“And that’s what I would have turned into.”
“And it was only after learning about organizing that I realized, ‘Oh, what I wanted to be, with that superhero thing, was a cop,’’ says Riley. (He first got hooked when a youth organizer, a friend of his dad’s, stopped by the house with some teenage girls and asked if he wanted to go to the beach with them - but first they were headed to support the cannery workers’ strike in Watsonville.) Then, when he was 14, he got into community organizing. First, he discovered Prince, and decided he wanted to be like him instead. Luckily, he says, two other interests derailed those plans. “It was, How can I realistically make this happen?” I was practicing sneaking into rooms silently,” he recalls, some 40 years later, over lunch in Oakland on a warm afternoon. “I was in serious gymnastics, martial arts, throwing stars, doing nunchucks. He remembers losing himself in comic books - he loved Daredevil, and anything with ninjas - and coming away determined to make “caped crusader” a career path. Growing up in the Eighties in East Oakland with a civil rights attorney father, the younger Riley was drawn to a different version of justice. When Boots Riley was 12 years old, he wanted to be a superhero.
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