Seeing through Violence: Murder and Gentrification in West Oakland

Jeffrey Schonberg
Medical Anthropology
UC San Francisco

Schonberg’s home of thirteen years sits in a historically, African American neighborhood of Oakland, California that is partially responsible for making “Oakland” synonymous in the public imaginary with “violence.” This neighborhood is also rapidly gentrifying.  Of the five homicides on his block since his arrival, only one of the victims was white—a twenty-seven-year-old man killed during a botched robbery of his marijuana grow. All of the other victims and perpetrators were black. Schonberg analyzes the details of this murder to another murdered neighbor—that of an eighteen year-old African American man killed by a rival crack dealer.  These two murders offer a framework for interrogating the violence and social suffering of my community through a moment of rapid change within the history of racism that creates a uniquely, American experience.  Furthermore, Schonberg interrogates what it means to do ethnographic, participant-observation research–with its ideas of the convergence of assimilation and distancing–when there is no distinction between the field and home and when spectacular violence creates the stakes.