All of this has left Oakland’s blacks and Latinos in a difficult position. They rightly criticize the police, but they also criticize the other invading army, the whites from other cities, and even other states, whom they blame for the vandalism that tends to break out whenever there is a heated protest in town: from the riots after the murder of Oscar Grant by a transit police officer in 2009, to the violence of the last two weeks downtown and, most recently, near the port.

Someday we may discern the deeper historical meaning of these latest events. For now, what’s striking are the racial optics. How did Asian-Americans respond to the sight of a diminutive Asian-American mayor being hooted off the stage by a largely white crowd at an Oct. 27 rally? And where was the sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed? Why did it take the injury of a white protester to attract attention?

Meanwhile, those hurt most by the protests are local business owners and workers, many of them minorities. Jose Dueñas, the chief executive of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Alameda County, blamed the Occupy movement for stalled economic activity. “We’ve got no events planned, people are pulling back,” he told a local newspaper. “We don’t blame them.” The cash-strapped city has spent over $1 million so far in occupation-related costs.

Local activism has been pushed aside as well. Even as Occupy Oakland has occupied the Bay Area headlines, hundreds of black, white and Latino parents met to oppose plans to close five schools in black neighborhoods. The following day there was hardly a single line of newsprint about the meeting.

Trouble Beside the Bay by Ishmael Reed http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/opinion/trouble-beside-the-bay.html?ref=opinion (via fresafresca)

This has been my sentiment since day one. #JadedAsshole

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I’m frankly surprised by the attention this op-ed is getting, especially from ostensibly radical folks. It’s a New York Times op-ed, y’all. With occasional exceptions, New York Times op-eds are not where actual complicated and on-the-ground political analyses take place; rather, they are usually the place where certain ruling class perspectives get concretized and validated. That alone, I think, make this worth being skeptical about. I should add that, as a black person who lives in Oakland, I am part of the “invading army” insofar as I was neither born nor raised here, but rather ended up here by virtue of the social mobility that comes with an elite college education that provided the means possible for me to move across the country and settle in Oakland while I completed graduate school. There are plenty other black folks in Oakland just like me. As a matter of fact, Ishmael Reed, the author of this piece, is one of them, if one of a different generation. Although he taught at Berkeley for some time, he was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is an outsider and an insider too, unless, of course, you buy into the racially essentialist idea that being black makes you an automatic insider to any black community wherever, as though blackness was some sorta cool secret club with membership cards and the like. However nice and reassuring a thought that is, it’s one that paves the way toward some shitty political analysis.

If you take the time to learn anything about the protests that took place after the murder of Oscar Grant (and the effective acquittal of Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot him), you know that the people taking part in “vandalism” and “property destruction” in the protests that followed the shooting were not just white “outsiders.” That was actually a narrative spun afterward by then Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and the Oakland Police, with the help of some of the local non-profiteers, who sought to attribute the uprisings as an expression of infiltrating anarchists rather than as a legitimate expression and rebellion by Oakland’s black and Latino youth, who were just as prominent as white anarchists in smashing windows, raiding stores, setting fires, etc. I didn’t and don’t agree with a lot of these tactics. But I also saw the ways in which for leaders of color, blaming these tactics on white anarchists from outside was a way of pretending that things were all good at home, a way of painting a tidy and orderly picture in which Oakland’s black and Latino communities speak with one voice when it comes to political tactics. By pretending that only white outsiders do these things, members of the black elite like Reed actually rob blacks and Latinos who choose to use violence and vandalism as political tactics, of a voice.

This, of course, is a class strategy. When you pretend that the black and Latino communities speak with one voice, you also put yourself into a position to articulate that voice. You become the ventriloquist. I mean, really, think about it—how often do you hear the phrase, “the white community”? And wouldn’t you look kinda side-eyed at someone who claimed to speak for it? Yet Reed can, in the New York Times, speak for Oakland’s blacks and Latinos with no editorial intervention and people will pass that absurdity off as if it were legitimate.

First of all, if white outsiders are to blame for the riots after Oscar Grant’s murder, then how is it possible to blame them for a lack of “sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed”? Riots aren’t an expression of sympathy? Or principles? I mean, the Occupy/Decolonize Oakland encampment did distinguish itself from the start by renaming Frank Ogawa Plaza—the site of the encampment—as Oscar Grant Plaza. And that was days, perhaps even a week, before Scott Olson’s injury. Moreover, most of the coverage of Olson’s tear gas canister inflicted injury focused not on his whiteness, but on the fact that he was a veteran. We might also ask, why did it take the injury of a veteran to attract attention?

Second of all, and related to my previous post, Reed allows the middle- and upper-middle class stratum of Oakland’s black and Latino populations to stand in for those populations in their entirety. What makes the chief executive of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce more representative of the Latino community than the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Latin@s who have participated in Occupy/Decolonize Oakland from the start?

The point is, Reed’s perspective is a class perspective that is aligned with the “small business owners,” and people who profit from small business owners, in Oakland’s community. It is in these folks’ interest to pretend that there are no dissenting black or Latino voices because those voices might contradict their own. In Oakland, many (but not all) of the small business owners of color have been a highly organized force, and collaborators with the Oakland Police, in efforts to criminalize youth of color. In other words, it’s no surprise that Reed doesn’t give any voice to the blacks or Latinos involved in Occupy/Decolonize Oakland; the arguments his op-ed makes, and the class position it expresses, depends upon the silence of those potentially dissenting voices.

I was at a general assembly for Occupy/Decolonize Oakland last night, as I have been a few times in the previous two-and-half weeks, and while there is certainly a prominent core of white activists who are present, there is no shortage of folks of color participating, offering leadership, and directing the conversation. A lot of those folks of color are, like me, upwardly mobile and college-educated. That is a good thing and that is also a real problem. Many of us are not the most vulnerable of—to use a formulation that I don’t love but can live with for now—the 99%. The perception that this is somehow a white movement not only underestimates the ways in which the movement is actually in flux and shifting from day to day, but also the ways in which it may represent a genuine political opportunity for communities of color more broadly if they/we can find ways to mobilize themselves/ourselves, and to tell black pétit bourgeois folks like Ishmael Reed and the folks who believe him that they/we have an alternative political vision and actually don’t need to be spoken for, thank you very much. Again, this is an instance where I think that well-worn pessimism may actually have the effect of rationalizing political quietism when that is, in my opinion, the last thing we need.

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