Response to NY Times article on Occupy Oakland & others, by Davey D.

Last week the New York Times published an absurd article about activists in Oakland, CA. It focused on occupy but was a larger attack on the city's activists. The article was BS, but it got a lot of attention. Well, Davey D. (radio personality, hip hop historian, professor) has written a response.

http://www.dominionofnewyork.com/2012/08/10/ny-times-underestimates-oaklands-radicals

‘Radical politics’ — in Mahler’s world — are those who like to throw rocks at windows, fight the police for the notoriety and recapture the hey days of the Black Panthers and rowdy rebellious spirit of the Hells Angels who have a chapter here. That in no way describes what people are all about here in Oakland. It diminishes the true grind that organizers put in day-in and day-out to improve their community and better this city. Those who take direct action in the face of oppression do so because they have little or no choice. It’s not something to be romanticized, it’s not a game, even if this writer came across a few individuals who thought it was.

So let’s put a couple of things on the table that The New York Times and Mahler omitted, starting with the Movement to win Justice for Oscar Grant. For those who don’t know, Grant was a unarmed 22-year-old man who was shot point-blank by a BART police officer on New Year’s morning 2009, while he lay face down, restrained on the Fruitvale station platform in Oakland.