Some thoughts on Fruitvale Station

I was anxious about seeing Fruitvale Station, partly because I’ve been traveling/moving and did not like the idea of seeing it alone, without being able to talk about it immediately with friends. This perhaps inflated the nervousness I had about the tenor the film would take. 

The film begins with Oscar Grant's death. It simultaneously begins with opposition from people on the train and platform to the BART police. They were adamantly saying something was wrong and trying to stop a harm. The film  ends with documentary footage of a commemoration at the Fruitvale station four years later, and likewise illustrates the commitment to justice and refusal to accept the daily danger and arbitrariness of police violence. I think it went to lengths to show the possibility of interracial relationships, in their most awkward and apparently easy forms, and acknowledged, or at least I want to believe I saw the film acknowledge, the gap between white and Black residents in the expectation of bodily safety and a future with family and job.

Fruitvale Station was devastating, in part because we know what was always going to happen, but Oscar Grant’s murder already felt devastating to me because racialized violence seems so intractable as a practice and commonsense. It is part of the structure of the city; BART as a class and racist project extends beyond the police to the history of its very construction, and ridiculously short hours of operation. The past and present workings of gendered racial capitalism come to this devastating moment of Oscar Grant’s death. What the film captures in its attention to the mundane details of dropping kids off at school, celebrating mom’s birthday, trying to keep a job and stay out of prison, and spending New Year with friends and strangers is the arbitrary denial of this day-to-day. The outrage I and so many others feel, I think stems from all of this, and the horror of even trying to come to terms with the fear that a mother’s child may not come home.

The film’s also devastating because I personally feel at a loss, and experience a gap between the feeling of intractability with which I was left (I don’t know that any film could shake that) and some feeling of, and imperative of moving toward, collective capacity to make his death unthinkable and impossible. There were glimpses, as I mentioned above, into the possibilities of refusal and change. So I am glad the film was made and being seen and discussed by so many people. Rather than fixate on limitations, or critique in a project-destroying way, I’ll say, as Carwil suggested, what I wanted more of, and where I would like to see all sorts of films be able to take their audiences.

What I wanted more of is context that might provide political direction with which to move emotion. (Maybe that’s a different film, an impossible request, too didactic, but here’s where I’m at.) What interested me in the film being made is what made the film possible. This includes both this particular historical economic moment in California, where policing and imprisonment racially structure livelihoods and life chances, and also the political context of Bay Area organizing. To give an example: I happened to be back in the Bay Area for a visit just a few days after Oscar Grant’s murder. This was also while Israel was bombing Gaza. What I saw at the large scale emergency protest called in San Francisco and at more informal demonstrations popping up in the Oakland streets were signs connecting Gaza, Greece, and Oakland. The Bay Area’s long history of militant antiracist, labor, and antiwar organizing (and much else besides) made it possible for people to connect the dots between the militarized occupations of all these places, despite their unique circumstances, and to be working to prevent injustices and violence in their and their neighbors’ (near and far) communities. 

There’s a lot to learn from this interrelated history of organizing against war and policing, and there are many people eager to learn and build together. So I would want the questions percolating in audience members’ heads to bubble not so much around what is to be done about this patent injustice, and linking the feeling of this outrage to movement rather than inertia. I feel sad to the core, the kind of sad that indicts all the violence that structures this society, but I know I can’t and don’t want to stay in this place because the conditions that make that sadness must end. 

These are some initial thoughts prompted by a Twitter discussion of a review of Fruitvale Station. 

Empire's edge and center: Fort Smith (Road Musing #4)

Forts and bases tend to repeat themselves. The territorialization of settler colonialism at one point in time becomes the grounds for both ongoing possession and expansion elsewhere. That said, I still need to better understand the relationship between Chaffee and Fort Smith, some 15 miles west.

Because of course, in the 19^th century, Fort Smith was the fort on the frontier, on the edge of US territory. Fort Smith was established on the banks of the Arkansas River in 1817. (The next year, the Quapaw people ceded their lands to what would Jackson would later declare a reservation at Hot Springs). A few short years later, Fort Smith served as a transit point and stockade for the forced resettlement during Indian Removal. That is, it became part of Trail of Tears for some of the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples whom the federal government was relocating.

The National Park Service at Fort Smith does go to some efforts to relate this history of empire's border to contemporary visitors, for whom this being the boundary between sovereign territories may seem unimaginable.

Still, the commemoration of the Trail of Tears and ongoing white land grabs sits uneasily beside the far more dominant narrative of brave men extending law and order to a wild frontier. (Historical marking is probably a better term as compared to the Native commemorations of forcible relocation at, say, Bosque Redondo in New Mexico or the Cherokee Heritage Center in Oklahoma [created in conjunction with the NPS], which seem like stronger efforts to link histories of forced removal to the present and future of these nations rather than treating this 'past' as a regrettable moment in 'our nation's history.')

Empire's Edge and Center: Fort Chaffee (Road Musing #3)

I ended up at Miss Laura's in Fort Smith became of neighboring Fort Chaffee. And I became aware of Chaffee because it was a place where the US had both resettled and imprisoned Cuban nationals who had come to the US as part of the Mariel boat lift in 1980.

Arkansas is a long way from the Florida shores where these folks' boats landed. The story of how this group of Cubans ended up here goes something like this: a few years earlier, in the mid-1970s, Chaffee had served as a resettlement location for Southeast Asian refugees from the US war in Vietnam. Many Vietnamese refugees did in fact resettle in the Fort Smith area, but resettling the Cubans, I was told repeatedly, was an entirely different experience. In short, 1980 was an election year (Carter v. Reagan) and the economy was in the tank. A mass migration by sea of over 125,000 people in a short window of time became another symbol of flagging US power. Moreover, the media portrayed these Cubans as entirely different than the freedom lovers fleeing communist oppression. Castro had let some people out of prison, along with others whom the US also considered as "undesirables."

Klan prostesting outside Fort Chaffee

Riots by Cubans at Chaffee in 1981, protests outside the facility by the Klan, and broader public disapproval spelled doom for Governor Bill Clinton re-election bid. He lost his position, and the crisis also contributed to Carter's weak-kneed image that Reagan promised to fix. And incoming President Reagan promised the new Arkansas governor to take care of the situation and close the facility. (And the rest of that story is part of a book I'm writing with Alison Mountz.)

Empire's edge and center: Nothing much about sex (Summer Road Musing #2)

Growing up in Colorado came with a steady dose of frontier mythology. And as other Western places, it also partakes in its fair share of exceptionalism. Fort Smith, Arkansas was no exception to that. It is certainly proud of its frontier heritage. More than once in my short time there, I was told that the small city had won the True West magazine's number one spot on its annual list of True Western Towns. 

It is also proud of its firsts and exceptions: the official US Marshals Service museum will be built here, and it also proudly shares that it hosts the only bordello on the national registry of historic places. Miss Laura's now houses the official visitors’ center. Visitors can get a little tour of the place and learn that for a time in the 1920s, the ‘social club’ was regulated by the local health department. 

By the looks of the health certificate (you get your very own when you visit!), the health department was making a pretty penny.

I was first told to visit Miss Laura's while in Hot Springs, Ark. For the woman who enthused about it as a destination, it seemed to give an insight into the lives of tough, independent working class women. This is not the only meaning the place has for people, for certain, but I am intrigued by the intrigue that ostensibly frank talk about sex and the lives of sex workers brought with it. On the tour, we saw the parlor and upstairs bedrooms (now housing tourism offices), and period clothes and furniture, and a few photographs and public health records. Nothing lurid like famous johns or raucous parties, so maybe the understatement was its own suggestion.  Or nothing much beyond the acknowledgement of sex work in this border place needed to be said as it taps into titillating narratives of bordellos in the Wild West.

The geek version that I imagine of this "bordello on the border" would open up the possibility for talking about the relations among the military, colonialism, and sex. But that is a different project than what I came here to look into. 

Summer Road Wander, Note #1

Fort Smith, Arkansas was a main destination for my summer road trip. Yes, the Fort Smith, and neighboring Fort Chaffee, that I maintain are at the center of the American empire.

Along the way, I meandered through Hot Springs, Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson created a natural reservation at Hot Springs in 1832 to preserve the healing qualities of water for the American people. He was simultaneously pursuing the forced removal of indigenous nations east of the Mississippi River and their relocation to new territories in the Indian Territories. (The formal reservation system would come later.)

What drew me to Hot Springs was not its mob town or boyhood-home-of-President-Clinton history. Instead, it was a little 'Did You Know?' note on Hot Springs' NPS website noting that the US Public Health Services had run a bathhouse and clinic in Hot Springs. I am always intrigued by instances when the US when government-run health services seem appropriate.