Happy Birthday, Oscar Grant

Someone was telling me the other day that I shouldn't ride my bike to the Fruitvale BART station because 1. I might get run over, and 2. a couple of people had been killed there recently.

Immediately surrounding the Fruitvale station is a Latino-American neighborhood and commercial district. Shop signs and billboards are written in Spanish. Women selling roses and day laborers stand on the corner while men sell tacos out of trucks. There is no tofu or mango in the burritos sold on International Boulevard. Adjacent neighborhoods are primarily African-American and Asian-American. Fruitvale is off the map for most Bay Area residents, who only hear about it on the news or know that it's on the way to the Oakland Airport. Traveling by bus from downtown Oakland to the Fruitvale station on International Boulevard, I realized that the name is no joke- the street is lined with the shopfronts of businesses, community organizations, and places of worship with signs written in every imaginable language, changing every few blocks- Vietnamese to Chinese to Korean to Spanish- marking the beginning of a new district or neighborhood.

Near the Fruitvale station, there are pawn shops, travel agencies, money wiring services, restaurants with men wearing cowboy hats and smoking outside, women pushing strollers, and people of every color going to and from the station and the indoor market. At the center of it all is a recently-built transit "village", a mix of apartments, shops, and offices including the La Raza health clinic. The village is everything a transit-oriented development should be. It replaced a parking lot with high-density, mixed-use buildings, affordable housing, local-serving retail, outdoor cafes, and you don't even have to cross the street to get to BART and a bus hub. Potential gentrification aside, the concept makes my planner's heart flutter.

My first trip through the station was just a few weeks after the area, and the city of Oakland, had experienced the trauma of waking up on New Year's Day to hear that a young man named Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART police officer as he lay face-down on the station platform in the early hours of the morning. At the time, a makeshift memorial of candles and flowers had appeared on one side of the station, but was cleared by my next visit.

Today, a group of community members, Black, White, and Latino, were handing out fliers for a rally commemorating Grant's birthday and calling for justice in his case. Passersby took pictures of their table and their banner with Grant's image. Taking pictures is a way for people to reduce their discomfort when they are feeling insecure and disoriented in a space. It's a way to take control and distance yourself from a situation or a subject without feeling emotion, or perhaps just a way to try to digest it when you are at a loss for words- like telling someone whose loved one has died that you're sorry for their loss. The fliers and the banner, like the makeshift memorial, keep the event from becoming divorced from the place or fading from memory. People should feel uncomfortable and unsettled about Oscar Grant's death and what it says about our society.

Oscar Grant, I strongly suspect, did not have the luxury of 'avoiding' the Fruitvale station. Neither do most of the people who travel through this vibrant urban space every day, should they even want to.

Oscar Grant would have been 23 years old today.

E. Mattiuzzi