Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

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[ 3 ] 1 Dreams Deferred The Patterns of Punishment in Oakland What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? —Langston Hughes, “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” 1951 Just as children were tracked into futures as doctors, scientists, engineers, word processors, and fast-food workers, there were also tracks for some children, predominantly African American and male, that led to prison. —Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys, 2000 Fifteen-year-old Slick, a Latino kid born and raised in Oakland, showed me the “hotspots”: street intersections and sidewalks where life-altering experiences linger, shaping young people’s perspectives of the area. As he walked me through the neighborhood, he pointed to the corner of International Boulevard and 22nd Avenue, where a few months before his best friend took a bullet in the lung during a drive-by shooting. He watched his homey die slowly, gasping like a waterless fish, gushes of blood inundating his respiratory system. We approached the corner of 23rd Avenue and International, and Slick warned me that “at any given Dreams Deferred [ 4 ] moment something could jump off, fools could roll up, and shit could go down.” He did not have to tell me; I had been on these streets in the past as a resident and as a delinquent and later on in life as an ethnographer, observing the young people who spent so much of their lives on these streets. We stopped at a mobile “taco truck” to order a burrito. Standing on the corner watching cars and people pass by, Slick continued to “break it down” for me: “Just the other day, mothafuckas rolled up on me and pulled out a strap to my head. . . . Fuck it, today is my day, . . . so I threw up my [gang] sign and said, ‘Fuck you.’ . . . The thang [gun] got stuck or some shit, ’cause I saw him pulling but nothing came out.” Slick seemed to pretend to show no trauma as he told me the story, but his lips quivered and his hands shook ever so slightly as he grabbed his soda from the taco vendor. As we took our first bite and wiped our hands on our baggy jeans, an Oakland Police Department patrol car pulled into the taco-truck lot. Two officers emerged from the car and ordered us to sit on the curb: “Hands on your ass!” Slick looked down at his burrito, and I realized we were being asked to throw our meal away after only taking one bite. The officer yelled again. Our fresh burritos splattered on the chewinggum -dotted concrete, and we sat on the curb with our hands under our thighs. An officer grabbed Slick’s arms and handcuffed him. Another officer did the same to me. One of them lifted us up by the metal links holding the cuffs together, placing excruciating pressure on our shoulder joints. As they searched us, I asked the officers, “What’s going on?” They provided no response. They took out a camera and took pictures of Slick and me. “Who is this guy?” they asked Slick, pointing to me. Slick told them, “He’s from UC Berkeley. He’s cool, man!” The officers unlocked our handcuffs, told Slick to stay out of trouble, and got in their cars and drove off. The officers had noticed me in the neighborhood and had asked many of the boys about me. They knew I was some kind of college student trying to help the boys out. One of them later told me that I was doing the boys no good by studying them and advocating for them. The officer told me that I was enabling them by harboring their criminality and that I should be arrested for conspiracy. Dreams Deferred [ 5 ] I looked around and saw that a crowd of pedestrians and taco-truck patrons had gathered a few feet away from us. I made eye contact with a Mexican man in his fifties wearing a cowboy hat. He nodded his head with a disappointed look and said, “Pinches cholos” [fucking gangsters] and walked away. I turned to Slick and said, “You OK?” He replied, “That happens all the time. They got nothin’ on me.” “How often does it happen ?” I asked. “Shit! Come on, Vic! You know wassup. It happens every day,” Slick replied. This kind...