...like many people, I'm horrified by the shooting of an unarmed young black man by BART police, and the rioting that happened last night. There's really no excuse for any of it. Violence doesn't fix what happened. I guess people get caught up in the moment, especially people who feel alienated from their community. If you don't believe that other people really have feelings worth worrying about, smashing their storefronts and breaking their car windows is no more than kicking over a sandcastle on the beach, I suppose. Apparently the protests started out peacefully, and the organizers are really upset over how they turned out.
All that said, this woman reminds me of every pretentious, annoying, head-up-their-ass person I loathed in college:
"I uphold the whole protest from start to finish," said Reiko Redmond, one of several people from Revolution Books in Berkeley who were in Downtown Oakland on Wednesday night. She said called the events a "righteous rebellion" that stemmed from a long history of oppression and police brutality.
Redmond wouldn't say whether she knew anyone involved in the vandalism.
"That's somewhat an inappropriate question," said Redmond.
Don't think much of this person either:
"I feel like the night is going great," said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. "I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It's for the murder of a black male."
Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.
"She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life," Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: "I just hope nobody gets shot or killed."
Do I need to mention that the owner of Creative African Braids is a black woman? How did ruining her business help prevent future deaths of young black men, or end police brutality, exactly?
People can be such frigging morons.
I was going to say something snotty about how is Revolution Books hanging in there when Cody's is gone and Stacey's is closing, but that's not really fair to blame their clientele's behavior on them.
Edited to add: Oh, and I barely said anything about the event that sparked this. A 22-year-old man is dead, leaving behind a little girl and a woman he hoped to marry. Maybe he wasn't behaving right at the scene — I have no idea — but that shouldn't warrant the death penalty. This is unfortunately not the first bad story I've heard about BART cops. Sigh... and yet I still feel bad for the bad guy in the story — or at least for his new baby, who was born the day after this happened. So many lives ruined by what was at best carelessness.
