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PDFFrom Colorlines:
There are also places where a partnership between Occupying and immigrant rights isn’t taking hold. In Los Angeles, there will be two events; a morning march led by immigrant rights groups, as has been true for a decade, and another in the afternoon organized by Occupy L.A. Michael Novick, a spokesperson for Occupy L.A. pulled up a generalist argument for the separation in an interview with CNN. May Day isn’t just about immigrants, he said; “It’s for labor rights, for economic and social justice, for economic equity, and for peace. And we think that will build a strong force downtown to say this is going to be a day that could change the world a little bit and hopefully for the better.”
It’s unfortunate that a march led by immigrants with those same messages doesn’t count as broad and inclusive in L.A.; that doesn’t seem to be an issue in New York, for example, where the immigrant rights groups and OWS have merged their major events.
Colorlines.com and our publisher, the Applied Research Center (ARC), continue to explore the relationship between OWS and the racial justice organizations that work to ensure that economic and social justice solutions take root in communities of color. ARC staff has been involved with Occupy Research, a network of academics and independent researchers doing research about and for the movement. We’ve conducted a series of focus groups with youth organizers involved in Occupy in various cities, including Oakland, New York, Portland, Baltimore, and Atlanta, and will be reporting on those later this Spring.
We are reminded daily that the 99 percent isn’t monolithic, and that the mechanisms that cause suffering differ from community to community. Some of the conditions that are new for this generation of the white middle class — the structures that bilk them of their assets or prevent them from acquiring any — are very old indeed, and often function with a particular sharpness, for people of color. That isn’t a coincidence, and economic justice movements would do well to deal with these patterns explicitly and deeply if they hope to solve the problem for everybody
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