Oscar Grant Mural

Nonprofits Defend the State – Need More Proof?!

Republished from Advance the Struggle

June 27, 2010...6:07 am

On June 23rd, 2010, in the midst of Oscar Grant’s murder trial, one of the leaders of the nonprofit organization, Urban Peace Movement, wrote in an email (in full below):

“We need to begin ‘innoculating’ our bases and the community at-large so that when the verdict comes down, people are prepared for it, and so that the ‘outside agitators’ who were active during the initial Oscar Grant protests are not able to incite the crowd so easily.”

The paternalist and racist assumption made by non-profit sector activists portrays those who participated in property destruction as child-like noble savages easily corrupted by superior beings from afar (read: “outside agitators”). This should come as no surprise to anyone, seeing as how the non-profit organization is historically rooted in colonial assumptions that the oppressed are mindless brutes that require, for better or for worse, intellectual guidance (read: “inoculation”) from above.  The non-profiteers see their role as missionaries, saviors, and saints that carry the burden of pity for the downtrodden.

Who is really the outside agitator? And what does the state and the politically interventionist non-profit sector object to most, the outside part, or the agitator part?

During this past week’s phase of the trial, leading Bay Area journalist JR Valerie observered:

“. . . 4 out of 6 black males under the age of 40 were kicked out of the courtroom in the 2nd day of Meserhle testifying . . . .” (rough transpcription from Hard Knock Radio archive, June 25th, 2010, min. 32:20-32:48, http://kpfa.org/archive/id/62141)

As Mehserle ran through a rehearsed emotional display, one black male courtroom observer from Oakland stood up and called out “save those tears.”  He was promptly jumped by Deputies, removed from the courtroom and now faces charges. Did any “outside agitators” incite this black male to speak out against the false cries of a murdering agent of the state? Would the Urban Peace Movement give this man credit for calling out the courtroom process, which is structured against the “biases” of the people’s sense of justice? Or for them, is the bourgeois white supremacist legal apparatus the legitimate carrier of justice?

To many, the courtroom setting and the whole legal apparatus of the state delivers the opposite of justice.  For centuries it has been coming in from the outside, committing genocide, and conquering to imposing itself as the center of economic, political, and social life. Who is on the outside and who is on the inside of this?  Unfortunately this isn’t the first time that folks claiming to represent the community have behaved as insiders to the system they claim to be against.

Last year, in our pamphlet Justice for Oscar Grant: Lost Opportunity? we wrote:

Despite frequent references to the radical legacy of Oakland, CAPE behaved as an extension of the state, “organizing” people to be peaceful, go home and not take militant action in the streets.

We were criticized (not in any significant written, public form) for taking this blatant stance in opposition to the conservative political role of the non-profit sector, which Coalition Against Police Executions (CAPE) was an expression of. We listened to some of these criticisms and accept that we over-generalized the forces within CAPE. In fact, there were divisions within CAPE that we did not recognize, voices of a more radical nature than the dominant Non-profit elements. We invite those differences to be made known by those within CAPE who had them.