Video - Main St. report Occupy the Hood/Detroit.
BAR | Those that initiated the early occupations in most cities were white. They have re-established the long-lost right of the poor to comngregate in public and express their discontent. If this is not to be a right which only whites enjoy, it's time for us to step up too. There will be race and class tensions, with the increased participation of black and brown people in the occupation movement. But these are growing pains, and necessary. It's time, as Glen Ford has said, to claim our place in the 99% and spell out what that looks like.
Occupation Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?
The answer is plenty, and we need to hurry up and claim it.
The tactic of “occupation” has reclaimed is the right of poor and jobless, even homeless, people to congregate, to assemble and to be discontented in public. That's no small thing, and it's surely not a thing that could have been accomplished if the first occupiers had been young, jobless and black or brown instead of white.
If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.
What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason.
Make no mistake about it, reclaiming the right of the poor, jobless and discontented to peaceably assemble, while politically paralyzing mayors and police forces used to cracking heads and dispersing malcontents is a project only white protesters could have accomplished without police violence and massive arrests. Fist tap Nomad.
Occupation Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?
The answer is plenty, and we need to hurry up and claim it.
The tactic of “occupation” has reclaimed is the right of poor and jobless, even homeless, people to congregate, to assemble and to be discontented in public. That's no small thing, and it's surely not a thing that could have been accomplished if the first occupiers had been young, jobless and black or brown instead of white.
If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.
What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason.
Make no mistake about it, reclaiming the right of the poor, jobless and discontented to peaceably assemble, while politically paralyzing mayors and police forces used to cracking heads and dispersing malcontents is a project only white protesters could have accomplished without police violence and massive arrests. Fist tap Nomad.
5 comments:
"What's In It For Black and Brown People?"
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=33359
lol, time to ring your little buzzer and let Mrs. Don know that your Depend is fully loaded and you could use a change and sponge bath..., http://abcnews.go.com/Business/occupy-wall-street-protesters-plan-move/story?id=14959906#.TsPt7fLtnko
LOL
Yeah, BD is old. Here's a pretty good YouTube, originally from before you were born, 1960, BD remembers when it was a big hit, could become a powerful icon for the Occupiers... The video is a re-do in 1999 by the original artist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpKQX4G6bgc&feature=related
I posted this on Hake's site
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Education RESEARCH cannot be divorced from politics but maybe EDUCATION can. Do a survey of scientists and see how many were inspired by reading science fiction before puberty.
Politicians don't want people to think. Or they want people to think what they are told. So really good education is a threat to them. It is even a threat to the political system that runs the educational system.
Why haven't we created something as simple as a National Recommended Reading List after all of these decades?
And the ECONOMISTS!!! It's 42 years after the Moon landing. Are we supposed to believe they don't have a clue that planned obsolescence is happening in cars all of that time? Galbraith wrote about it TEN YEARS before the Moon landing. So why can't economists talk about how much Americans have lost on the DEPRECIATION of automobiles and other durable consumer goods since 1969?
How about mandatory accounting in the schools?
Some education!!
Physics makes stuff wear out. That should be measured in accounting by DEPRECIATION. Is accounting too difficult for physicists?
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Black Americans could have made double-entry accounting mandatory among themselves decades ago. We would just have to encourage the idea and find and suggest good books. Why do we need White people to tell us what education is? Why do we need credentIals for knowledge that is USEFUL TO OURSELVES? What the palefaces call education is mostly a psychological game that turns knowledge into property and encourages people to hide information from each other.
How long are we going to be manipulated by White Morons?
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