In Defense of Sideshows

Culture or Criminality?

If you hate sideshows in the Bay Area, or maybe even called the cops about them, you should know: Sideshows have been happening in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades and no amount of complaining, or even attempts at law enforcement, has made them go away.

That’s because every American city worth its weight in gold is also home to debatably destructive subcultures that are as synonymous with their locations as the architecture that defines their skylines. Artistic revolutions and uninhibited forms of expression that develop into regional symbols of rebellion are never embraced by the upper classes—and they shouldn’t be. 

Organized unlawful activity, which is almost always initially thought of as dangerous and upsetting, can later become accepted upon future analysis. 

Can you imagine New York City without graffiti? You can’t and you shouldn’t. That’s exactly why I can’t imagine the Bay Area without sideshows. Graffiti and street art are as synonymous with New York City as good pizza and the Statue of Liberty, just as dudes doing doughnuts in crowded intersections are as Bay Area as good Chinese food and the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the late 1970s, hip-hop was frowned upon as kids hellbent on destroying records. Now it’s the most popular music genre in the world—nearly a quarter of all global Spotify streams are attributed to Hip Hop artists. Skateboarding, while hated by rent-a-cops and pearl-clutching suburbanites, became a billion-dollar industry that gave us icons like Tony Hawk, Bam Margera and Rob Dyrdek.

Oakland has been influential in the sideshow subculture for years. Now, sideshows are happening more frequently in San Francisco, too, causing new waves of wealthy residents to complain. Blue-collar suburbs like Richmond, Vallejo, Hayward, Pittsburg and Antioch regularly host sideshows to the chagrin of local law enforcement and the same 10 people on Nextdoor who have turned crime and Fox News-esque fear-mongering into digital hobbies. 

Fear-mongering aside, sideshows are dangerous and have led to numerous injuries and even deaths. Sideshows have a well-documented history of descending into mob violence and even the occasional shootout. There are legitimate safety concerns that should be addressed. One of the ways these safety concerns could be addressed is to make sideshows a legal spectator sport in which certain areas could be a designated safe zone for sideshows. There would be enforceable rules and safety precautions put in place. Something that was once considered a blight on the Bay Area could be converted into our own regional version of NASCAR. 

Sideshows are far from the only destructive activity involving automobiles. There were over 42,000 deaths attributed to car crashes in 2022. Yet San Francisco has all but abandoned issuing traffic citations, which could be used to combat issues like drunk driving, while bolstering the city budget.The highest rates of traffic fatalities were found in Southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana, where drunk driving is significantly more common than sideshows.  

Critics say law enforcement should be more aggressive in its handling of sideshows, but what these critics fail to address is the added danger a heavy-handed police response would lead to. Sideshows do cause deaths and property damage, but police chases kill hundreds of people in the United States every year. Simply put, sideshows are a problem that added law enforcement would likely make worse. Not to mention, the complicated history that Bay Area police departments have with communities of colors, and the various scandals that range from underage prostitution to executing unarmed civilians which validates concerns expressed by community leaders. 

San Francisco is home to numerous normalized activities that are technically illegal, but largely accepted. Public nudity, and public sex acts happen openly at Dolores Park, during the Folsom Street Fair, or in the Castro and very rarely do people complain – yet when primarily black and brown youth do doughnuts in a parking lot or at an intersection, one observer was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying “'When your mayor and the police can't maintain law and order you call in the National Guard,'’ Sideshows are just as culturally significant to low income communities of color in the Bay Area as sexual liberation is to the LGBTQIA community. Similar to sideshows, the history of the LGBTQIA community is filled with confrontations with law enforcement. 

Many of the critiques ignore the root cause of sideshows. What these people, especially the transplants, fail to understand is that sideshows have been here much longer than they have and will continue to be here long after the complainers have decamped to the suburbs, where they'll probably complain about each other’s leaf blowers. Yes, I’m looking at you, Orinda.

Sideshows date back to the 1980s, when low-income communities of color were regularly harassed by law enforcement due to unfair policing practices and President Ronald Reagan’s failed war on drugs, which we can see just by walking down Market Street. The ongoing war on sideshows, just like the war on drugs, is also a complete failure. 

America is a country obsessed with treating symptoms, but not addressing their root causes. And many of the social ills that caused the drug epidemic are also behind sideshow culture. Poverty, segregation and a complete lack of institutional integration naturally create frustration that manifests in all sorts of ways. When you’re marginalized you dull the pain with drugs and alcohol, look for a group of people who will accept you, or participate in activities that give you an outlet for your frustrations.

Sideshows are a collective outlet for mutual frustration. Despite the Bay Area’s progressive reputation, working-class people of all colors, but especially Black and brown people, have been largely forgotten. Their opinions are never really taken into account when major decisions are made, like Mayor London Breed announcing a curfew for liquor stores in food deserts like the Tenderloin, or when Sen. Scott Wiener gleefully announces legislation to increase bridge tolls. What do you expect them to do? Nothing? 

Speaking of nothing, when you have nothing invested in a society you feel ignores you, there’s really no reason not to get in a potentially stolen car, start doing doughnuts and then light the car on fire. If your life already sucks, what do you have to lose? 

The people who complain about sideshows do have a right to complain, but they’re complaining about the wrong things. It’s not like the more affluent residents of the Bay Area are morally superior. They just have something to lose. They’re invested in the system because they were given the opportunity to invest in the system. They benefit from its continuation and little pockets of anarchy, no matter how small, are inherently threatening to the whole. 

Just like the drug war before, you can’t incarcerate yourself out of sideshows. You can increase the number of police, you can impound the cars and impose more severe penalties, but if a group of people are perpetually left out, they’re going to find a way to act out. 

If it’s not doing doughnuts and lighting cars on fire in Oakland or at the Embarcadero, it’ll be something else. It’ll always be something. The Dolores Park Hill bomb and illegal fireworks on the Fourth of July aren’t going away either. The San Francisco Bay Area has the greatest concentration of millionaires in the United States and San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in. But for most of us, no matter your background, it doesn’t trickle down.

If you want the gunshots, the sideshows, and the drug activity to decrease, you have to give people a reason to care about continuing to further the system they live in…

And we haven’t. 

So until then, as Mistah Fab and Too Short so eloquently said, “Go, go, go dumb at the sideshow! Huh?!? What are you smokin’?”