Most people around my age have probably heard of the name Rodney King and the story behind what happened to him. A similar, and less well known story, but just as tragic, was what happened to Oscar Grant on January 1st, 2009, when he became another wrongful victim of racial profiling and was murdered by a Bart police officer named Johannes Mehserle at Fruitvale Station.
Recently with the release of the movie titled “Fruitvale Station”, the events that happened in that early morning tragedy have taken a much larger spotlight in the nation. I have to admit that up until I saw that movie the other day, which was directed by Ryan Coogler, I didn’t know anything about the terrible misfortune that happened to Oscar Grant.
While the movie did a fantastic job depicting the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar, it also shed even more light into the police brutality that still exists in our country which often arises out of racial profiling. Having grown up in a middle to upper class family that lived in a completely white neighborhood out in the suburbs, my family never experienced any of what people like Oscar went through. But back on an early summer night in 1991, I met someone very similar to him when I was hanging out at a house in the inner city of the area I grew up in. For the three months that followed, I spent time with this individual and got to see a completely different side of the tracks and one that Oscar Grant would have been all too familiar with.
I have often looked back at that summer and felt amazed that I even survived through it. Some of the things I did during that time period were definitely illegal and very insane. Sadly, this person who became my best friend at the time also became someone who was the object of my sex and love addiction even though I was never able to admit that to myself or him back then. He and everyone else I spent time with were black yet I was still readily accepted even though I was white. He was also a small time drug dealer just like Oscar was, who did enough of it just to get by. He had his group of close friends who drank and smoked weed with him at night too. And it didn’t take long for me to be quickly absorbed into his world as I started doing the very same things as him.
There was one night that I was hanging out without him and with one of our mutual friends instead and I can still remember what happened in vivid details. The two of us were lighting off small firecrackers on the train tracks and heading back to his house to crash for the night when suddenly police came out from all directions and drew their guns on us. We were both thrown up against a fence, roughly searched, and talked down upon with curse words even though we hadn’t done anything wrong. The officer who searched us definitely didn’t like how I looked. At the time I had a six inch high flat top, lines and zigzags throughout it and my eyebrows, and wore clothes that definitely fit the inner city look. He told me if he ever saw me downtown again, he was going to “put my wigger ass in jail”. It was the first wake up call I had in my life to how privileged I really had it, as compared to what that friend and all the others I hung out that went through, every single day of their lives.
And that incident wasn’t the only one to happen to me like that either. When I went back to college, I retained that inner city look and went to house parties quite often. On one night I went for a stroll from one of those parties to go get a pack of cigarettes as I smoked them too back then. I was walking up a street headed to the nearest store when a police car passed by. With a screech and a quick turn around in the middle of the road, the car raced up to me and two policeman jumped out. They drew their weapons and threw me up against their cruiser and searched me. When I asked what I had done, I was told to “shut the fuck up”. They then literally forced me quite hard into the back seat of their cruiser without reading me any rights and took me to an apartment complex a few miles away. A person then emerged and walked around the cruiser looking in at me, then shook their head and left. After that, the police took me up the street and kicked me out of their cruiser with no explanation of what any of what had just happened was all about and I was miles away from where I needed to go.
It’s sad but what I experienced is probably only a mere fraction of what many black people, as well as all the other minority races, continue to go through. Oscar Grant lost his life to police that were racial profiling and acting violent because of it. Thankfully, my ending wasn’t the same from when I once fell prey to the same thing. But what did come out of all that for me was a greater understanding and compassion for what the minority races have to endure in this world from so many others, including the police. Fruitvale Station was a riveting film about that and a rather good portrayal of how inner city life can be like for a minority based individual like Oscar was. Hopefully there will come a day when things like his homicide won’t happen anymore. Until then, at least a movie like this will help raise greater awareness to the racism that still exists in our country.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
Read your comments re Oscar Grant – found them quite interesting and illuminating. I myself never experienced such profiling because i never looked the part nor was I in neighborhoods where I would be looked at.. You may want to correct your posting to read “racial” profiling late in the post where it actually says “racing” profiling. Only other cooment is less is more – when I am looking at the web, normally late at night, I don’t have the head to read a lot.