Attorney Steve Schleicher: “Please explain to the jury, why did you continue to record what you were seeing here?”
Witness Alisha Oyler: “Because . . . I always see the police, and they’re always messing with people and it’s wrong and it’s not right.”
As the trial of Derek Chauvin draws to a close, in a welter of expert testimony and talk of the crumbling blue wall of police silence, the most important witness from more than three weeks of testimony might also be the least memorable.
From the moment Alisha Merrie Oyler, the young woman in an Arizona T-shirt, took the stand on the first day of testimony, she became the subject of derision on social media. Reaction to her speech and demeanor ranged from scornful mocking to contempt and pity; one source likened her to “a bored child in a required class.”
Oyler’s backstory set the stage for her seemingly disinterested testimony. When viewed through another lens, however, she highlights the less visible but equally important implications of the Chauvin trial. Well beyond the example of a massive failure of the criminal justice system, she stands as a larger indictment of the system as a whole.
“It’s not right,” she said.
The twenty-three year old moved to Minnesota from Arizona and dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. She described herself as a shift lead at the service station across the street from the corner where four Minneapolis police officers, led by Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd.
Oyler caught the incident on her cell phone, capturing the officer’s contemptuous treatment of Floyd. Her testimony offers a window into life for those on the margins of U.S. society. As Michael Harrington described in The Other America, a seminal 1962 book about poverty, the U.S. poor maintain “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” He identified the poor as those Americans “who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress.”
Harrington continued, “each disability is the more intense because it exists within a web of disabilities. And if one problem is solved, and the others are left constant, there is little gain.”
While perhaps not as memorable or compelling as other witnesses, Oyler’s testimony lays the foundation for understanding how that web of disabilities persists in insidious ways. Through her words and those of others, we understand how the trial illustrates not just the critical demand for police reform but also the need for larger structural change.
In 1962, Harrington doubted the ability of his book to capture the attention of the nation. He lamented the lack of an American Dickens who could tell the story of “The Other America” in a way that could prick the conscience of Americans.
More than a half-century later, digital storytellers on cell phones and video from police body cams offer snapshots of that story in all of its trenchant ugliness. We see predatory business practices, unfair working conditions, underemployment, and health disparities. We witness the silencing of women and minorities, the deep-seated persistence of structural anti-Black racism and the challenges of underfunded education as well as the glaring inequities of the criminal justice system. All were on display from various vantage points, symbolized by Derek Chauvin’s knee.
George Floyd experienced COVID-19, a debilitating drug addiction, an enlarged heart, and a fear of law enforcement. In other words, George Floyd was a composite of the invisible America.
Oyler, constantly told to sit closer to the microphone in delivering her testimony, added her own poetic verse in her words and actions to the tapestry of the video.
While “trying not to cuss,” she described the moment when police showed up in the neighborhood “messing” with somebody.
Her perspective is reminiscent of Gil Scott Heron’s 1970 poem, “Whitey on the Moon,” its own indictment on the precarious existence of those trapped in the Other America.
In the poem, Heron’s protagonist describes a trip to the emergency room with his sister as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for the poor in 1970.
He worries about the ten years of medical bills on the horizon after such a visit—the latest in a series of challenges, a web of disparities that he is left to deal with while the government looks to the moon instead of the morass of poverty and injustice all around on earth.
“Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that crap wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell.”
Harrington postulated that U.S. poverty could not be eradicated by calling for the poor to assimilate into the dominant culture or pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The latter, a nineteenth century joke, morphed into an elite admonition to the “have-nots” that goes unquestioned. Harrington rejected it as well as the popular “rising tides” argument that a simple expansion of the economy could solve the problem.
“Society,” Harrington provocatively argued, “must help them before they can help themselves” by undertaking broad “remedial action” in the form of a “comprehensive assault on poverty.” The goal was no less than eradicating the very foundation of the web of disparities undermining U.S. democracy, security, and equitable practices.
In this regard, Alisha Oyler, George Floyd, and now Daunte Wright, do not need our sympathy nor our pity. Instead, we should direct our efforts to the society that continues to ignore conditions rendering countless Americans vulnerable to life on the margins—the frontier of economic despair.
We can no longer mute the cries of the Black Lives Matter movement. We must devote the best of our energies to conquering deep-seated inequalities, educational gaps, and lapses in health care. We must focus on ending unemployment and underemployment that render the economically disadvantaged, Black and white and every shade in-between, vulnerable and invisible.