Actions In Oakland In Response To Police Shooting

As you may be aware, a cop shot and killed a man in Oakland, California on New Year's Day. The details make the incident particularly galling for many: the man, an unarmed African American, was laying prone beneath two cops while they restrained and handcuffed him. A third cop standing above them pulled his firearm and shot the victim, Oscar Grant, in the back, killing him. The incident, which took place on a commuter train platform, was witnessed by dozens of people and filmed from multiple angles, allowing news and evidence of the killing to spread rapidly.

On Wednesday, January 7th, a week after the killing, a protest march convened at the train station where the killing occurred. After listening to speeches for two hours, the crowd began marching towards downtown Oakland. At a nearby intersection, the windows of a police car were smashed and a dumpster was set on fire. Riot police arrived soon after and attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and targeted arrests. Marchers retreated and splintered, with some groups smashing the windows of businesses both local and corporate, torching two cars and smashing the windows of many others, and burning more dumpsters. As the rioting continued into the night, over a hundred marchers were eventually cornered by a large number of riot cops and arrested.

Yesterday, the windows of an Oakland police station were smashed during the night by anarchists. Further demonstrations are planned and solidarity actions are likely to continue in the coming days.

Corporate media reports of the mini-riot have focused on the damage caused to locally-owned small businesses and the destruction of private vehicles. The windows of a business called Creative African Braids were smashed, and the car of a local school teacher, a man taking tap-dancing lessons, and a local reporter were smashed or set on fire, all apparently at random. Part of what has attracted the media to this element of the story is that the owners of the damaged cars and businesses are mostly African Americans, as were many of the marchers seen carrying out the vandalism, muddying the racial narrative. It remains unclear how local businesses came to be targeted and by whom.

Undoubtedly, this aspect of the events in Oakland will cause the greatest controversy among anarchists. As the rhetoric of European insurrectionists has gained prominence in the American anarchist community, the literal manifestation of bombastic slogans like "Burn them all, big and small!" is bound to make some reconsider their language. Insurrectionary ideologues will likely accuse those made quesy by the sight of smashed Black-owned small businesses of bourgeois spinelessness or some other liberal pejorative.

Hopefully, a discussion of strategy will prevail in this debate. As long as an ideological commitment to one form of action or another remains the norm, whether pacifist or insurrectionary, strategy will be dictated by dogma instead of actual conditions. It's possible to have no sympathy whatsoever for small-time capitalists and still argue that destroying cars and stores at random, regardless of who does it, makes for bad strategy. It's also possible to argue the opposite and not have a fetish for window breaking. The C.S.A. encourages anarchists to discuss these events on their strategic merits rather than the dictates of their preferred doctrine.

As perceptive readers can probably discern from the tone above, the C.S.A. sees the destruction of random small businesses and the cars of tap-dancing students as a strategic mistake. The targeted attacks that have occurred in Oakland on cop cars, police stations, and the symbols of global capital such as banks, are far more effective at conveying the motivations of anarchists, and make a small but real dent in the institutions that actively reproduce capital and the state.

Lending support to undirected vandalism is often a misguided attempt to discover or encourage a direct action ethos among non-anarchists. But ignoring the context of actions and focusing exclusively on tactics is folly (Kristallnacht was a riot that involved a lot of window smashing, too.)

As a matter of power dynamics, hair braiding businesses probably cannot compare as oppressive institutions to cops and banks, and their wholesale destruction would lead no where. Anarchists who wish to participate meaningfully in solidarity actions ought to focus their attention on the institutions in their own communities that enforce hierarchies of oppression and privilege, whether those are physical spaces or social dynamics or something else entirely, not soft targets that are incidentally located along a parade route.