I want to start with a story that happened when I lived in Oakland in the mid to late 1960s. My very-exwife and I lived in an old house on Lester Avenue that had been split into two apartments. The main level of the house was split in half so both entries and both main floors were at street level. The house/flats had been pretty rundown but the landlord had remodeled our half so, when we moved in, we lived in half the main floor that had been repainted and refurbished and a newly finished basement bedroom and bathroom that was under our half of the first floor and the other half’s kitchen.

The rent was cheap – $90 a month, as I recall – and it was a convenient place to live, close to Lake Merritt and close to freeway access, but it was not in an area that was considered nice at the time nor was it considered particularly safe. Anyway, after we moved in, the landlord started remodeling the other flat. Usually, he locked it each night, but, towards the end, while he was painting the second unit, he left the windows open for the paint to dry. As we were getting ready to go to bed, we heard somebody walking around upstairs. It was probably in the other unit but it was hard to tell and right above our head. We panicked and my now very-ex-wife immediately called the police.

This was in the summer of 1968, and Martin Luther King had been murdered – but Robert Kennedy hadn’t; yet – there had been riots fueled by Black rage in almost every American City but not in Oakland. What particularly surprised me was that there were riots in San Francisco which seemed much more Black friendly than Oakland which was run like a police state. I wondered why.

Back at Lester, when my very-ex-wife called the police and told them we had a burglar, the cop on the line asked “Is he in the house?” Uhh, no sir. “Then he is not a burglar lady, he is a prowler.” It was not a conversation we expected what with the prowler walking around above our heads but it is good to know the proper nomenclature. Inside the house is a burglar, outside is a prowler.

I think the cop knocked on the door before we even got off of the phone. I went upstairs – with a hairbrush in case it was a burglar and not a prowler – and the cop was waiting outside, weapon drawn. In the middle of the street was another patrol car with another cop standing behind the car with a shotgun pointing at us, me, really. I told him that we heard somebody walking around in the other half of the house and he knocked on the door yelling “police” and stepped to the side. I just stood there, in front of the door, until the cop told me to stand to the side, away from the door. Pointing at the door, he said, “That’s where he is going to shoot.” Up until then, it had never occurred to me that one result, when I knocked on a door, would be somebody shooting at me. But he – they – didn’t shoot and we went inside, found an open window, locked it, and went our separate ways, the police officer back to driving around in the dark and me, two new lessons learned, back to sleep.

As to why the riots happened where they happened, I’ve thought about it a lot and it is complicated, each city has its own particulars. Still, I think that there is a general lesson here, only a hypothesis, really. To greatly oversimplify, nasty dictatorships are stable, think the Soviet Union under Stalin or Saudi Araba under the Saudis, and democracies are stable, think Denmark or Canada, but a pretend democracy is not stable. To us white people, San Francisco talked the good talk – they had something like Safty and Respect on the side of their cars – but, to Black people, they were not what they pretended to be, they were every bit as bad as the Oakland cops. All that good talk was in service of covering up the miserable way Black people were/are really treated in San Francisco in 1968/now. The disconnect is that Black people have been told they live in a democracy with all the liberty and opportunity that implies, but the reality is that they live in an oligarchy in which they are treated as second class citizens. The problem is not reality but the difference between expectations and reality.