Racial Fractures and the Occupy Movement

That being said, some Occupy movements are more racially inclusive than others. Many seem to have openly embraced the sometimes-thorny intersections of race and class that tend to pop up during discussions of economic injustice. In Albuquerque, occupiers renamed their movement “UnOccupy Albuquerque” out of respect to the Native American community’s distaste for the word “occupy.” In LA, protesters reached out to black and Latino homeowners who were facing foreclosure. In Atlanta, Occupiers renamed their occupation site Troy Davis Park.

If it is to be successful, the entire Occupy movement needs to take deliberate steps to be racially inclusive, even if that means addressing the white privilege that exists from within the movement. Only then will they be capable of wielding strength as a unified movement. As Color Lines puts it, “The Occupy movement is clearly unifying. Centralizing racial equity will help to sustain that unity. This won’t happen accidentally or automatically. It will require deliberate, smart, structured organizing that challenges segregation, not only that of the 1 percent from everyone else, but also that which divides the 99 percent from within.”

I encountered a perfect illustration of this kind of racial inclusiveness during the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, D.C. on Friday, October 28th. The march, which included organizers from the Occupy movement, began at Howard University and ended with a rally outside of the US Chamber of Commerce. The group of marchers began as a mix of mostly black Howard students, faculty and alumni. Karen Spellman, a Howard University alumni and a veteran of 60s era SNCC civil rights organizing, was in attendance and she said a few words before we departed. We marched down Georgia Avenue, encouraging most bystanders to join us (some did). When we made our way through McPherson Square, the site of Occupy K Street, more white Occupy protesters joined us.

Blacks and whites marching together might be the norm for protests in Oakland or New York, but D.C. has a different kind of racial landscape all together. Thanks in part to the rapid gentrification of many neighborhoods, DC is a city with a tense racial divide. With the influx young, white professionals embarking on D.C., the once “Chocolate City” is quickly becoming less brown. Neighborhoods that were once mainstays of black nightlife and culture have become increasingly white. Rising rents and property taxes have pushed many black longtime DC resident elsewhere. D.C. is a city where one can actually see this racial divide unfold over time in neighborhoods. So, I wasn’t terribly surprised when this divide began to play out during our march.

As we continued our march, some of the older black activists began to lag behind as the young and mostly white Occupy K Street protesters took the lead. Sensing a fracturing of the group, a young white occupier shouted, “We all need to stay together!” Everyone waited for the rest of the group to catch up. Someone in the crowd urged Spellman to get up front and handed her a bullhorn. She tells the crowd, now a mix of black and white, that she wants to teach us the classic civil rights protest anthem “Oh Freedom.” The entire group falls silent as they listen to Spellman, a black woman who led her own protests decades before Occupy, sing the tune. Eventually, the entire crowd joined in the singing and we continued marching. We marched: old with young, black with white; all united by one cause, our voices blending together and echoing into the D.C. night.

(Image Credit: The Washington Post)

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