It's because you're not poor, and you're not in Oakland. You have absolutely no facts about the situation, but you're here anyway, "just worried" about hypothetical people you don't know and haven't even gathered statistics on. You've got no idea why they're offering this to poor blacks in Oakland, and you're just gonna take a guess.

And you're promptly validated in that by other non-poor non-Oaklanders who tell you -- and I'm quoting here -- that your lack of experience is "100%" equivalent to those who do have experience.

That's the problem here: not your whiteness, but the outrage you feel at being excluded from a decision in which you've got no information and no stake. That stems from all of the things at once: your whiteness, your maleness (go ahead, tell me I'm wrong about that), and all the other dimensions along which people get excluded from things and simply never happen to you.

And instead of saying, "Tell me more", you tell everybody that your opinion is devalued solely because of the color of your skin, so that all of the other people in this room full of middle-class white men will tell you that it's wrong to exclude you.

I know you've long since stopped listening to me, but I'm nonetheless going to make a suggestion: the next time you're "just worried" about something, consider whether you've done anything to assuage that worry. Without that, it looks like you're just trying to inform the Oakland City Council of something that it already knows -- because it's literally the only thing you know about it.