A Friendly and Open Letter to East Bay Clergy, Non-Profit Executives, and Elected Official

To Those Who Seek to Divide Us:

Your preemptive denouncements of potential disruption in the wake of the verdict in the Mehserle trial have displayed your true colors. It's no coincidence that you speak the language of the police; you have the same interests. You are aware that any disruption of the functioning of the city of Oakland will destabilize your positions of power.

Many of you have attempted to exacerbate racial divisions in our community, to pit white “outsiders” against black and brown youth. Your attempts will fail, just as they failed in January of 2009. We support those white radicals who fight alongside us in the streets. Police violence is a threat to us all, it is only because we are divided along these racial lines, the same racial lines many of you seek to fortify, that we can continue to be victims.

It is unsettling the way some of you have used the police murder of Oscar Grant as a springboard for your careers, as a talking point used to get more people to your sermon or to gain a promotion at your non-profit job.

Clergy, Non-Profit Executives, and Elected Officials: you are just another part of the power structure, the structure that can only be upheld by the violence of the police. You have no interest in changing the system, only in changing its color: a darker shade of American political corruption.

Financially advantaged people in positions of power have no place issuing decrees to working class people. When you say that this is “your community” it is clear that this statement comes from a position of ownership rather than from a perspective of collective residence and participation.

You are the same people who told Robert F Williams that God would stop the Klan, the same people who advised the Panthers to turn the other cheek, the same people who tell the survivors of police violence to get on our knees and pray. We have already spent too much time on our knees. We will live a dignified life, we will tell future generations that we refused to submit and follow the orders of the police. We've had enough of masters.

The streets do not belong to you. Keep your phony resistance for the press conferences, save your preaching for Sunday. Your attempts at dividing the younger generation are falling apart.

Your gods can not save you.

We intend to stand together.

- A Young Rebel