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Occupy DC protestors march to the Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 17 during a day of protests in a show of force by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

By Bridget Todd

Originally posted on Racialicious, republished with permission.

People often tell me that I don’t look like your average Occupy protestor. I was initially drawn to the Occupy movement for several reasons. As an educator, anything that gets young people paying attention to the world around them is something that I feel the need to support. As an activist and organizer, I generally believe in the need for all citizens to engage in this kind of political discourse. As a black woman, I feel any conversation about economic inequality is incomplete if it doesn’t also address racial inequality as well. The various occupations across the country present spaces for such conversations to take place. I’ve found plenty of reasons to support the Occupy movement, but does the movement support me?

Much has already been said about race and the Occupy movement. Some have criticized the movement for its perceived lack of diversity and aggressive “whiteness.” Earlier this month, organizers took heat for refusing to allow state representative and civil rights legend John Lewis to address the crowd. A protester at Occupy Philly claimed volunteers called her a “nigger” while she waited to use a communal cell phone charging station. She responded to the incident by forming her own coalition within Occupy Philly: The People of Color Committee.

She isn’t the only protester working to bring race into the central message of the movement by mobilizing occupiers of color. Occupy Harlem’s first general assembly was largely black and Latino and included veteran black activists like Professor Cornell West and Nellie Hester Bailey.

After being confronted by the whiteness of the protesters, two friends from New York and Detroit started Occupy the Hood, a movement that works within Occupy Wall Street to mobilize people of color on issues of economic injustice. According to their Facebook page, “Occupy The Hood stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement… It is imperative that the voice of POC is heard at this moment! We must not be forgotten as the world progresses to the next economical stage. We can all agree that the voices in our communities are especially needed in this humanitarian struggle. We are our future and we possess the energy needed to push the Occupy movement to the next phase.”

These attempts to bring race into the conversations taking place at various occupations are integral, as racial injustice and economic injustice go hand in hand. Despite under-representation at Occupations around the country, black and brown people make up the majority of those suffering economically. A new report from the Center for Social Inclusion confirms this disparity, maintaining that “today, Jim Crow exists in the job market as more black and Latino workers are cast as second-class workers: over-represented in low-skill, low-wage occupations with limited chances to move up the ladder of opportunity.”

As we all know, racism exists, even within well meaning progressive movements. It exists as a kind of pathological denial of the privilege in which white progressive activists are actively rooted. Ignoring complex issues of race and privilege in the Occupy movement will only suggest that it actually is steeped in the kind of racial intolerance of which it has been accused.

During my time spent at Occupy K Street and Occupy Wall Street, I was disgusted by the amount of white protesters who happily waved signs likening student loan debt to slavery, with seemingly no thought to how the co-option of slavery rhetoric might look to black protesters. While being in debt is undeniably unpleasant, to compare it to the literal enslavement of millions of Africans is ridiculous. This is the kind of racial obliviousness that will alienate black and brown folks who might otherwise be sympathetic to the overall message of the protests.

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 U.S. 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 1960s 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, D.C. 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 D.C. 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.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (R) and Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker (L) at last year's Wall Street Journal CEO Council, held in Washington, D.C. on November 16, 2010.

On Monday and Tuesday, 120 of the world’s top executives convened at the Four Seasons hotel in D.C. for the annual Wall Street Journal CEO Council. The people assembled represented companies generating a combined total of $2 trillion and employing 5 million people, according to the organization’s website. In addition to CEOs, attendees included lawmakers, policy wonks and former ambassadors. The meeting’s theme centered around China’s role in the global economy, job creation and American deficits.

The meeting brought together, in essence, the 1 percent around which the Occupy movement protestors have centered their critiques. And yet, Occupy DC protestors weren’t at the meeting. Occupy DC participant Brandon Darby, a member of the group’s media team, said protestors didn’t know about the meeting.

“As far as I know, we didn’t do anything [at the CEO meeting],” he said.

Darby said Occupy DC has a committee that focuses on finding events where protestors could get involved. It’s no small task figuring out where to go in a city like D.C., where such events happen very frequently.

“If we went to every single thing like that, it would rapidly spiral into us doing nothing but going to those kinds of meetings,” Darby said. “We definitely sort of pick and choose.”

Protestors probably didn’t hear about the meeting “because a lot of the energy was focused on what was going on in New York,” Darby added.

Early Tuesday morning, New York City police cleared Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protestors, under orders to clean the area. The middle-of-the-night raid outraged protestors around the country. In D.C., protestors spent part of the day Tuesday marching to Brookfield Properties’ D.C. office. The company owns Zuccotti Park.

Dan Patterson / Flickr

A protestor holds an "Occupy the Hood' sign in New York City.

The Occupy protests against corporate greed have brought together a broad coalition of people, but there have been questions about whether the crowds assembled are racially representative.

Enter Occupy the Hood, a sub-movement that started in New York and Detroit and is now spreading to other cities, including D.C. The goal is to get more people of color involved in Occupy protests and ensure their voices are heard. Friends Julian Liser, 21, and Drew Franklin, 24, started the D.C. branch last week. They say the protests in D.C., where 61 percent of the population is non-white, should be attracting more people of color, particularly from economically depressed communities since they are hardest-hit by the economic woes at the center of the movement.

“It’s important that minorities are also aware of what’s going on, and they should also feel this movement is important for them, too,” Liser, who is black, says. “It’s kind of hard to explain that to them because they just see people around K Street protesting something. They don’t see how it affects them.”

Liser’s story is similar to many of the white protestors on K Street. He’s unemployed and was motivated to join Occupy DC after learning about the new Bank of America debit card fees. Such fees are “killing my account,” Liser says.

Franklin, who is white, says the protests were “started by white people and there’s already a social divide, so that’s something you really need to work to overcome.”

Liser says people who work can’t necessarily make time to get down to K Street. And the protests are removed from D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods where few whites live, places that tend to be isolated, he adds. “You don’t see anything happening beyond that.”

There have been some efforts aimed at improving the racial diversity of the protests. Anti-racism training has begun at Occupy DC, for example, which focuses on raising awareness about white privilege. Franklin and Liser, who say the D.C. protests are generally welcoming to people of color, want to hold meetings throughout the city and involve organizations based in marginalized communities. Occupy DC has endorsed their efforts.

Some say it’s divisive to focus on race in the Occupy movement, which is largely about class issues.

“Just because certain issues are divisive doesn’t mean they aren’t based in truth and that you should ignore them,” Franklin says. “Class does not supersede race or vice-versa. In fact, they tie together in many ways and we need to acknowledge the complexities of society and the establishment if we’re going to confront these problems.”

Andrew Bossi / Flick

A protest sign during the first day of Occupy DC.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to other cities, including the District. Protesters are are calling for an end to corporate greed and proclaiming the vast majority of Americans suffer while the rich haven’t.

More than a hundred people gathered at Freedom Plaza on Thursday, some wielding signs with statement like “We are the 99%.”

It would make sense that such a movement would have particular relevance for communities of color, who are facing higher unemployment rates and are largely on the losing side of the wealth gap. So some have wondered why the crowds in some cities have been mostly white.

Racialicious compiled a number of dispatches from activist reporting many people of color are absent from leadership positions or feel marginalized at the New York protests. Such rumblings helped spur the formation of “The People of Color Working Group,” which issued a statement:

… The economic crisis did not begin with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008. Indeed, people of color and poor people have been in a state of crisis since the founding of this country, and for indigenous communities, since before the founding of the nation. We have long known that capitalism serves only the interests of a tiny, mostly white, minority.

The vast majority of the crowd at Occupy DC’s Thursday protest was white, but a number of people of color said they felt speakers’ messages and the crowd assembled was representative of those who are suffering.

“If one person is affected, the globe is affected,” Simone Evans-Blango of D.C. said. “I think [focusing on] who is affected by what is counterproductive and divisive.”

Jerri Walker, a Howard University student, said she was pleased with the diversity of the crowd. And Shari Whitaker of Maryland said, “we’re all hurting. No one race is hurting more than the other.”

Elahe Izadi / DCentric

A crowd gathered on Freedom Plaza on Thursday. Most, but not all, protestors were white.

Some white activists, however, said the crowd was disproportionately white. Some questioned whether the fear of facing law enforcement could have dissuaded people of color from attending. There have been reports of clashes with police at the New York protests.

“It’s one of the privileges of being white, especially a female,” Sarah Eyre of Baltimore said. “If something happens to you, it probably won’t be as bad than if you were not white.”

White activists also said better outreach was needed.

“What we’ve seen today is a start,” Kathleen Sutcliffe of D.C. said. “If this isn’t diverse enough then we need to make the effort to reach out and form coalitions. It needs to be the entire 99 percent.”

Dwight Kirk of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists said there needed to be greater diversity, but he was optimistic that such gaps could be bridged, particularly with the use of social media. The effort needs to be a conscious one, he added.

“There needs to be an awareness that we’re not all coming to the table equally empowered,” he said.

Some activists in New York have already made noise about it. An “Open Letter From Two White Men to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET” was written in response to reports of marginalization at the New York protests:

… We would like to add our voices to the chorus of constructive critiques coming from communities of color. We believe the white people of #OccupyWallStreet need to understand something: the feelings of economic insecurity, political powerlessness, and lack of support that have brought so many of us to the protests at Liberty Park have been lived by many of the people of color in this country for centuries. Without an active effort to address racial issues from the core of #OccupyWallStreet, the protest will fail…

The reality is that organizing a protest in the middle of a weekday prevents a lot of people from participating. It particularly shuts out the working poor who, regardless of race, cannot afford to take a day off from work — even if it’s to protest against a system they feel has by-and-large failed them.