Reed: " 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." (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/opinion/trouble-beside-the-bay.html?ref=opinion)
"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, of painting a tidy and orderly picture in which that 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. 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 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 Latinos who have participated in Occupy/Decolonize Oakland from the start?"
(From http://www.lowendtheory.org/day/2011/11/10)