oscar grant was shot at close range in the back while in handcuffs by BART police officer johannes mehserle in front of friends, family and strangers on a bart platform in oakland california on new years day 2009. oscar grant was unarmed and mehserle claims he was "reaching for his taser." the murder was captured by numerous passengers on the train, and although the bart police attempted to confiscate all cellphones, the video of course made it onto various media outlets:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJukcFzEX4

(CAUTION: GRAPHIC!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZTbJH6BNaU&feature=related



following the circulation of this video all over the internet there was a rally at the fruitvale station, and lots of unrest in the streets of downtown oakland later on that night. this led to little over a hundred people being arrested after clashes with oakland police. mehserle resigned and fled to tahoe, was extradited and currently stands trial. there has been a great deal of organizing activity against state terror since then.



so i've had this pic of a sticker that began circulating around the time of the police shooting. it's this amazing visual pun of the BART logo and a gun.



http://www.dlist.com/viewmedia.do?mid=1513724&profile_id=62239



the image is propaganda, it captures the rage of the moments following the murder of oscar grant. it makes a clear connection implicating the role that such taken-for-granted institutions play in our oppression. those living in the bay area, those who are familiar with this case and remember it, or were among those who watched the video thousands of times online, recognize what it symbolizes instantly.



i've just received notification that this image has been removed due to some sort of content violation. of course i don't expect anything more of this website (truthfully, what more could be expected of a website that arbitrarily censors users typing the word "vagina" in its chatroom), but i want to call to attention to what dlist is clearly stating through such an elliptical boilerplate pic-disapproval email. by censoring expression of any dissent against the violence of the state, whether its committed by the militarized policies of special governmental agencies like BART or by the trained profiling practices of individuals in its police department such as mehserle, dlist is essentially supporting it, dlist is aligning itself with the value system of the state by hiding propaganda against the state. by way of metaphor, dlist is plucking cellphones from witnesses videoing our murders.



dlist is erasing rage against state murder, the murder of oscar grant by BART police officers. they are obscuring any connection this murder may have to the possible murder of dlist members by the state. this is precisely how oppression operates. because dlist is "a site for gay guys and their friends," because dlist evokes gay identity, gay history and thus homophobic violence, this is especially annoying. by hiding my pic, what is obscured are any connections a gay identity may have with any other forms of oppression. this obscuring of course weakens the opportunity to expose dlist's members to the full possibilities of their sexuality and gender, and of course makes members vulnerable to oppression. what is the point of invoking "gay" only to disconnect it from our lived experiences of violence, of histories of homophobic violence and organized responses to this violence? what is the agenda of dlist? dlist aligns itself with the violence of gay assimilation into the mainstream, into systems of state terror, through this image removal, just as gus van sant edits the white night riots from a film about harvey milk to win an academy award.



it's perhaps very telling that the image was removed in june, during gay pride month. as gays clamor for open participation in continued colonial shenanigans through don't act don't tell (come help the coast guard keep the beach clear of media trying to capture the bp spill! or, join the extended petrol war hostilities in obama's AfPak theater!), apparently gone are any ideas of a gay identity being separate from the state, of any possibilities of resistance to ongoing legacies of colonial violence. i would insist that i am being told to divide myself, since my black self is more vulnerable to being murdered in a way similar to oscar grant than my wan participation in the gay market which privileges whiteness and the rich which must be protected by the state. the unfortunate and unsexy reality of my black identity is thus being censored by the open elliptical actions of dlist, the legacies of violence against black people at the hands the state, organizing that's happened against this violence, the violence against black bodies that is the core of this country, its history, its present. the notion that a gay identity must by definition exclude rage against this oppression faced is disgusting, assimilationist and lethal. the notion that a black identity should exclude this is an outright non sequitur. i reiterate, to deny these realities is to make oneself vulnerable to them, but of course, some more than others...

i'm betting against a care since there's no way i'll go broke. i've grown into knowing full better to ever expect i should fitfully discover company to come and help watch the world destroy itself with. it's just not in the stacking of the deck. this is directed to all of you who have discovered that through being a guy you pretty much get out of ever having to do any real work. i can't possibly imagine what your world is like. so stop reading now. this isn't going to charm you. i want to build and unmake not so much because the verbs sound romantic in a sentence, but because that's the only way i know how to act. i wish i could slide into a life where everything is pretty much waiting for me already. well kind of. no joke baby: the world of my heart's wildest dreams will terrify you to drop dead boredom. but it's my line in the sand, and an important one: don't make the mistake in disbelieving that i would sooner die with my dignity intact than to entertain the casual acquaintance of someone i have zero political respect for. entirely of my own choosing you might notice that i speak a language that must constantly be re-invented fairly play-by-play. it's just to above-all-else make it easier to truly capture and accurately represent all those countless casual human horrors in the world that you cause for all of us who will never be you. when they were passing out eyes-that-don't-close and drinking buddy licenses in the birth canal i picked eyes-that-don't-close. something's desperately in need of repair where my heartbeat sits. as of this typing there's only a single solitary dull briquette wearing a color photocopied mushroom cloud mask.


























the only reason i don't give a fuck is because i don't really know how.