Public transportation fight videos: a case study in urban race relations?
If activity on YouTube is any indication, the San Francisco public transportation system seems to be a hot bed for conflict, and the fact that the city's residents are a tech-savvy crowd means that incidents are regularly caught on camera. A quick search on YouTube turns up lots of results. A new video uploaded on Tuesday already has a whopping 1.6 million views at the time of this post.
Last fall, this video of two women fighting on the Stockton route of the San Francisco MUNI (the Bay Area's bus system) went viral practically overnight. It has 870,000 views to date.
Several altercations between the police officers and passengers of the Bay Area's underground railway system, BART, have also been video taped and uploaded to YouTube. Most recently, this violent scuffle between a rowdy BART rider and a BART policeman ended in the two shattering a glass window, badly cutting themselves. Most notoriously, the fatal shooting of a young man named Oscar Grant, whose death was captured on numerous cell phone cameras, spread quickly around the web and YouTube became a virtual town hall in which users expressed their anger and pain and shared their tributes to the fallen Grant.
The video posted yesterday shows two grown men -- one white, one black -- arguing in the back of a MUNI bus in Oakland, California. Things escalate and quickly turn physical while another passenger documents the whole thing on camera. Viewer discretion is advised as some strong language is used and violence breaks out towards the end.
Racial tension appears to have played a key role in this dispute, and many believe that the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland also revealed racial prejudice; Grant was a young black man who was unarmed and appeared to be doing nothing wrong, and the officer who shot him was white. Many of the response videos uploaded to YouTube questioned whether racism was in play. The video that shows the two women - one Chinese, one black - attacking each other over a free bus seat also makes you cringe; there's so much anger bottled up that suddenly erupts.
Those who have ridden on a public bus as it transports people through the different neighborhoods of San Francisco may have experienced the unique mixing of cultures and classes on public transportation, perhaps unlike any other social forum. We continue to watch as members of the community decide over and over again to document these conflicts and upload them to YouTube so others can watch.
In San Francisco unique in the number of incidents and/or the frequency with which they are captured on camera? How often are racial tensions to blame? Do skirmishes like these happen on public transportation systems everywhere?
We're curious to hear from you.
