December 2, 2011 | 9:26 AM | By

Occupy Movement: Confronting ‘Racial Tension’

Since the early days of the Occupy movement, there have been questions over race and whether protests have been representative of those Americans struggling the most. We’ve written before about efforts in D.C. to boost protest diversity, and the Huffington Post has this interesting dispatch from Detroit, also a mostly-black city, where many early protestors were white.


In recent years Grand Circus Park, despite the slow gentrification of downtown Detroit, has been most welcoming to hard-luck natives, laid-off blue collar workers and other jobless, the self-medicating and many of the city’s chronic homeless. Many of them, like the majority of the city itself, were black.

So when the Occupy protests sprouted here, and waves of young, mostly white protesters arrived from outside the city with their tents and their cardboard signs and people’s microphones, the park’s invisible demarcation lines of class and race were for a time blurred, eroding in small measure what has been one of the central complaints about the movement, its lack of diversity.

Nationally protesters have occupied cities like Detroit, Oakland, New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and others with sizable African-American and minority communities. But, especially in its early days, the Occupy movement remained overwhelmingly white.

Read more at: www.huffingtonpost.com