, dignity, and compassion.
I understand the frustrations of community members and small business owners who live and work in the communities where this violence is occurring. And, I understand the very human impulse to want to act out of fear, anger, and frustration. But acting out of anger and fear alone seldom leads to good outcomes. If we expect to encourage our youth to think before acting out of anger or rage then we have challenge ourselves to do the same.
What is happening right now in Oakland is heartbreaking. And, I have been learning more and more about heartbreak. In heartbreak we can either chose to shut our hearts off and succumb to the fear of feeling our own pain or we can allow that pain to break our hearts open. I choose the later. May we allow our hearts to break open. May the heartbreak that we feel be our guide and our teacher. May it remind us to treat one another and ourselves with care and compassion, and may it motivate us to work for the justice that we all seek.
