The Corner

“Get it straight: there not just out here to sling and shoot drugs. That’s where it all began, to be sure, but thirty years has transformed the corner into something far more lethal and lasting than a simple marketplace. The men and women who live the corner life are redefining themselves at incredible cost, cultivating meaning in a world that has declared them irrelevant…. lives without any obvious justification are given definition through a simple, self sustaining capitalism.”

-David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood, pg 58.

For any of you HBO junkies out there, Simon and Burns are also the minds behind The Wire. Some of the best, smartest, and most compassionate television ever made, in my personal opinion. Oakland is very different than Baltimore, and even Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Unlike these Northern cities, which integrated in unprecedented numbers as an aftermath of slavery, Oakland was part of California’s promised land. Many African Americans relocated to Oakland from the Southwest, in search of jobs with the railroad and other industries. You can still hear the Southern twang mixed into the accents of many residents of East and West Oakland.

But when the Southern Pacific railway went silent, so did many industrial jobs—factories like the regional facility for Granny Goose, and for Gerber, closed their doors as they did in so many places, leaving people without employment. Following the 1970’s, Deep East Oakland became known as home to some of the most notorious streets in California. Before this it had been practically suburban, something still evidenced by the houses and street layout. This is another unique aspect of East Oakland. Despite sharing a sister status with Baltimore, Oakland has (other than possibly the San Antonio Villa Projects made famous by local kingpin Felix Mitchell) no major series of government-built housing projects. There is nothing like Harlem’s depressing bleak mini skyscrapers, or Chicago’s Cabrini Green. But with the closing factories and the mass exodus of (mostly white) middle class families, it started to become the streets we now know as epicenters of violence. As Burns and Simon put it:

“This is an existential crisis rooted not only in race—which the corner has slowly transcended—but in the unresolved disaster of the American rust-belt, in the slow, seismic shift that is shutting down the assembly lines, devaluing physical labor, and undercutting the union pay scale” (The Corner, pg. 59).

There is a message in Burns and Simon about the psychological cost of the death of the working-class American dream. It created the corner, that poverty and lack of hope created the culture of the underground economy. The introduction of crack cocaine here filled a double bill. Ready addicts whose depressed circumstances and lack of economic options made it all too easy for them to fall victim to a drug that dulled the pain. And side by side, it created a marketplace where finally, young black men had a chance to make money, by selling those drugs.

But the underlying message is haunting. The death of working-class America does indeed, transcend race. The death of one way of life with no replacement jobs, with no opportunities or hope to fill the void, will only create more corners, and next time not primarily in black neighborhoods. Maybe then we will take notice and not stick to the safe -- and, I think, sometimes hidden -- assumption that this happened to them but not us.

And when you talk about the crack epidemic to many residents, you realize it is commonly accepted here that crack was introduced by the government. In part to subvert the revolutionary fervor that the sixties and seventies brought to a boil in black neighborhoods across the country. Look no further than the Black Panther Party. Understanding how the past brought us to where we are is essential. But it isn’t enough. Again, I quote Simon and Burns:

“How do we bridge the chasm? How do we begin to reconnect to those now lost to the corner world? As a beginning, at least, we need to shed our fixed perceptions and see it fresh, from the inside….

“We need to start over, to admit that somehow the forces of history and race, economic theory and human weakness have conspired to create a new and peculiar universe in our largest cities. Our rules and imperatives don’t work down here. We’ve got to leave behind the useless baggage of a society and culture that still maintains the luxury of reasonable judgments” (The Corner, pg 60).

Some how, at some point, the rules for surviving changed here.

I met many police officers in my work, good and loyal men. Including OPD’s Deputy Chief Kozicki, who despite his gruff demeanor shows an honesty and willingness to discuss that is hopeful. Yet in the interview and panel discussion we held, Deputy Chief Kozicki kept saying that the community must fix itself, as if this was a tacit admission that police are coming in from the outside. Police are, or at least should be, part of the community. And when a broken community needs fixing, all parts must be fixed. Fault lines are not just divides; they are also the spider cracks that exist everywhere. If we are truly to reach out to the truth of the corner there cannot be an us and them mentality. We cannot superimpose, we must instead endeavor to understand. And in this process, each one of us must take a certain amount of responsibility. The police are the community. I am the community. I cannot remove myself from the Deep East. It may be isolated and insular, but the only way to change that is to not let it be. They are our children, our neighbors, our friends, and our compatriots. And until we learn how to practice that in reality, I firmly believe that nothing can change.