Grant’s life was tragically cut short and although Fruitvale Station is not a pleasant experience, it is a necessary one. There are moments in the film that are difficult to watch. Grant has made his share of mistakes and poor decisions, but none of this, the film argues, justifies his murder. His father is absent from the picture, and his mother is the glue that keeps the family together. His girlfriend works at Walmart to support their daughter, and his sister similarly works at a fast-food chain to survive. As the film progresses, we are offered brief glimpses into a man who lives on the fringes of society. This brings us to Fruitvale Station‘s greatest strength. He is not given one, and although we sympathize with his plight, we also realize that Grant is partially responsible for this in the same way that he is responsible for his incarceration. In one scene, for example, Grant returns to a job that he was fired from weeks earlier for showing up late in an attempt to get a second chance.
Rather, he is depicted as a complex individual who has much to learn about life. This does not mean that the film deifies Grant. Even with the best intentions and a loving and supporting family, the cards are stacked against him. By simply showing Grant’s daily struggles to care for his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal), obtain employment, and stay out of trouble, the filmmakers demonstrate how difficult it is for a young African-American male with a criminal record to rebuild his life. In this moment, Grant comes off as a selfish, arrogant, and short-tempered young man who still has much to learn about life.Īside from this harrowing flashback, however, Fruitvale Station focuses on the final day in Grant’s life, and here we are ultimately presented with a young man who struggles to reinvent himself after his prison sentence. Grant is visited by his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer), and an intimate conversation between a mother and son is destroyed when Grant is distracted by a fellow inmate and subsequently starts a fight with him. In the film’s only flashback scene, we learn that Grant was incarcerated in 2008 for drug dealing. (2012, 2)Īlexander raises numerous thought-provoking claims about the American justice system and how it is supposedly designed to maintain a social and cultural hierarchy between whites and blacks in which African-Americans are systematically treated as second-class citizens.įruitvale Station makes it clear that Oscar Grant is a product of this unfair justice system. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. Michelle Alexander calls attention to the inequities between whites and blacks in her eye-opening book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Those who claim that race is no longer an issue in America are wrong. Jordan), a 22-year-old African-American male, before he was gunned down by a BART police officer on 1 January 2009. The film recreates the last day of Oscar Grant III (Michael B. In the case of Fruitvale Station (2013), Ryan Coogler’s excellent debut, we are challenged to confront our seldom spoken tendencies to judge a situation without knowing anything about it, and to consider the possible repercussions of those judgments. The best art usually forces us to face our flaws.
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