"ICE melt in hell"

Oakland protests just have their own wavelength, especially when they’re small enough that you start to get used to specific strangers’ faces, but large enough that those faces keep getting replaced by new ones. Something about the kind of smallness of the place in that, alongside the bigness of it, actually, and both of those things at once. Anyway, it was too hard not to reflect on the differences from the previous evening, in the West Bay, because hearing the same song from a different singer just keys you into that comparison. Starting with how many more kids and families there were, and ragged hoodies, and teens lounging on bicycles with random energy. Aggressive communist pamphleteers—“where are you going to be on Saturday?” and an explanation that their march on Saturday is the real one, “I’ll see you there!”—but also, the cumbia band was as chill as the pink car blasting music was insane, just outside the bounds of the protest (while a guy with the wheelchair, a bottle, and a dog singlehandedly stopped traffic, and the yellow vest folks were just like \_(ツ)_/ about it)—and then a drone hovered overhead above us, and the sound of a power tool, as workers boarded up the Citibank, right there, during the protest, and somehow someone painted Fuck ICE on it, immediately, and little details like the way the American flag flying above the stage looks like it survived WWII, but just barely. You look over there and is that Kamau Bell? (It sure is, that man is so tall.) A speaker declares that white people aren’t all bad people, just most of them, and the crowd laughs appreciatively. There’s energy here, many different kinds at once, and it crackles.

There’d been a kind of gap in a lot of the speeches, the previous evening, between the exhortative, utopian mode (this doesn’t happen here!), and the sort of flat statement of what was actually happening here and shouldn’t. But there was much less distance in Fruitvale, the next day; Mayor Lee and Supervisor Bas and all the other faith leaders and organizations spokespeople kept saying where they stood, and what they intended to do, and what we, the people, also needed to do, in detail. Write down this phone number. Text this number if you see ICE. Here is how to make the words “Sanctuary City” real. Comparisons can be misleading, of course—this elephant’s foot is so different from this elephant’s trunk! What different beasts they are!—but even so, it was hard not to feel like it was two very different appeals to identity, on stative and one performative. Here is what is and what should not be—because of who we are—and here is what we all must do, to be who we must. A man speaking in Spanish, explained that these are the people with influence, who can influence what is happening, and I took him to be explaining for any non-English speakers what was going on, until he turned it around and said: look for those around you who can influence what is happening, and be those people too.

The sun hadn’t come out, all day, one of those endless grey days where time doesn’t move until the deep chill hits the barely warmed streets, and I hadn’t dressed for it; got some tacos at the orange truck and pedaled home. When the electeds had dispersed, when the interfaith communities and c3s and c4s moved on, a more reckless energy took over, apparently; a car was burned, a business or two was attacked. Like me, the news media had already moved on; having not stayed long enough to write a story about how Chaos Erupted, they had to append it later, and so, in a way, it never quite did.