“The Whole Damn System Is Guilty”: Urban Violence, the Principal Contradiction of Racial Capitalism, and the Production of Premature Death in Oakland, California

Abstract

Discourses of “urban violence” are deployed in reaction to the mobilizations advanced by working-class communities of color following extrajudicial police murders. This discourse delegitimates these mobilizations while pathologizing said communities by insisting that “urban violence,” not police murders, is a more pertinent issue. This article takes seriously the claims made during the Oscar Grant “moment”— a period of popular struggle — that “the whole damn system is guilty.” This article uses Gramscian conceptualizations of socio-historical activity, organic and conjunctural, along with public health and socio-economic measures, to counter the obfuscating discourse of “urban violence” by illustrating the structural violence that communities in Oakland endure and contest. The sum of this structural violence constitutes the principle contradiction of racial capitalism, which produces premature death for working-class communities of color in Oakland. The extrajudicial police murder of Grant in Oakland catalyzed the blossoming open of this contradiction into an intensified moment of struggle.