The Oscar Grant 'moment' was a period of intensified struggle in Oakland - starting just before Oscar Grant, a young Black man, was murdered by transit police officer Johannes Mehserle on January 1st, 2009, and lasting (at least) until November 5th, 2010 (when Johannes Mehserle was sentenced for involuntary manslaughter). Despite local news coverage, and subsequent popular cultural texts, few academic texts engage the Oscar Grant "moment", a moment rich for analysis as a number of social issues can be refracted and studied -- from resistance, to the expansion and militarization of policing, to gentrification, neoliberal multiculturalism in urban planning, gentrification, the 'non-profit industrial complex', to the repression of social struggles.

There are a number of limitations when the Oscar Grant 'moment' is mentioned, documented, or analyzed in academic literature. The extrajudicial police murder of Oscar Grant is reductively credited to a static, transhistoric racism, and the popular self-activity that made Grant's murder known are erased or under-analyzed. This, perhaps, is because academics appear to have not engaged the texts produced by radical activist-scholars, texts that contain the most accurate historical accounts and erudite analyses of this moment. While there is consistency to white supremacy and the premature death it produces, such a reductive portrayal obscures the historically and geographic specific projects and networks of social bodies that are re-/articulating racial regimes particular to specific times and places -- leaving sites for popular intervention unnamed. In performing the necessary work of demonstrating the forces of racial capitalism and its bloody consequences, we might lose sight of popular self-activity, the means of producing a radically democratic social order.

This dissertation demonstrates racial capitalism as the principal contradiction that negates human dignity and life by reviewing the development of racial capitalism in Oakland, the contemporary forms of premature death it produces, as well as naming some of the contemporary projects and agents that are profitably repressing and antagonizing popular social bodies through gentrification and saturation policing. Furthermore, using grassroots and independent media as an archive, this dissertation examines the popular self-activity that condensed into and produced the Oscar Grant "moment". This demonstrates the robust condensation of popular self-activity from a multitude of different groups and traditions - from radical political traditions of anarchism and marxism, to those active in the cultural production of hip hop -- as well how people from seemingly apolitical networks and active in seemingly apolitical pursuits contributed to this moment of intensified struggle.

As a result of the Oscar Grant 'moment', popular social bodies made significant gains - by disrupting networks of elites who were advancing gentrification and policing, as well as breaking the veritable impunity to law enforcement officers who murder extra-judiciously. More importantly, and as activist accounts and analyses state, popular social bodies deepened their analyses of law enforcement and the 'non-profit industrial complex', as well as deepened their networks and ties, all of which allowed for the intensity and maturation of struggle manifest in the Occupy Oakland 'moment'. While gains were made through the synergistic condensation of popular self-activity from different networks of people, we are still left wanting by way of re-/producing a radically democratic social order, and the synergy of popular self-activity necessary to do so cannot be left to happenstance. As such, open-ended questions about making radical political praxis mundane in 'ordinary' times are proposed. Rather than bring people to extraordinary acts of radical political praxis in moments of crisis, how do we weave radical political praxis into the mundane and the practical of 'ordinary' times? How do we produce radically democratic, popular vehicles to resolve pressing, popular issues and realize collective utopian visions?