mob rape in richmond

I've been a little quiet - this is actually a good sign. For me. It's a sign that I'm nudging along in a more contented way, less tormented, more sort of living in the moment. Geez. I hate that phrase. More dog like I guess. I've been busier than I want to be, I've been starting to need some absenteeism and just over the last two or three days I can feel the regurgitating red dust swirling in my gut. I'm beginning to feel a familiar panic over money and yes - the Richmond 'gang-rape' has these reactive doors swinging open and shut in my brain like barn doors crashing around in a storm. Noisy. Clattering. Gaining momentum. Not so quiet anymore.

Gang rape is a strange phrase to use because it sort of covers the event with a sense that it was 'gang' related. That allows many to pretend that neither they nor their sons could ever be involved. I prefer mob rape, because it evokes for me the sort of hysteria of a mass gathering coupled with the indifference towards a fellow human being.

I went to school in Richmond. Richmond, Surrey, in England, that is. Now I live just two small cities from Richmond, California. The name is the only similarity. Albany which boasts the 'best' school district in the East Bay sits just to the north of Berkeley, it is home to the Subaru and a scary number of parental lesbian homeowners. It is a town where the ex police chief once told me 'I'm probably way more liberal than you, Jill'. It wasn't always so. Albany was once the area stronghold for the John Birch Society. Next up the northern trail to Richmond is El Cerrito. This town never met a big box store it didn't like, and the overground BART tracks dissect the town. Tract houses built in the expansion of the 50's spread up the hillside like a wildfire and used car dealers line the main drag. Yet El Cerrito has one of the best used music stores and a recently renovated indie movie house. It's cheaper to buy a house there than in Berkeley or Albany. But it does merge with Richmond. At an ugly criss-cross intersection of freeways and major thoroughfares where large buildings sit empty - Richmond oozes its despair onto the neighboring town. Berkeley sort of looks over its shoulder to make sure Richmond isn't creeping any closer.

I drive through Richmond, I have saved kittens from the streets and rescued a goose from in front of a drug dealers house, I have photographed the old glorious shipyards and taken wrong turns and felt a panic in my gut, I look at the sprawl of broken homes from the freeway and notice the dead pitbull on the Central Avenue off-ramp, I once took in a young brindle pit puppy from Richmond with a crushed foot wrapped in electrical tape. Houses and warehouses sit empty and disheveled and burned carcasses of buildings sit surrounded by chain link fence. What once was a thriving downtown is empty at the weekend.

What can ever become of this town and so many like it? Drugs are the currency, guns are the deal-maker. It is ranked 49th most dangerous city in the US with a population over 75,000  and much is being made of that grisly statistic. But that is a huge improvement over 2006 when it was ranked 29th most dangerous. Yet Richmond has one of the only elected Green Party Mayors of a major US city, a woman from a union family, a woman who will fight to prevent the kind of development along the shoreline that demeans a city, the kind of development that offers short term gain that mayors with their eye on re-election traditionally welcome with open arms.

But none of it matters when cultural apathy means not a single witness to an assault of this kind taps in 911 on the cell phones every one of them carries, when an entire mob can leave a 15 year old girl slumped and brutalized beneath a bench in an unlit section of a schoolyard and melt into the darkness and go home. And it isn't just Richmond men and boys who commit these acts of unspeakable disregard. It simply is not acceptable that girls and women (and gays, lesbians and transgender people) cannot be safe from (predominantly) male violence. And while much hand wringing and fuss is made about the truancy rate at schools and the responsibility of the security guards at the homecoming dance that night - we must be willing to look into the eyes of boys and men who abuse and assault and say 'no more, you and you alone bear the blame for this act'.

Comments

[Deborah]

here. here.