UCSF

This dissertation is about an impoverished, African American neighborhood in Oakland, California where the murders of Antoine and Danny occurred. I map the conditions that made their tragic deaths both possible and logical within a racialized vernacular of social, political and economic tidings that enunciate what is seen as a usual, American experience for such a place--a place that is often defined by its high levels of violence. I do this by writing about my own experiences living in this neighborhood, having bought a house here in 1999, as well as those of my neighbors and the families of the victims. Furthermore, I ethnographically engage its storied history, documenting those structures that frame its violence and consequently, molded these deaths. Therefore I look at migration, displacement, and the evocation of privilege and the provocation of poverty. I write about overt and covert racism, struggle, promise and deception. I document the people and policies that greedily promote the hoarding of prosperity and the generous sharing of its losses. I notice the effects of transportation on geography, community, subjectivity and suffering. I learn how wars, both large and small, near and far, seem somehow to always penetrate our lives. And finally, about the unnatural effects of natural disasters; and specifically, how such a seemingly random event as an earthquake, "an act from God," can wiggle its way into a history of racialized oppression in the United States and emerge as a trigger of vulnerability in a homicide epidemic.