A: Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation by CROATOAN, 30 April 2012

http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/

http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/

Synopsis This pamphlet written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers is offered in deep solidarity and in the spirit of conversation with anyone committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. It is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity. This conflation, we go on to argue, minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation faced by marginalized demographics. According to this politics, white supremacy is primarily a psychological attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Privilege politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that psychological attitudes are the root cause of global oppression and exploitation, and that vague alterations in consciousness will somehow remake oppressive structures. This dominant form of anti-oppression politics assumes that demographic categories are coherent, homogeneous communities or cultures. This pamphlet argues that identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. The violent domination and subordination we face on the basis of our race, class, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a shared political vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across society creates the conditions for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous organizing on the basis of shared experiences, analysis, and tactics. There is a difference between a politics which assumes identity categories indicate shared political beliefs, and autonomous organizing against the forces which impact marginalized groups in different ways. We hear endless nostalgic appeals to civil disobedience, deescalation, and police-enforced pacifism, often from 1960s-era activists who have been seamlessly absorbed into positions of power within municipal, state, federal, academic, and nonprofit institutions. Free speech is allowed or facilitated by the state and used to justify continued beatings, surveillance, and paramilitary raids of protests across the country. Demanding increased cultural sensitivity and recognition has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in an age of deep austerity. We argue that one of the lessons of the history

of anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles is that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who resist are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death. There is no middle ground.

I: The Non-Negotiable Necessity of Autonomous Organizing As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people coming together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation, we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By autonomous we mean the formation of independent groups of people who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression including but not limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender nonconforming people, QPOC. We also believe in the political value of organizing in ways which try to cross racial, gender, and sexual divisions. We are neither spokespersons for Occupy Oakland nor do we think a single group can possibly speak to the variety of challenges facing different constituencies. We hope for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous organizing. We believe that a future beyond capitals 500 year emergence through enclosures of common land, and the enslavement, colonization, and genocide of non-European populations and beyond the 7000 or more years of violent patriarchal structuring of society along hierarchized and increasingly binary gender lines will require revolutions within revolutions. Capitalisms ecocidal destiny, and its relentless global production of poverty, misery, abuse, and disposable and enslavable populations, will force catastrophic social change within most of our lifetimes whether the public actively pursues it or not. No demographic category of people could possibly share an identical set of political beliefs, cultural identities, or personal values. Accounts of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as intersectional continue to treat identity categories as coherent communities with shared values and ways of knowing the world. No individual or organization can speak for people of color, women, the worlds colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a whole although activists of color, female and queer activists, and labor activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right. These representatives and institutions speak on behalf of social categories which are not, in fact, communities of shared opinion. This representational politics tends to eradicate any space for political disagreement between individuals subsumed under the same identity categories. We are interested in exploring the question of the relationship between identity-based oppression and capitalism, and conscious of the fact that the few existing attempts to synthesize these two vastly different political discourses leave us with far more questions than answers. More recent attempts to come to terms with this split between anti-oppression and anticapitalist politics, in insurrectionary anarchism for example, typically rely on simplistic forms of race and gender critique which typically begin and end with the police. According to this insurrectionary current,

the street is a place where deep and entrenched social differences can be momentarily overcome. We think this analysis deeply underestimates the qualitative differences between specific forms and sites of oppression and the variety of tactics needed to address these different situations. Finally, we completely reject a vulgar class first politics which argues that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are simply secondary to or derivative of economic exploitation. The prevalence of racism in the US is not a clever conspiracy hatched by a handful of ruling elites but from the start has been a durable racial contract between two unequal parties. The US is a white supremacist nation indelibly marked by the legal construction of the white race in the 1600s through the formation of a cross-class alliance between a wealthy planter class and poor white indentured servants. W.E.B. Du Bois called the legal privileges accorded to poor whites a psychological wage: It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown to them. We live in the shadow of this choice and this history. A history which is far from over.

II. Institutional Struggles Over the Meaning of Anti-Oppression Politics a. On the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), Again Nonprofits exist to maintain society as we know it. Nonprofits often provide vital social services in the spaces left by the states retreat from postwar welfare provisions, services which keep women, queers, and trans people, particularly those who are poor and of color, alive. Post-WWII welfare provisions themselves were provided primarily to white families through redlining or the racially exclusive postwar GI Bill for example. Social justice nonprofits in particular exist to co-opt and quell anger, preempt racial conflict, and validate a racist, patriarchal state. These organizations are often funded by business monopolies which have profited from and campaigned for the privatization of public social services. This has been argued extensively by many who have experienced the limits of nonprofit work firsthand, most recently by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Indeed, the exponential growth of NGOs and nonprofits could be understood as the 21st century public face of counterinsurgency, except this time speaking the language of civil, womens, and gay rights, charged with preempting political conflict, and spiritually committed to promoting one-sided dialogue with armed state bureaucracies. Over the last four decades, a massive nonprofit infrastructure has evolved in order to prevent, whether through force or persuasion, another outbreak of the urban riots and rebellions which spread through northern ghettos in the mid to late 1960s. Both liberal and conservative think tanks and service providers have arisen primarily in response to previous generations of radical Black, Native American, Asian

American, and Chican@ Third World Liberation movements. In the 21st century, social justice activism has become a professional career path. Racial justice nonprofits, and an entire institutionally funded activist infrastructure, partner with the state to echo the rhetoric of past movements for liberation while implicitly or explicitly condemning their militant tactics. The material infrastructure promoting these ideas is massive, enabling their extensive dissemination and adoption. Largely funded by philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation ($13.7 billion), Rockefeller Foundation ($3.1 billion), or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($37.1 billion), the US nonprofit sector has grown exponentially, often through the direct privatization of the remnants of Americas New Deal-era social safety net. This funding structure ties liberal organizations charged with representing and serving communities of color to businesses interested primarily in tax exemptions and charity, and completely hostile to radical social transformation despite their rhetoric. In 2009 nonprofits accounted for 9% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States, generated $1.41 trillion in total revenues, and reported $2.56 trillion in total assets. One need only hear the names of these philanthropic organizations to realize that they are or were some of the largest business monopolies in the world, whose foundations are required to donate 5% of their endowment each year, while 95% of the remaining funds remain invested in financial markets. The public is asked to thank these organizations for their generosity for solving problems which they are literally invested in maintaining. With increasing frequency, Filipino prison abolitionist and professor Dylan Rodriguez argues, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal multicultural/people of color liberal imagination which venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. [T]hese organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1995-2001, which is in many ways the national hub of the progressive wing of the NPIC, I would name some of the organizationshere, but the list would be too long. Suffice it to say that the nonprofit groups often exhibit(ed) a political practice that is, to appropriate and corrupt a phrase fromRuth Wilson Gilmore, radical in form, but liberal in content. b. Politicians and Police Who Are Just Like Us In California some of the most racist policies and reforms in recent history have been advanced by politicians of color. We are not interested in increasing racial, gender, and sexual diversity within existing hierarchies of power within government, police forces, or in the boardrooms of corporate America. When police departments and municipal governments can boast of their diversity and multicultural credentials, we know that there needs to be a radical alternative to this politics of inclusion. Oakland is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of how people of color have not just participated in but in many instances led as mayors, police chiefs, and city council members the assault on poor and working class black and brown

populations. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan speaks the language of social justice activism and civil rights but her political career in city government clearly depends upon satisfying right-wing downtown business interests, corrupt real estate speculators, and a bloated and notoriously brutal police force. There is no more depressing cautionary tale of the fate of 1960s-era politics of changing the state from within than the career of Oakland Mayor Quan. Quan fought for the creation of an Ethnic Studies program at UC Berkeley in 1969, and in 2011 penned a letter to Occupy Oakland listing an array of state-approved social justice nonprofits in order to justify mass arrests and a police crackdown on protesters attempting to establish a community center and free clinic in a long abandoned city owned property.[1] In response to a season of strikes, anti-police brutality marches, and repeated port shutdowns in response to police assaults, the state offered two choices: either the nonprofits, or the police. Quan and other municipal politicians are part of a state apparatus that is rapidly increasing its reliance upon militarized policing to control an unruly population, especially poor people of color in urban areas. Policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in general. A white supremacist decades-long war on drugs has culminated in a 21st century imperial war on terror. The equipment and tactics of urban pacification are now being turned on American cities and on the citizens and non-citizens who are targeted by austerity measures which have for decades been applied to the Global South. This is as much the case in the liberal Bay Area as it is anywhere else. Recently Urban Shield 2011, a series of urban military training exercises for Bay Area police forces, was held on the campus of UC Berkeley in anticipation of raids on the Occupy Oakland encampment and other local occupied public parks. Israeli Border Police and military police from Bahrain, fresh from suppressing an Arab Spring uprising in their own country, took part in these exercises beside Alameda County Sheriffs and Oakland Police Department officers. We see clearly that in an era of deepening budget cuts and Americas global decline, the white liberal consensus about racial inclusion is quickly becoming economically unaffordable, and in its place we see increasingly widespread public support for mainstream, openly white supremacist social movements. Armed paramilitary white nationalist organizations like the Minutemen patrol the US border, white supremacist media figures spout genocidal fantasies on the radio and television, and police killings of young black men and women have become so frequent that even the mainstream media has begun to report on it. At the same time, policing is fast becoming the paradigm for government in general. As Jared Sexton and Steve Martinot argue, Under conventional definitions of the government, we seem to be restricted to calling upon it for protection from its own agents. But what are we doing when we demonstrate against police brutality, and find ourselves tacitly calling upon the government to help us do so? These notions of the state as the arbiter of justice and the police as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal violence are two sides of the same coin. Narrow understandings of mere racism are proving themselves impoverished because they cannot see this fundamental relationship. What is needed is the development of a radical critique of the structure of the coin.

[The police] prowl, categorising and profiling, often turning those profiles into murderous violence without (serious) fear of being called to account, all the while claiming impunity. What jars the imagination is not the fact of impunity itself, but the realisation that they are simply people working a job, a job they secured by making an application at the personnel office. In events such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the true excessiveness is not in the massiveness of the shooting, but in the fact that these cops were there on the street looking for this event in the first place, as a matter of routine business. This spectacular evil is encased in a more inarticulable evil of banality, namely, that the state assigns certain individuals to (well-paying) jobs as hunters of human beings, a furtive protocol for which this shooting is simply the effect. c. Anticapitalism and the Material Reproduction of Race and Gender Establishing community mutual aid and self-defense against the violence of emergent mainstream racist movements, against the systematic rape and exploitation of women, and against the systematic murder and/or economic ostracization of transgender, transsexual, and gender-nonconforming people; attacking ICE and police-enforced austerity policies which have historically targeted communities of color, naming and resisting the rollbacks of reproductive rights and access to healthcare as the patriarchal, racist attacks that they truly are; these are some of the major challenges facing all of us who understand that oppression is inextricable from global capitalist crisis. We cannot separate whats happening in Oakland from a global wave of anti-austerity and anti-police brutality general strikes, occupations, and riots across the globe from Barcelona to Tottenham, from Tahrir to Mali, and from Bhopal to Johannesburg. We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain themselves without creating non-state based support networks and without recognizing the mutual implication of white supremacy with capitalism and patriarchy. Undocumented immigrants confront a vicious, coordinated, and entirely mainstream ICE, police, and civilian assault which is, to be absolutely clear, a nativist anti-Latin@ movement committed to patrolling the borders of a nation understood as fundamentally white. Intensifying anti-immigrant racism is not unrelated to capitalism, and just a national but an international phenomenon, fueled by the success of capitalist globalization, by the profits which could be realized through debt and structural adjustment programs, US agribusiness subsidies, free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and through multinational industries inevitably searching for lower labor costs through the fragmentation of global supply chains. Austerity means women, and particularly poor black and brown women, are being forced by the state and their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers to make up for the cuts in services and wages through additional domestic and reproductive labor they have always performed. As a recent W.A.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore puts it, We know that economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more domestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a mancession fade quickly when one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics of crisis adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly justification of welfare and social security reforms. Saving Americas families, the culture war rhetoric that clings to heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown. Crisis translates politically to putting women in their place, while demanding queers and trans people pass or else. And the worse this crisis gets, the more the

crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy by assaulting womens autonomy under the guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: its not a crisis, theres just not enough for them. Capitalism can neither be reduced to the predatory practices of Wall Street banks nor is it something which intersects with race, gender, and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. Violence and deprivation, premature death, and rape, are structural aspects of an economic system which requires that some work and some do not, some receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that poor people of color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not profoundly impacted by the economy, and instead interested only in reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular oppressed identity at the expense of all the others. In the US in particular, the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural difference, the applauding of women and queers entering the workplace, and the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger generations, has not improved but instead masked a dramatic deterioration of the material circumstances of racialized populations. Massive accumulation through dispossession of native lands; racialized enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and intensive exploitation of womens unpaid labor, both in the home and as indentured domestic work, and always violently stratified according to race all of these form the naturalized and invisibilized underbelly of capitals waged exploitation of workers. The cumulative economic impact of centuries of enslavement, genocide, colonialism, patriarchy, and racial segregation is not simply peripheral but integral and fundamental to the nature of the global capitalist economy. The US economy reproduces racial, gender, and sexual inequality at every level of American societyin housing, healthcare, food sovereignty, education, policing, and prison. And also endlessly recreated in these very same sites are the categories man/woman, normal/abnormal, able/disabled, legitimate/illegitimate, citizen/illegal, and a series of stigmatized populations who always interfere with the smooth functioning of the national economy. The natural, harmonious relationship between citizens, patriots, taxpayers, owners, workers, rich, and poor, are disrupted by illegals, welfare queens, faggots, freaks, careless promiscuous teens, and so on. The category of race is materially recreated and endlessly renewed through these institutions which organize the lives of the undocumented, the imprisoned, the residents of aging ghettos which increasingly function as open-air prisons. Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow separable from racist exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex oppressions facing us in this world, confines antiracist and antipatriarchal struggle to the sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual privilege. The current dominant form of anti-oppression politics in fact diminishes the extent to which racialized and gendered inequalities are deepening across society despite the generalization of policies promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity. Without attacking the material infrastructure which agglomerates power in the hands of some (a process whose end result is now called privilege), the equalization of privilege and the abolition of these identity-based oppressions in class society is a liberal fantasy.

d. The Racialization of Rape and the Erasure of Sexual Violence Over the last year in California, the racist specter of potential rape has been used to both delegitimize spaces of militant action in parks, streets, homes, or college campuses and to erase the prevalence of sexual violence throughout society. The figure of the black rapist is routinely invoked to excuse police violence, retroactively justifying the murders of countless black men like Kenneth Harding. The need to preempt potential rape has been explicitly used to rationalize the widely publicized pepper spraying of UC Davis students on November 18, 2011. We are tempted to say this incident is more about the need for state bureaucracies to justify their own existence than it does about epidemic of sexual violence in America, but the truth is that the reality of rape and sexual violence along with rapes deployment as an ideological weapon are fundamental to the everyday functioning of the economy and the state. In recent interviews, UC Davis Chancellor Katehi and Vice Chancellor Meyer, respectively, defend the police response to the Occupy UC Davis encampment by invoking Occupy Oakland and the implicit threat of sexual violence from the outside. Katehi claimed, We were worried especially about having very young girls and other students with older people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record if anything happens to any student while were in violation of policy, its a very tough thing to overcome. Chancellor Meyer was much more specific about the hypothetical threats in question: So my fear is a long-term occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non-affiliate and there is an incident. And then Im reporting to a parent that a non-affiliate has done this unthinkable act with your daughter, and how could we let that happen.[3] These statements illuminate how gender and race are typically linked in public discourse here, Katehi, a woman in a position of power attempting to justify an illegal police action, infantilizes women as permanent victims and posits a tacitly racist specter of the criminal rapist, coming from the outside to the inside of the campus community. After the hypothetical rape, the rape survivor disappears. The rape is regrettable; this regret is not articulated in terms of the trauma of the rape survivor, but through the fact that the incident will have to be reported to a parent. To say rape is unthinkable is only possible from a position of privilege in which sexual violence is not an everyday reality. Considering the fact that rape occurs within every class and every possible racial demographic, usually perpetrated by friends and family, it is utterly fantastic to suggest that a large university campus like UC Davis is a place where rapes do not occur and where rape culture doesnt flourish. Rendering rape unthinkable is absolutely essential to its structural use as a tool of gendered subordination and exploitation, and also as an ideological tool of white supremacy. The pepper spray incident reveals how the specter of rape appears in state and media narratives when its politically useful, and functions as a tool of racialization and criminalization (two processes which converge on poor black and brown populations) when in fact rape and sexual violence affects every sector of society. The locations which we are told to fear rape and sexual violence change depending upon what is politically expedient, and its crucial to notice which sites are emphasized and when rape has

occurred in Occupy encampments across the country, but far, far more rapes have occurred in American households, and yet media reports do not discourage us from heterosexual marriage and co-habitation. When is rape ignorable, and when is it unacceptable? Rape occurs frequently in dorm rooms, in fraternities and sororities, in cars, on dates, amongst persons of like age, ethnicity, and class. When the exclusion of police from public spaces is represented by the media as an invitation to rape, we are not at the same time informed that police themselves rape, sexually assault, and abuse women, trans people, queers, sex workers and others with stomachturning frequency. While these administrators mobilize the specter of rape to defend the police response to the Occupy encampment at UC Davis, they take part in a nationwide campus culture that sanctions sexual violence. A major study on the topic found that colleges only expel persons found responsible for sexual assault in 10-25 % of all reported cases. These students were often suspended for a semester or received minor academic penalties. Half of the students interviewed said that student judicial services found their alleged assailants not responsible for sexual assault.[4] When sexual violence manifests in public organizing spaces, the subject is routinely labeled divisive or just personal. In a disturbing feat of capitulation to the states attack, radicals will frequently suspect that allegations of rape and sexual assault are in fact inventions of state forces attempting to infiltrate communities of struggle. Many radical communities have come to associate a focus on addressing and attacking sexual violence with a politics of demobilization or distraction from the real issues. Again, the result is that the reality of sexual violence, not merely in one month encampments, but in personal spaces, amongst persons from every racial and ethnic demographic who know and trust one another, is methodically erased. The silence around sexual violence sanctions it, just as the spectacular outrage at isolated incidents of racial violence (e.g. Trayvon Martin) marks the everyday police murder of black and brown individuals as routine. The reality of sexual violence is that it is silenced, evaded, and ignored, empowering primarily cisgendered men at every level of society, and transforming conversations about sexual violence into further justification for intensified racist segregation, incarceration, and policing

III. The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Practice a. Identity is not Solidarity Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about the political homogeneity and helplessness of communities of color. The category of communities of color is itself a recently invented identity category which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite interracial conflict. What living in a post-racial era really means is that race is increasingly represented in government, media, and education as culture while the nation as a whole has returned to levels of racial inequality, residential and educational segregation, and violence unseen since the last post-racial moment in American history the mid-60s legal repeal of the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial privilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. According to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more culture, and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy. Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous communities or cultures which can be represented by individuals. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial identity categories have typically been described through an additive concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of existing demographic categories. Representing significant political differences as differences in privilege or culture places politics beyond critique, debate, and discussion. For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the problem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic cultural diversity within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that representatives of different identity categories must be placed front and center in struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaningless without also specifying the content of their politics. The US Army is simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. Diversity alone is a meaningless political ideal which reifies culture, defines agency as inclusion within oppressive systems, and equates identity categories with political beliefs. Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups they claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is indeed a colorblind or post-racial society. Wealthy queers support initiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers who are predominantly women of color. But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-oppression activists who do advance a structural analysis of oppression and yet consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces the history of violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over individual privilege and state recognition of cultural difference. Even when these activists invoke a history of militant resistance and sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of petitioning the powerful to renounce their privilege or allow marginalized populations to lead resistance struggles. For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates the dominant praxis.

b. Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color and Our Women and Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Populations and Patriarchal White Conservationism The dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics operates primarily at the level of managing appearances, relinquishing power to political representatives, and reinforcing stereotypes of individually deserving and undeserving victims of racism, sexism, and homophobia. A vast nonprofit industrial complex, and a class of professional community spokespeople, has arisen over the last several decades to define the parameters of acceptable political action and debate. This politics of safety must continually project an image of powerlessness and keep communities of color, women, and queers protected and confined to speeches and mass rallies rather than active disruption. For this politics of cultural affirmation, suffering is legitimate and recognizable only when it conforms to white middle-class codes of behavior, with each gender in its proper place, and only if it speaks a language of productivity, patriotism, and self-policing victimhood. And yet the vast majority of us are not safe simply going through our daily lives in Oakland, or elsewhere. When activists claim that poor black and brown communities must not defend themselves against racist attacks or confront the state, including using illegal or violent means, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of legitimate victimhood for white middle class consumption. The activities of marginalized groups are barely recognized unless they perform the role of peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature cannot confront power on their own. Contemporary anti-oppression politics constantly reproduces stereotypes about the passivity and powerlessness of these populations, when in fact it is precisely people from these groups poor women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans* street workers fighting back against murder and violence, black, brown, and Asian American militant struggles against white supremacist attacks who have waged the most powerful and successfully militant uprisings in American history. We refuse a politics which infantilizes us and people who look like us, and which continually paints nonwhite and/or nonmale demographics as helpless, vulnerable, and incapable of fighting for our own liberation. When activists argue that power belongs in the hands of the most oppressed, it is clear that their primary audience for these appeals can only be liberal white activists, and that they understand power as something which is granted or bestowed by the powerful. Appeals to white benevolence to let people of color lead political struggles assumes that white activists can somehow relinquish their privilege and legitimacy to oppressed communities and that these communities cannot act and take power for themselves.

People of color, women, and queers are constantly spoken of as if we were children in contemporary privilege discourse. Even children can have a more savvy and sophisticated analysis than privilege theorists often assume! Communities of color have become in contemporary liberal anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of management by sympathetic whites or community representatives assigned to contain political conflict at all costs.

And of course it is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for the oppressed to be infantilized and deterred from potentially unsafe self-defense, resistance, or attack. The absence of active mass resistance to racist policies and institutions in Oakland and in the US over the last forty years has meant that life conditions have worsened for nearly everyone. The prisons, police, state, economy, and borders perpetually reproduce racial inequality by categorizing, profiling, and enforcing demographic identities and assigning them to positions in a hierarchy of domination where marginalized groups can only gain power through the exploitation and oppression of others. The budget cuts and healthcare rollbacks are leaving poor queer and trans people without access to necessary medical resources like Aids medication or hormones, and other austerity measures have dovetailed with increasingly misogynist antireproductive-rights legislature which will surely result in an increasing and invisible number of deaths among women. As diversity has increased in city and state governments, and in some sectors of the corporate world, deepening economic stratification has rendered this form of representational equality almost entirely symbolic. We have been told that because the Occupy movement protests something called economic inequality it is not a movement about or for people of color, despite the fact that subprime targeting of Blacks and Latinos within the housing market has led to losses between $164 billion and $213 billion, one of the greatest transfers of wealth out of these populations in recent history. And despite the fact that job losses are affecting women of color more than any other group. We are told that because the economy has always targeted poor people of color, that increasing resistance from a multiracial cohort of young people and students, and from downwardly mobile members of the white working and middle class, has nothing to do with people of color but that somehow reclaiming and recreating an idealized cultural heritage does. We are told that we are tokens or informants if we remain critical of a return to essentialist traditional cultural identities which are beyond political discussion, and of the conservative political project of rebuilding the many systems of civilizationeconomics, government, politics, spirituality, environmental sustainability, nutrition, medicine and understandings of self, identity, gender and sexualitythat existed before colonization. We reject race and gender blind economic struggles and analysis, but we do not reject struggles against what is, under capitalism, naturalized as the economy. While the majority of Occupy general assemblies have adopted a neo-populist rhetoric of economic improvement or reform, we see the abolition of the system of capital as not peripheral but fundamental to any material project of ending oppression. Recent statistics give a snapshot of worsening racial inequality in the US today: the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, the greatest wealth disparities in 25 years. Over 1 in 4 Native Americans and Native Alaskans live in poverty, with a nearly 40% poverty rate for reservations. From 2005 to 2009, Latin@s household median wealth fell by 66%, black household wealth by 53%, but only 16% among white households. The average black household in 2009 possessed $5,677 in wealth; Latin@ households $6,325; and the average white household had $113,149.

To address these deteriorating material conditions and imagine solutions in terms of privilege is to tacitly support the continual state and economic reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies, and renew racist and patriarchal violence in the 21st century. c. On Nonprofit Certified White Allies and Privilege Theory Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become allies of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and field of action offered by privilege theory. In one particularly stark example of this problem from a December 4 2011 Occupy Oakland general assembly, white allies from a local social justice nonprofit called The Catalyst Project arrived with an array of other groups and individuals to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, order to speak in favor of a proposal to rename Occupy Oakland to Decolonize/Liberate Oakland. Addressing the audience as though it were homogeneously white, each white ally who addressed the general assembly explained that renouncing their own white privilege meant supporting the renaming proposal. And yet in the public responses to the proposal it became clear that a substantial number of people of color in the audience, including the founding members of one of Occupy Oaklands most active and effective autonomous groups, which is also majority people of color, the Tactical Action Committee, deeply opposed the measure. What was at stake was a political disagreement, one that was not clearly divided along racial lines. However, the failure of the renaming proposal was subsequently widely misrepresented as a conflict between white Occupy and the Decolonize/Liberate Oakland group. In our experience such misrepresentations are not accidental or isolated incidents but a repeated feature of a dominant strain of Bay Area anti-oppression politics which instead of mobilizing people of color, women, and queers for independent action must consistently purge political differences within identity categories and attack the demographic ratios of existing interracial political coalitions in order to survive. White supremacy and racist institutions will not be eliminated through sympathetic white activists spending several thousand dollars for nonprofit diversity trainings which can assist them in recognizing their own racial privilege and certifying their decision to renounce this privilege. The absurdity of privilege politics recenters antiracist practice on whites and white behavior, and assumes that racism (and often by implicit or explicit association, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia) manifest primarily as individual privileges which can be checked, given up, or absolved through individual resolutions. Privilege politics is ultimately completely dependent upon precisely that which it condemns: white benevolence.

IV. Occupy Oakland as Example a. Occupy Oakland, Outside Agitators, and White Occupy When Mayor Quan and District Attorney Nancy OMalley claim that Occupy Oakland is not part of the national Occupy movement, theyre onto something. From the start, Occupy Oakland immediately rejected cooperation with city government officials, wildly flexible state and media definitions of violence, and a now largely discredited arguments that the police are part of the 99%. After the coordinated raids on Occupy encampments across the country, the innumerable incidents of police violence, and slowly emerging details about the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security and its information fusion centers, the supporters of collaboration with the police have fallen silent. The press releases of the city government, Oakland Police Department, and business associations like the Oakland Chamber of Commerce continually repeat that the Occupy Oakland encampment, feeding nearly a thousand mostly desperately poor people a day, was composed primarily of non-Oakland resident white outsiders intent on destroying the city. For anyone who spent any length of time at the encampment, Occupy Oakland was clearly one of the most racially and ethnically diverse Occupy encampments in the countrycomposed of people of color from all walks of life, from local business owners to fired Oakland school teachers, from college students to the homeless and seriously mentally ill. Unfortunately, social justice activists, clergy, and community groups mimicked the citys erasure of people of color in their analysis of Occupy, when they were not negotiating with the mayors office behind closed doors to dismantle the encampment peacefully. From the beginning the Occupy Oakland encampment existed in a tightening vise between two faces of the state: nonprofits and the police. An array of community organizations immediately began negotiating with city bureaucracies and pushing for the encampment to adopt nonviolence pledges and move to Snow Park (itself later cleared by OPD despite total compliance of individuals who settled there). At the same time, police departments across the Bay Area readying one of the largest and most expensive paramilitary operations in recent history. It became increasingly clear that the citys reputation for progressive activism could not tolerate the massing of Oaklands homeless, and the extent of urban social damage, made visible in one location. The ongoing history of Occupy Oakland is a case study in how much antiracist politics has changed since Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown attempted to run for Oakland mayor and city council respectively in 1973 against a sea of white incumbents. Oaklands current city governmentincluding the mayors office, city council, and Oakland Police Departmentis now staffed and led predominantly by people of color. State-sanctioned representatives who claim to speak for Oaklands people of color, women, or queers as a whole are part of a system of patronage and power which ensures that anyone who gets a foot up does so on the backs of a hundred others. Whatever the rhetoric of these politicians, their job is to make sure the downtown property owners and homeowners in the hills are insulated from potential crime and rebellion from the flatlands due to increasingly severe budget cuts to social services, police impunity, and mass

incarceration. Increasing numbers of Oaklanders rely upon a massive, unacknowledged informal/illegal economy of goods, services, and crime in order to survive. In other words their job is to contain this economy, largely through spending half (or over $200 million annually, and $58 million in lawsuit settlements over the past 10 years) of the city budget on the police department. When city politicians argue that protests are the work of outsiders, theyre also asserting the city government and the Oakland Police Department truly represent the city. We do not believe that a politics rooted in privilege theory and calling for more racial diversity in fundamentally racist and patriarchal institutions like the Oakland Police Department, can challenge Oaklands existing hierarchies of power. This form of representational anti-oppression activism is no longer even remotely anticapitalist in its analysis and aims. By borrowing a charge used against civil rights movement participants and 60s-era militants of color like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, and even Martin Luther King Jr., as outside agitators, city residents have been told that the interests of all authentic Oaklanders are the same. The one month Occupy Oakland encampment was blamed by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and its city government partners for everything from deepening city poverty to the failure of business led development, from the rats which have always infested the city plaza to the mounting cost of police brutality. An encampment which fed about a thousand people every day of its month-long existence, and which witnessed a 19% decrease in area crime in the last week of October, was scapegoated for the very poverty, corruption, and police violence it came into existence to engage.

Real estate mogul and city power broker Phil Tagami patrolling the Rotunda Building with a shotgun on the day of the November 2nd Oakland general strike. If you believe the city press releases, authentic Oaklanders are truly represented by a police force which murders and imprisons its poor black and brown residents daily (about 7% of OPD officers actually live in the city) and a city government which funnels their taxes into business-

friendly redevelopment deals like the $91 million dollar renovation of the Fox Theater$58 million over budgetwhich line the pockets of well-connected real estate developers like Phil Tagami. In a complete reversal of 60s-era militant antiracist political movements, we are told by these politicians and pundits that militant, disruptive, and confrontational political actions which target this city bureaucracy and its police forces can only be the work of white, middle class, and otherwise privileged youths. b. The Erasure of People of Color From Occupy Oakland

Some of Occupy Oaklands White Anarchist Outside Agitators A recent communique critiquing the Occupy movement states, The participation of people of color [in Occupy Oakland] does not change the fact that this occupation of public space upholds white supremacy. Some of our own sisters and brothers have silenced our critiques in order to hold on to their positions of power as token people of color in the movement. [3] The communique argues that people of color can suddenly uphold white supremacy because they do not share the political analysis of the documents authors. People of color who do not agree with the politics advanced by this group are labeled white, informants, members of Cointelpro, or tokens. Often many of us are simply erased. This is a powerful and deeply manipulative rhetorical tactic which simply fails to engage substantively with any of the reasons why people of color did participate in Occupy Oakland and equates critical participation with support for

rape, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gentrification. Needless to say, the authors of the abovequoted passage do not speak for us. People of color who were not only active but central to Occupy Oakland and its various committees are routinely erased from municipal and activist accounts of the encampment. In subsequent months the camp has been denounced by social justice activists, many of whom work directly with the mayors office, who have criticized it as a space irreparably compromised by racial and gender privilege. Racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia were all clearly on display at Occupy Oakland as they are in every sector of social life in Oakland. None of these accounts has even begun to examine how the perpetrators and victims of this violence did not belong to a single racial demographic, or track the evolving efforts of participants to respond to this violence. People of color, women and trans* people of color, and white women and trans* people who participated heavily in Occupy Oakland have regularly become both white and (cis) male if they hold to a politics which favors confrontation over consciousness raising. And within white communities, similar political disagreements are routinely represented as differences between individuals with white privilege and those who are white allies. There is clearly a need to reflect upon how the dynamics of the encampments quickly overwhelmed the capacity of participants to provide services and spaces free from sexual harassment and violence. To describe the participants of Occupy Oakland as primarily white men is not simply politically problematic and factually incorrect it also prevents us from being able to look honestly at the social interactions that have actually occurred under its auspices. V. Conclusion: Recuperating Decolonization and National Liberation Struggles; or, Revolution is Radically Unsafe

Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide helped spark the Arab Spring. Nearly fifty years after the dramatic upsurge of wars of national liberation fought over the terrain of what used to be called the Third World, there are few political tools for confronting emerging local and global racisms between nonwhite communities, and the persecution of ethnic minorities in former colonies by native, nonwhite elites. In the US, this has taken the form of increasing antiblack, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant racism within communities of color and increasing class divisions within nonwhite demographic categories. National elites in decolonizing countries have frequently appealed to idealized ethnic traditions and histories in order to cement social cohesion and hierarchies of domination within dictatorial one-party states. Appeals to a kind of authoritarian traditionalism often mobilize components of indigenous traditions which justify caste or caste-like social divisions. No longer requiring the force of occupying armies, formal decolonization in newly independent countries from Senegal to Vietnam has given way to neocolonial austerity, structural adjustment, and debt imposed by the global north and administered by those who Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, famously called the native national bourgeoisie. As Maia Ramnath observes about the actually-existing history of formal decolonization, In seeking to replicate the techniques of colonial rule by institutionalizing states rather than abolishing them, the nationalist goal diverged from that of substantive decolonization. If the colonial regimes structures of oppression were not simply to be reopened for business under

new local management, yielding a new generation of authoritarian dictatorships and cultural chauvinists, a different logic of anticolonial struggle was imperative. [T]he specter of statenessthe pressure to establish your own, or to resist the aggression of someone elsescalls forth the enforcement of internal conformity, elimination of elements who fail or refuse to conform, and relentless policing of boundaries, including those of hereditary membership, for which task the control of female bodies, sexuality, and reproduction is essential. The belief that communities of color in the US to represent coherent, bounded internal colonies or nations working for self-determination has been stretched to the breaking point by class divisions within these communities. To be clear: we believe that wealth can only buy limited protection against worsening racism, sexism, and homophobia. We desire radical liberation, from what theorists have called the coloniality of power and the institutions the borders, the nation-form, the churches, the prisons, the police, and the military which continue to materially reproduce racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies on a global scale. And yet we believe that the political content of contemporary decolonial struggles cannot be assumed in advance. 21st century decolonization in the US would be unrecognizable to the individuals who have fought for liberation under the banner of anticolonial struggle in the pasta tradition which includes Toussaint LOuverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Lucy Parsons, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Robert F. Williams, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, the Third World Womens Alliance, CONAIE, the indigenous militants of Bolivia in 1990, the militants of Oaxaca in 2006, the Mohawk people in the Municipality of Oka, Tupac Katari, Chris Hani, Nelson Mandela (who led the ANCs armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe), Emiliano Zapata, Juan Cheno Cortina, Jose Rizal, Bhagat Singh, Yuri Kochiyama, Kuwasi Balagoon, DRUM, Assata Shakur, and countless others. Anticolonial struggles were violent, disruptive, and radically unsafe for individuals who fought and died for self-determination. One cannot be a pacifist and believe in decolonization. One cannot be horrified at the burning of an American flag and claim to support decolonization. And one cannot guarantee the safety of anyone who is committed to the substantive decolonization of white supremacist institutions. The fact that decolonial struggle has been reduced to statesanctioned rituals of cultural affirmation, and appeals to white radicals to stop putting the vulnerable in harms way, reveals the extent to which contemporary privilege politics has appropriated the radical movements of the past and remade them in its own image. We are told that the victims of oppression must lead political struggles against material structures of domination by those who oppose every means by which the victims could actually overthrow these structures. We are told that resistance lies in speaking truth to power rather than attacking power materially. We are told by an array of highly trained white allies that the very things we need to do in order to free ourselves from domination cannot be done by us because were simply too vulnerable to state repression. At mass rallies, were replayed endless empty calls for revolution and militancy from a bygone era while in practice being forced to fetishize our spiritual powerlessness.

In a country where the last eruption of widespread political unrest was nearly forty years when the police go to war and it is called force. When business as usual is disrupted in any way, even by shouting, it is labeled violent. In this upside down world militant protests across the globe are characterized as heroic struggles for freedom while in the US SWAT teams are deployed to clear reproductive rights rallies. As an October 24th, 2011 letter from Comrades in Cairo published in The Guardian puts it, In our ownoccupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting and interacting these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalised, the excluded and those groups who have suffered the worst. [...] Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the governments own admission, 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed and all of the ruling partys offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on 28 January they retreated, and we had won our cities. It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted peaceful with fetishising nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured and martyred to make a point, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious. [5]

[1] http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca/groups/cityadministrator/documents/pressrelease/oak033073 .pdf [2] http://reynosoreport.ucdavis.edu/reynoso-report.pdf, pages 27- 28. [3] http://disoccupy.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/for-people-who-have-considered-occupationbut-found-it-is-not-enuf/] [4] http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault/articles/entry/1945/ [5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-tahrir-square-cairo

Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America

Jonathan Mahler: 1 August 2012: New York Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/magazine/oakland-occupymovement.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Accessed on Wed 15 August 2012
By JONATHAN MAHLER

The Anti-Capitalist Brigade started gathering early on May Day at Oaklands Snow Park. There was free coffee, oatmeal, doughnuts, fliers with the days agenda and plenty of pot. A street medic I just finished a wilderness first-aid course, he told me when I asked about his training tended to his first case of the day, a man in his 20s whose leg had been beaten to a purple hue with a metal rod in an overnight fight in the park. Nearby, an organizer reminded protesters to take down the toll-free number for the National Lawyers Guild: This is important. Do not put it in your cellphones, because if you get arrested, the cops will take those away. Write it on your bodies. In indelible ink. There are Sharpies on the table. No central action was planned. A coalition of labor unions had asked Occupy Oakland, with its proven ability to turn out large numbers of militant activists, to blockade the Golden Gate Bridge, but then withdrew the request at the last minute. Instead, thousands of Occupy protesters met at various strike stations and fanned out into the streets with shields and gas masks (or the homemade alternative: bandannas soaked in vinegar), transforming downtown Oakland into a roving carnival of keyed-up militants of every shape and size: graduate students, tenured professors, professional revolutionaries, members of the Black Bloc, dressed like ninjas, their faces obscured. Joints were passed, but this was not a mellow crowd. A barefoot man known as Running Wolf grabbed an American flag from outside a popular cop bar and dragged it behind him. Packs of protesters charged into businesses, overturning tables, shattering windows and smashing A.T.M.s. An activist spray-painted vulgarities on the window of a Bank of America branch. The Menace was loose again, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote about a different group of rabble-rousers, the Hells Angels. This riot had a soundtrack, too, a cacophony of chants Strike! Take Over! and Take Back Oakland! Kick Out the Yuppies! overlaid with beating snare drums and the rhythmic thump-thumping of the police and news helicopters hovering overhead. Many businesses were closed, less in solidarity with May Day than out of fear of reprisal from protesters. The rumored targets werent just the big corporations, but smaller shops that were the quarry of the so-called antigentrification brigade. In an Occupy Oakland twist on the Soul Brother signs that shopkeepers used during the race riots of the 1960s, Awaken, an upscale cafe and art gallery, had plastered its windows with signs reading: We are Oakland. We are the 99%.

As the swarm made its way down Broadway, shouting, pounding on windows and throwing bottles at stores, two Asian immigrants hastily boarded up their small, sad-looking beauty-supply store. When I tried to talk to one of them, he shooed me away Too busy and reached for another board. A few blocks away, I spotted Phil Tagami, a real estate developer who has taken to standing guard in the lobby of his downtown office building with a shotgun during protests. Dressed in black fatigue pants and combat boots, he was scuffling with a group of activists who were trying to force their way into another upscale cafe called Rudys Cant Fail. Clusters of cops in riot gear stood impassively outside a few strategic locations. Others jogged around the city in formation. At one point, a few officers knocked a protester in a black hoodie off her bicycle, pushed her facedown on the ground and roughly zip-tied her hands. An angry crowd quickly converged, chanting, Pigs go home! Then there was a pop the firing of a tear-gas canister and a cloud of chemical smoke quickly swept across the block, temporarily dispersing the protesters. As the activists collected at the intersection outside City Hall, Scott Olsen, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran who was shot at close range in the head last fall with a beanbag round by the Oakland Police, rolled a cigarette and calmly observed the chaos through glazed blue eyes, his long, stringy blond hair protruding from beneath a protective helmet. He looked less like an ex-Marine than a stoned, skinny teenager who had gotten lost on his way to the skate park. I asked him what brought him out. I cant stay home on a day like this, he said. Last spring, as the Occupy movement struggled, vainly, to recapture its lost energy in New York and elsewhere, in Oakland it remained vital. Occupy Oakland was the show that wouldnt close, complete with its own cast of celebrities, including Olsen, the movements Ron Kovic; Tagami, the citys Charles Bronson; its mayor, an ex-radical herself; her countless critics; and Oaklands infamous police department O.P.D. In a sense, Oakland is the last place you would expect to find the most stubbornly active outpost of the Occupy movement. Its a city almost entirely devoid of financial or corporate institutions, a city that capital fled decades ago. The shimmering skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, packed with Pacific Heights investment bankers and venture capitalists, are all of 12 minutes away. Silicon Valley, bursting at the seams with dot-com millionaires, isnt much farther. Why not take the fight there, to a more plausible surrogate for Wall Street? Maybe because Occupy Oakland, whether its leaders have articulated it or not, isnt a protest against what Oakland is, but rather what its in danger of becoming. Oakland may be broke, but all of the wealth being generated in its immediate vicinity needs someplace to go, and some of that wealth is already beginning to find its way to Oakland, to a place that has long been the catch basin of Americas radical energies and personalities.

Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents dont hurt (free, if youre willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. Whats more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. Americas last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; the Black Panthers were born in Oakland; and David Hilliard, a former Black Panthers chief of staff, still gives three-hour tours of the movements local landmarks and sells his own line of Black Panthers hot sauce: Burn Baby Burn. Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hells Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland. The Oakland native Felix Mitchell was one of the first to scale up corner drug-dealing into a multimillion-dollar, gang-controlled business. On his death he was stabbed in Leavenworth in 1986 the city gave him a heros send-off: thousands came out to see his coffin borne through his old East Oakland neighborhood by a horse-drawn carriage trailed by more than a dozen Rolls Royces and limousines. In Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oakland writer and social activist Jack London said this to a group of wealthy New Yorkers: A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you. Its a dream that still exists in Oakland that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door. Im not afraid to call myself a Communist, the rapper and activist Boots Riley told me one morning last spring in the kitchen of his weather-beaten yellow Victorian house in Oaklands Lower Bottoms section. I think some people call themselves everything but, because they dont want to associate themselves with the failures and mistakes that other folks who have called themselves Communists have made. But Christians dont stop calling themselves Christians just because some other Christians made some mistakes. Riley was getting dressed as we talked, combing out his black-power Afro with a cake cutter, a once-popular AfricanAmerican grooming accessory that he now has to order from online cooking sites. He covered his face unevenly with shaving cream and carefully sculptured his prominent sideburns tapered muttonchops that stretch to the corners of his mouth like a pair of giant peninsulas. Virtually anywhere else, Riley would look and sound about as out of place as

someone speaking Old English in colonial dress. But in Oakland, a kind of Amish village of retro-radicals, he makes perfect sense. When Riley first visited Occupy Wall Streets encampment in New York, it didnt do much for him. It bothered me that there was no agenda, he said. Just a lot of folks saying, I dont have an answer. But Occupy Oakland felt different. Our strategy is not just to get people to say, We dont like the banks, he said. This is about getting folks to confront the system where they are. In Oakland, Riley is radical royalty, which in hard-left circles helps offset the somewhat credibility-undermining fact that hes also a legitimate hip-hop star, albeit one with a mostly cult following. His father was an N.A.A.C.P. pioneer, militant organizer and civil rights lawyer who met Rileys mother at a 1968 student strike at San Francisco State University. Hanging in Rileys kitchen is a picture of him as an infant, clutching a copy of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, an anti-colonialist manifesto that was required reading for radical 60s activists. Many local radicals come to Oakland via a nearby U.C. campus: Berkeley, Davis or Santa Cruz. Riley is Oakland-bred. The first action he ever led, at age 15, was a strike to protest budget cuts at his predominantly black public high school. The rapping came later, after the rise of politically conscious, militant hip-hop. Theres a long history of popular musicians taking up revolutionary causes. Riley inverted the equation: He was a revolutionary who turned to music to get his message out to more people. His band is called the Coup as in coup dtat. Rileys politics are extreme. He doesnt want to see capitalism reformed; he wants to see it toppled. We need a system thats not based on profit, but thats based on helping people, thats based on some sort of mutual control of resources, he says. Recently, Riley has been trying to channel the radical energies that Occupy Oakland unleashed. Hes less interested in smashing windows thats a tactic that . . . immediately draws a line between you and the people than in gathering new circles of supporters. This can be a challenge given the movements local record of vandalism and destruction. Later that spring afternoon, I joined Riley as he canvassed a strip mall to let people know about an upcoming protest at a home-foreclosure auction. Theres this woman Nell whos getting her home auctioned off from underneath her, and we need to go and stop that from happening, he told an African-American man inside a Starbucks. What do you think? Do you want to come through and help us save this womans home? I dont know, the man replied. You guys have been doing a lot of parading around, tearing stuff up and just getting people upset. Its against the law to shut down the auction.

So was integrating coffee shops, Riley said. Should we not have done that? This would be a whites-only Starbucks if that hadnt happened. Its strange to think of Oakland, with its 19 miles of coastal waterfront, as a rust-belt town, but thats exactly what it is. In the late 19th century, Oakland Point was the western terminus for the transcontinental railroad, which, coupled with the citys access to the sea, made it an ideal destination for factories, canneries and warehouses. During World War II, Oaklands factories and shipyards churned out warships at a furious pace, providing jobs to tens of thousands of black migrant workers from the South. From 1940 to 1945, Oaklands African-American population more than quadrupled. The influx of blacks ultimately drove many white residents either to the suburbs or north into the hills. Over the course of the 60s and 70s, the jobs disappeared, and the city spiraled downward. Oakland is now a sprawling and diverse but segregated city of about 400,000, a real-life Monopoly board that operates on a de facto economic principle of urban design: it gets poorer and more dangerous as you descend from the eucalyptus-scented hills into the urban flatlands. Its downtown is still lined with architectural masterpieces, decaying reminders of the citys haute bourgeois past amid unmistakable signs of a diminished present like grand prewar hotels that have been converted into Section 8 housing. Oaklands civic core, such as it is, is shrinking. The city has three professional sports teams. One team, the As, are trying desperately to relocate to San Jose. Another, the Raiders, may wind up in Los Angeles soon again. (The city continues to pay about $20 million a year for the deal that brought them back to Oakland.) The third, the Golden State Warriors, who conspicuously refuse to include Oakland in their name, are preparing to move to San Francisco. Oakland is $2 billion in debt and counting. To balance its precarious budget, the city has been reduced to crude accounting tricks like selling the Kaiser Convention Center shuttered in 2006, when the city could no longer afford to maintain it to its own redevelopment agency for $28 million. A couple of years ago, in an effort to shore up the citys eroding tax base, members of Oaklands City Council voted to allow the industrial-scale cultivation of medical marijuana and grant permits for four indoor pot plantations of unlimited size before Washington intervened. The city still receives millions in tax dollars from its medical-marijuana dispensaries, but that income stream may be in jeopardy. In April, federal agents descended on downtown Oakland and raided a dispensary and Oaksterdam University the so-called Princeton of Pot, which offers classes in cannabis cultivation. (This being Oakland, as the agents filled a U-Haul with confiscated computers and enough pot plants to get much of the city stoned, a crowd gathered outside chanting: Shame! Shame! Shame!)

When Oakland officials leave the city government, they tend to not go quietly. Last year, Oaklands departing attorney, John Russo, said he was resigning because he had moral objections to the way the city was being run. The government is led by people who have spent their whole lives fighting authority, Russo told me. Now they are the authority, and they dont know how to deal with that. Its a uniquely immature and narcissistic leadership group, and thats why theyre always fighting with each other. For a few weeks last fall, Mayor Jean Quan could look out her third-floor office window and into Occupy Oaklands teeming encampment, where, among other goings on, Running Wolf was living in a tree house in an old oak, lowering his waste down in a bucket. Occupy Oaklands teeming encampment (after 10 October 2011) was equal parts revolutionary base camp and modern-day Hooverville. Its kitchen was a popular destination for the hungry, homeless and mentally ill, many of whom were already sleeping in the plaza when the tents appeared. Others werent far behind. One homeless man, who has since become a prominent figure in the movement, first visited the camp with the intention of stealing pot from the hippies who were living there. It turned out that the pot, like everything else, was free. We spent a lot of time counting people to see if we could move some of the mentally ill people out, but a lot of them didnt want to move, Quan told me recently. These kids were giving them free food, free wine and free dope. Id stay here, too, if I were them. Quans first instinct when the tents rose on Oct. 10 was to let the protesters stay. There were just a few issues that needed addressing: the illegal open fires, the unauthorized and possibly dangerous use of City Halls power outlets, the 911 calls reporting incidents of violence and sexual harassment inside the camp. Arturo Sanchez, an earnest young deputy city administrator, was dispatched to serve as Oaklands liaison to the movement. His brief was to both express the citys concerns about the camp and to listen to the protesters complaints. He quickly learned that the protesters wanted nothing to do with him or anyone else representing the city. Its a shame, he says. If they had come to us with an agenda, were probably one of the few cities that would have written resolutions and lobbied our state legislators and sent a message along with our mayor when she went to the White House. Oaklands government mistakenly treated an insurrectionist movement as a progressive one. Occupy Oaklands organizers werent disenfranchised liberals but committed anarchists operating from a revolutionary playbook that prohibited all negotiations with government officials. In fact, government officials were at the top of their target list. As one Occupy Oakland blogger put it, the goal was to launch unmediated assaults on our enemies: local government, the downtown business elite and transnational capital.

Once Quan decided later in October to dismantle the camp, everything that could possibly go wrong did. The police moved in on the morning of Oct. 25, a day before she was expecting them to, and while she was on her way back to Oakland from Washington. In clashes with protesters after the raid, they injured an Iraq war veteran, of all people. Quan is not on the best of terms with her own Police Department. She was herself named in a police report shortly before she took office in January 2011 for her conduct at a police-brutality protest, and the police union spent thousands of dollars backing one of her opponents. The theory among some of my left friends and among some members of my family was that I was set up, she said. You know, I was out of town, they closed down the camp a day early and then overreacted. Certain people in the police had tried to set me up before. I mean, my car got booted right after the election. Why? I asked. To send the message that they can do what they want, Quan said. That I better watch out. Quans efforts at damage control only compounded the mess. After the first eviction, she permitted the protesters to return to the plaza in front of City Hall and set up a second encampment. Days later, thousands of people estimates range from 7,000 to 100,000 participated in a strike that shut down most of the citys businesses and the port of Oakland, a vital source of jobs and revenues, prompting Quan to label them economic terrorists. The police union, for its part, publicly criticized the mayor for sending mixed messages about Occupy. On Nov. 14, she kicked the protesters out of the plaza for a second time. By that point, Quans popularity was in free fall. In December, her approval rating dropped to 19 percent, and she became the target of two recall efforts (both of which have been abandoned). When I met with her in March 2012, Quan told me that she didnt want to waste too much time talking about Occupy. It was just a blip, she said. It came and went. Several weeks later, on May Day, the protesters were again rampaging through Oakland. By the time Riley and I arrived at the home-foreclosure auction at the Alameda County Courthouse, dozens of protesters were already trying to push their way into the building via a side entrance. The crowd parted for Riley, and he wove his way toward the metal detector in the entryway. A muscular African-American police officer blocked his path. Riley grew annoyed. I respect your frustration, the officer said. I also respect your artistry. Im a big fan of your music.

The officer started quoting from one of Rileys early songs, Fat Cats and Bigga Fish, the story of a small-time hustler who sneaks into a black-tie party planning to steal anything he can. Its a comic narrative that builds to an ironic, political twist: the hustler winds up getting a lesson in real hustling when he overhears his citys mayor talking to a corrupt real estate developer. (Aint no one player that could beat this lunacy/Aint no hustler on the street could do a whole community.) All right then, lets begin this, the police officer rapped, picking up midway through the song. Nights like this is good for business. You didnt listen to any of the lyrics, Riley interrupted. Yes I did, the officer replied. The lyrics are talking about the people being able to express their power and control their environment, Riley said. And youre stopping that. That has nothing to do with what Im doing right now. Word quickly spread that the auction could be taking place around the corner on the steps of the courthouse. Thats perfect proof of why this movement has to exist as opposed to just art, Riley told me as we followed the crowd around to the front of the building. Because you can listen to my music and just still be manipulated by other things and end up becoming a cop. Hundreds of protesters soon gathered on the courthouse steps, chanting: Hey, hey! Go home! Our house will not be sold today! No one was quite sure what was going on. Was that the auctioneer they had seen walking to his car? Had the auction been postponed? A few protesters spotted a man in khaki shorts, a red Titleist baseball cap and sunglasses, clutching a clipboard with a list of addresses a prospective investor, they surmised, who had come to the courthouse to snatch up a foreclosed home or two. A large circle of activists rapidly closed in on him, moving within inches of his face, chanting: Scumbag! Scumbag! Scumbag! Oaklands chief of police, Howard Jordan, a 23-year member of the force, had the misfortune of taking over the department three days after the first Occupy Oakland encampment went up. Our chief goal has always been to facilitate peoples right to assemble and give them a right to exercise their First Amendment rights, he told me shortly after May Day in his office at Police Headquarters, which overlooks a medical-marijuana dispensary, Oakland Organics.

Thats not exactly how it has looked in viral videos of flash grenades and police-baton beatings at Occupy Oakland protests. In February, the federal monitor charged with overseeing the Police Department said he was thoroughly dismayed by some of its behavior. In particular, he criticized the departments overwhelming military-style response to the Occupy protesters. The clashes that took place the night Scott Olsen was injured triggered a record number of internal-affairs complaints. The department has since missed its court-imposed deadline for investigating these complaints; to expedite the process, it outsourced the cases to law firms and investigators, an added expense of $750,000. Jordan was not going to be unprepared for May Day, calling in hundreds of mutual-aid officers from neighboring towns, including SWAT teams. The day proved to be a relative success for the Police Department. Considerable damage was done to the city, and one police car was set on fire, but tear gas and other so-called nonlethal munitions were used only sparingly. There were no serious injuries, and only 39 protesters were arrested, compared with 400 at the last major Occupy action. But Occupy is just the beginning of Jordans problems. On the most basic level, his department cant protect its citizens. Budget cuts continue to reduce the size of the force to 640 today from 800 officers in 2010 even as incidents of violent crime continue to rise: Oaklands murder rate is up 5 percent over last year, when 110 were killed, and robberies are up 24 percent. Oaklands police force already consumes more than 40 percent of the citys general-purpose fund. Clearly, this is not enough. After a round of layoffs in 2010, the department announced that it would no longer respond to burglaries and break-ins that were not in progress. (They have since amended the policy so officers will now respond to home burglaries when possible.) Officers have not discouraged store owners in especially dangerous neighborhoods from arming themselves. The departments every move is scrutinized by federally appointed independent monitors, a result of a settlement agreement reached with the city in 2003, when four Oakland police officers were accused of planting evidence, falsifying reports and using excessive force. It gets worse. The departments efforts to comply with the settlement agreement and implement reforms have cost it millions in extra payments to independent consultants. And thats in addition to the $57 million the department has paid over the last decade to settle various police-misconduct lawsuits. According to the citys former police chief, Anthony Batts, the federal scrutiny has, perversely, hurt the departments ability to fight violent crime in Oakland, forcing the department to assign more detectives to internal affairs than to homicides. You wind up with tons of police officers inside a building counting data so you can check off boxes, Batts told me. Meanwhile, people are dying in the streets. Batts resigned abruptly in October after just two years on the job, taking the customary potshots at the city on his way out the door. (He told a reporter that Oakland treats its Police Department like a necessary evil.)

His successor, Jordan, now finds himself dealing with a demoralized force, only 15 percent of whose officers actually live in Oakland, according to Quan. Jordan is also dealing with a community that doesnt trust the men and women sworn to protect them. Like everything else in Oakland, the negative perception of the department is entangled with the citys history: in the aftermath of World War II, Oaklands municipal leaders recruited white Southerners to police their increasingly black city. Jordans department is running out of time to comply with the reforms mandated by the settlement agreement. In a matter of months, the O.P.D. could be placed in federal receivership. I asked Jordan how the federal government would go about running a municipal police department. I dont know, he said. I dont think theres ever been a police department that has gone into receivership. Its not something that I want to be the first to do. He paused for a moment to give the matter a little further thought. I imagine that I would become an assistant chief. Why is this happening to Oakland? Ignacio De La Fuente, a city councilman, asked me, gesturing toward his office window in the midst of the May Day chaos. Its our fault. The mayor failed to recognize that this was a problem that if we let grow would have a detrimental impact on the city. The mayor failed miserably dealing with Occupy, and shes failing miserably now. We were sitting on the second floor of Oaklands deserted City Hall, a gorgeous, cream-colored, Beaux-Arts wedding cake of a building Americas first government skyscraper that rose from the rubble of the Great Earthquake of 1906. Downstairs, police officers in riot gear stood guard in front of the buildings entrance. Their presence was by no means a symbolic gesture: when Occupy protesters turned out en masse for an action in late January, City Hall was ransacked. Windows and glass display cases were smashed, flags stolen and burned, an architectural model of City Hall itself toppled. De La Fuente, a small, tough-looking man with a raspy, Spanish-inflected voice, sneaked across the Mexican border in 1970, unable to speak a word of English. He started out as a dishwasher, then became a machinist and labor leader. He was elected in 1992 to Oaklands City Council as part of a wave of left-wing political reformers fighting for impoverished neighborhoods devastated by unemployment, crack cocaine and municipal neglect in the 80s. As he ranted, De La Fuente sounded more like a law-and-order Republican than a former illegal immigrant and militant union organizer. This incredible amount of money we have spent baby-sitting these people, he said, referring to the protesters. It should be absolutely unacceptable. Oakland can have a peculiar effect on progressive politicians. In 1999, the corporate-Americabashing former-and-future California governor Jerry Brown swept into the mayors office and promptly set about undertaking an ambitious, aggressively pro-business agenda for the city. Brown, who had a Labrador named Dharma, was soon cozying up to real estate developers, lobbying the state to loosen its environmental review process on urban construction and conjuring visions of a

new Oakland, with a downtown ballpark for the As and a luxury resort hotel and casino. The centerpiece of his redevelopment plan, the 10K Project, was to lure 10,000 well-off residents to gleaming downtown condominium towers, establishing a new tax base and driving the growth of retail stores and restaurants. De La Fuente was now straining to be heard over the protest raging outside. An aide closed the window, but the noise continued to seep in. The councilman went on, almost shouting: The national and international bad reputation, the perception and the reality unfortunately that Oakland is a place where they can do things that they cannot do anywhere else, that its a magnet for troublemakers were seeing that here again today. As if on cue, a loud bang rang out the detonation of a flash grenade from the Oakland Police. Manifesto Bicycles is a boutique bike shop in downtown Oakland that specializes in single-speed and fixed-gear bikes, or fixies, and also sells a small selection of Oakland-made apparel, like a T-shirt featuring a bicycle tire, a razor blade, a syringe and the words Welcome to Oakland. Its owners are the husband-and-wife team of Sam Cunningham, a 44-year-old former professional skateboarder and herpetologist, and MacKay Gibbs, who describes herself as a music fanatic with a passion for vintage everything and a nose for business. Their small capitalist enterprise named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract represents another side of Oakland, albeit one thats still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, more D.I.Y. version of artisanal Brooklyn. Oakland even has its own take on the Brooklyn Flea, known as the Art Murmur, a sprawling hipster street fair, cultural bazaar and gallery-and-pub-crawl. At the Flea, you can buy refurbished manual typewriters; at the Murmur, you can buy Sharpie-on-foam-cup drawings by a local artist. The collision between Oaklands growing cadre of small-business owners and the local Occupy movement has produced some memorable moments of low comedy. In November, 30-year-old Alanna Rayford, who owns a showroom for local fashion designers in a Gothic Revival building downtown, closed up shop to join the march to the port. She returned the following morning to find the windows of her store smashed and some artwork missing. One of the paintings, a gorilla smoking a blunt, had been placed on prominent display at the entrance to the Occupy encampment. Investment money tends not to flow into cities with soaring violent-crime rates and large numbers of militant nihilists for whom revolution is less a branding opportunity than an active, ongoing goal. And Governor Brown just eliminated the states economic redevelopment agencies, which will make it much harder for small businesses to open in Oakland. Like pioneers in an unsettled urban frontier, Oaklands small-business owners have had to band together. They are talking about creating an emergency fund for those who cant cover their

payments in a given month and are experimenting with the reseeding of neighborhoods. Recently, a pop-up hood appeared in Old Oakland, the citys original downtown. Six small businesses temporarily operated rent-free in order to test the viability of adding retail stores to a quaint enclave that has been experiencing a boomlet in bars, restaurants and residential conversions and construction. For all its fragility, a transformation is clearly under way in Oakland. The tent poles of the new American city have already arrived the urban bike shops, the restaurants with locally sourced fare, the cafes with fair-trade coffee, a Whole Foods. There is a distinctly Oakland character to many of these businesses Awaken, whose menu includes a Santa Cruz-brewed ginger ale at $3.50 a bottle, says its mission is to bring people together and launch movements but its an unmistakable part of the same trend that has been taking hold across urban America for years. It is, in a word, gentrification, and whats most striking about its arrival in Oakland is that its just now getting there that the city has existed for so long as a kind of living museum of 1970s radicalism, its culture of militancy, poverty, crime rates and dysfunctional government all conspiring to delay what now seems inevitable. For years, Oakland has been the black hole in the middle of the great galaxy of Northern California as it shimmered its way into the electronic age, says Richard Walker, an urban-geography professor who recently retired from the University of California, Berkeley. In this context, May Day and Occupy Oakland, more broadly looks less like an expression of the citys indomitable radical spirit than the last gasp of a protest movement overmatched by the encroaching forces of capitalism. Oakland is simply too geographically well positioned and financially underexploited not to absorb the creative, professional and entrepreneurial overflow from more expensive places like San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Berkeley. And as it continues to develop its own gritty-chic cachet, theres a good chance Oakland might become more than just a default option for some of the Bay Areas nouveau riche. What will this transformation mean for Oakland? It should produce a bigger tax base that can help improve city services and maybe even create a more effective police force. But gentrification is not a recipe for job creation. In the end, Oaklands income inequality can only grow, making it not so different from so many other American cities. You will still have poverty, decay and decline in the midst of immense plenty, Walker says. The utopian vision for a post-capitalist Oakland clung to by Boots Riley and the rest of the citys revolutionaries will soon be dead. But radical Oakland will live on, awaiting its next opportunity to rise up, even as the city itself evolves. For every young tech worker moving into a downtown condominium tower or entrepreneur gobbling up cheap, deserted retail space, theres sure to be a militant graduate student drawn to a city that has just added another chapter to its long radical history.

Ever since its encampments were dismantled, Occupy Oakland has been talking about reoccupying a public space and establishing a new beachhead for the revolution. Earlier this year, the protesters tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the abandoned Kaiser Convention Center. On May Day, rumors were rampant that after the protests wound down, they would take back the City Hall plaza. As dusk fell, thousands of activists converged on City Hall, dancing, drumming, distributing leaflets for their various revolutionary movements. But when the sky darkened, the number of officers on Broadway multiplied. The familiar warning followed: I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly and . . . command all those assembled to immediately leave. If you do not do so, you may be arrested or subject to other police action . . . which may result in serious injury. . . . If you refuse to move, chemical agents will be used. The threat worked. Soon, just a few hundred determined protesters remained, rattling their metal shields, hurling obscenities and glass bottles at the police. The Menaces last stand. Only this group was small enough to manage. The police charged the crowd, pushing it north up Telegraph Avenue. People raced past Awaken, with its We Are Oakland. We Are the 99% signs. The cafes tattoo-covered owner hastily unlocked the door to let a few fleeing protesters in as the riot cops chased the retreating herd from downtown. Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer and the author of The Challenge and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning. Editor: Dean Robinson This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: August 3, 2012 An earlier version of this article misstated the point at which Scott Olsen, a veteran of the Iraq war, was injured by the police. It was during protests after a police raid on the protesters camp on Oct. 25, 2011, not during the raid.

David D responds to Jonathan Mahler: http://www.dominionofnewyork.com/2012/08/10/nytimes-underestimates-oaklands-radicals/#.UCnrpkRSM7A