This past week, I was driving up an unfamiliar street on the way back from a hiking trail in Oakland. I was surprised to see the following graffiti on the garage, and found out that it was the Mayor’s house. What surprised me most was the discord between the Black Lives Matter sign in the window and the graffiti on the garage door.

I don’t condone graffiti tagging anyone’s home. But I do understand the sentiment. Poor and working class people of color are living in desperate times and affluent white people are living in relative comfort. Black Lives Matter doesn’t just represent a feeling of not wanting Black people to be brutally murdered. It’s about being willing to stand against white supremacy and the institutions that support it. The graffiti went up on Mayor Libby Schaaf’s garage just hours before she voted AGAINST a measure to defund police. The Movement for Black Lives only has three demands. The first is to defund police. Outside of the Oakland Police Department, she is the single most powerful individual in Oakland, who could have a huge impact here. But she is unwilling to use the power of her office, or her power as an individual to do so. Given her unwillingness to act, she has a lot of nerve to put a BLM sign up in her window.

People have characterized the graffiti as an attempt to “intimidate” the mayor into changing her vote. This is ridiculous. The graffiti is a cry for help. We need the Mayor to take action on behalf of our communities. The graffiti is calling Mayor Schaaf out for her racist behavior. It is exposing the hypocrisy of her BLM sign if she won’t support the BLM demands. As I looked for an article to link to the graffiti, I had to scroll through three pages of google search items to find one that didn’t speak of the activists as “vandals” or refer to the graffiti as an “attack.” Communities of color are covered in graffiti. Does this mean that people of color are always being “attacked”? Why is graffiti completely acceptable in some neighborhoods, but unacceptable in others? Why does the mayor expect to govern a city where she lives in a quiet, predominantly white neighborhood while other communities are filled with sirens, police helicopters, and officers breaking down our doors and shooting us in our beds?

Especially now, as the city name of Oakland has come out of Donald Tr*mp’s mouth as one of the cities to which he may be sending his secret police, an unidentified group of unauthorized law enforcement officials who are kidnapping and brutalizing protesters. Mayor Schaaf, people are dying. Fascism is rising in our nation. Our democracy is under attack. You need to grow some backbone and stand up for justice. This is not the time for white fragility. Some graffiti on your garage is not the real danger here. I heard that your children were scared, and—as a mother—my heart goes out to any child who feels frightened in these times. But my heart particularly goes out to frightened children in detention at the border, children who have been terrorized by police. Children whose family members may not come home because they were brutalized or kidnapped at protests in Portland or wherever else Tr*mp chooses to send his goon squad.

Schaaf is a Democrat. This is similar to the type of spinelessness we have seen with Joe Biden. His Green New Deal focuses on renewable power for buildings and public transportation, but doesn’t address private vehicles. These half-measures won’t get us where we need to go. We need more than lip service to these problems, we need real leadership that will address the problems at the root.

But we can keep pushing Biden to the left, and we can keep pushing local officials as well. The Breathe Act will be making its way through Congress, and we can keep up the pressure to get it passed. And above all, we can fight to ensure that the will of the people is enacted in the November election. Which is also the third demand of the Movement for Black Lives: Remove Donald Tr*mp.