Brunch, the New ‘White Space’: Protesters Storm Brunch-Serving Restaurants in Oakland

Sunday was a bad day to order the egg-white omelet.

Not content with disrupting medal ceremonies for centenarian WWII veterans, the “hands up, don’t shoot” crowd served up its latest concoction: “Black Brunch,” in which protesters stormed brunch-serving restaurants — a.k.a. “white spaces” — in Manhattan and Oakland, Calif., chanting, singing, waving banners and posters, and reading off names of black citizens killed by police.

If that seems hip and edgy to you, then you were probably brunching at Lallisse on Sunday morning. In an interview in Spook magazine, “activists” Wazi Maret Davis and Brianna Gibson, discussing an earlier Black Brunch event, recounted the reaction of diners at a restaurant in the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland:

[Spook:] What was the response you had from the white folks who were sitting there in Rockridge, eating their brunch?

Brianna: . . . I think the first place we went I had a few people ask me, “What do you want us to do?” And I told them, just remain silent and acknowledge that we’re here. Some people nodded, some people applauded, or showed a fist of solidarity, and there were a few individuals who were crying.

Wazi: Weeping. Weeping is the word.

“I think it’s beautiful,” the manager of Oakland restaurant Forge told the Los Angeles Times, responding to Sunday’s events. “It’s a message that needs to be heard, and if they have to disrupt business and daily life for a minute, then I’m glad we could help.” At Oakland’s Lungamore, a dozen customers stood in support.

The rhetoric and the reality do not align. Davis says that it is imperative to “interrupt . . . communities where they’re surrounded by money, or they’re surrounded by white folks, [and] they don’t have to engage with what’s going on in Black communities, and they can easily disassociate from that and pretend it’s not happening.” But the communities the Black Brunch crowd inconvenienced were full of dime-a-dozen liberals eager to support their cause. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in midtown Manhattan unwilling to raise a mimosa to a refrain of “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for us all!”

Left-wingers can be about as flamboyant as they please when protesting in Manhattan or the Bay Area, and they know it. There is a reason they are not staging their performance art at barbecue joints at dinnertime in Fort Worth: namely, they would not make it through the door — not because the diners are racist brutes, but because the only dinner-and-show they are interested in is the one they paid for.

And in parts of the country not governed by Oberlin graduates, people are sensible enough to refuse the premise of such spectacles, which is that the racial climate of present-day America is no different than that of 1950s-era Montgomery. But it is. Black Brunch is not a modern-day sit-in, because brunch establishments are not modern-day whites-only diners.

“Black Brunch” is nothing more than the tactic of a racial-justice movement being steadily reduced to its radical fringe, populated by people such as Gibson, who use phrases like, “We’re really trying to de-centre whiteness.” Marches in Time Square succeeded on the backs of recreational protesters, who, self-satisfied, returned to their NPR podcasts and vegan-smoothie shops. Black Brunch is a grasp at relevance by the hardliners left behind. Who can be surprised that it meets with some approval from the crowd of milquetoast liberals who, for reasons of demography and geography, are the people most likely to frequent brunch service in Manhattan and Oakland? It is one type of leftist talking to another.

And it’s the left-winger who is most likely to see things through the filter of racial grievance. As one protester tweeted, “ATTN WHITE Man, I have no guilt disturbing your brunch. Its [sic] YOU that has no right to be here.”

Just as Martin Luther King envisioned: a nation where people are judged not by the color but by the content of their crepe.

Or something.

— Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.

“Activists like graduate student Wazi Maret Davis, say they were deliberate in their choice of restaurants, selecting places they considered were “white spaces” – which included an Oakland Apple Store. The point is to confront non-black people with realities that black people are confronted with every day.”

http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/12/10/black-brunch-organizers-put-protest-on-the-menu

‘Black Brunch’ Organizers Put Protest on the Menu

Wazi Maret Davis, Zachary Murray and Wild Tigers created Black Brunch in Oakland.

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/wazi-maret-davis/9a/b20/63b

Wazi Maret Davis
Violence Prevention Educator at Youth ALIVE!
Oakland, CaliforniaPublic Policy

Previous
The Greenlining Institute, San Francisco State University, Conferences & Visitor Services
Education
San Francisco State University

Summary
Originally from Hyattsville, Maryland and the Washington, DC area, Wazi moved to Oakland, California in 2013 to pursue higher education while building and investing in the rich history and Oakland community. They hold a BA in Communication and a Major Certificate in LGBT studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and are currently enrolled in the MA program in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. At SFSU, Wazi began working part-time as a graduate research assistant with the Beyond Bullying Project—a digital storytelling project about LGBTQ sexuality in high schools.

They have also volunteered and interned with organizations such as the Mautner Project:
National Lesbian Health Organization, Bois of Baltimore, Inc., MarylandCAN (Campaign for
Achievement Now), and the National Black Justice Coalition, and recently the Black Youth Project all of which also organize differently across intersections to address issues of social and political inequity. Wazi has experience working both on the ground and in public sector organizations and currently works for The Greenlining Institute carrying out public policy and advocacy work.

Wazi identifies as an organizer, activist, and artist invested in youth, education and racial and economic justice. They are especially dedicated to working for and with other under-served, working class LGBTQ communities and communities of color and is currently looking for opportunities with both paid & non-paid youth development, health, and/or public policy work.

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https://www.linkedin.com/pub/zachary-murray/3b/225/65

Zachary Murray
Knowledge and Advocacy Coordinator at Larkin Street Youth Services
Oakland, CaliforniaPublic Policy
Previous
Center for American Progress, Congressional Hunger Center
Education
Cornell University

Experience
Larkin Street Youth Services
Knowledge and Advocacy Coordinator
Larkin Street Youth Services
October 2013 – Present (1 year 4 months)
Center for American Progress
Fellow
Center for American Progress
March 2013 – July 2013 (5 months)
Congressional Hunger Center
Emerson National Hunger Fellow
Congressional Hunger Center
August 2012 – July 2013 (1 year)

Education
Cornell University
Cornell University
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Bachelor of Sciences (B.S.), Africana Studies and City and Regional Planning
2012

http://www.hungercenter.org/fellow/zachary-murray/

Policy Placement: Center for American Progress (Washington, DC)
Zach’s work at the Center for American Progress focused on building bridges between CAP’s Poverty to Prosperity and Progress 2050 teams. Through contributions to each teams’ research and analysis, Zach worked to unify Poverty and Progress 2050s commitment to create economic opportunity for all, close racial and ethnic disparities, and seize on diversity as an opportunity for growth and prosperity.

https://www.facebook.com/zachary.x.murray

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Wild Tigers (Alette Kendrick)

https://www.facebook.com/alettric

http://www.calstate.edu/pa/clips2007/june/7june/ucsc.shtml

UCSC cuts student activist's suspension
Santa Cruz Sentinel 6/7/07
By Roger Sideman
Alette Kendrick, the UC Santa Cruz student who faced the harshest penalty for her actions during a protest of the UC Board of Regents, struck a deal Friday with campus officials, who reduced her suspension from three years to two academic quarters in exchange for a written apology and 100 hours of community service.
On Oct. 18, demonstrators blocked the three exits of a campus lecture hall, preventing the regents from leaving. The protesters were met by police who used pepper spray and batons to clear the way. Kendrick, 21, was arrested by campus police on three felony counts of battering a police officer. But the charges were reduced and last month Kendrick pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest and disturbing a lawful public assembly. She issued a public apology before the court.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/news-media-ignores-black-protests/Content?oid=4145294

Organizers of Saturday's Millions March in Oakland made sure white protesters didn't take over the event.

"I'm of the belief that there is most definitely a place for property destruction — for raging and all that," said Wild Tigers, another Black Brunch organizer, graduate student, and longtime activist, "but the reality is that, as black people, it's very different for us to be out there on the streets smashing windows at Starbucks. Because, if I do that, I could get a bullet. For white people out there, doing that is a privilege."

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