Where Have You Guys Been, Anyway?

Stacy Patton over at the Washington Post finally notices that African-Americans are neither impressed with or resonating with the Occupy Together movement, and nobody should actually be surprised that this is the case.

Beyond a lack of leaders to inspire them to join the Occupy fold, blacks are not seeing anything new for themselves in the movement. Why should they ally with whites who are just now experiencing the hardships that blacks have known for generations? Perhaps white Americans are now paying the psychic price for not answering the basic questions that blacks have long raised about income inequality.

New Jersey comedian John “Alter Negro” Minus says he won’t participate in the Occupy protests because black people are being besieged by so many social injustices, he can’t get behind targeting just the 1 percent.

Banks’ bad behavior “just gets lost in the sauce, so to speak,” Minus said. “High joblessness and social disenfranchisement is new to most of the Wall Street protesters. It’s been a fact of life for African Americans since the beginning. I actually think black people are better served by staying out of the protests. Civil disobedience will only further the public perception that black people like to cause trouble.”

Is there a chance that the movement can become more diverse? Leslie Wilson, a professor of African American history at Montclair State University, is not optimistic.

“Occupy Wall Street cannot produce enough change to encourage certain types of black participation,” Wilson said in an interview. “The church cannot get enough blacks out on the streets. Some students will go, but not the masses. Black folks, particularly older ones, do not think that this is going to lead to change. . . . This generation has already been beaten down and is hurting. They are not willing to risk what little they have for change. Those who are wealthier are not willing to risk and lose.”

I think a lot of it, at least from my perspective, goes back to my discussion on white liberals and privilege.  Folks getting pepper sprayed and tasered, treated as criminals, portrayed in the media as nothing more than thugs and gangsters, all for no good reason?

Welcome to our world, folks.  It's not pretty.  We've been saying this nonsense has been going on for years, but the rise of Occupy Wall Street has, to many darker-skinned folks like myself, only exposed the ugly rift in America that has always been there.  Remember, in just four years or so, the financial crisis and the proceeding bailout devastated what little wealth the African-American community had.  The racial wealth gap right now is staggering in the US.

It took for the wealth gap to get this bad for some people to notice that for some of us, it's been this awful for generations.  It's great that people can camp out in parks when you don't have to, and then proceed to say "Hey this wealth disparity is awful!"

Where have you guys been for the last 30 years, huh?  Nice to have you finally join us on the same page.  Now, what exactly do you plan to do about it other than cleverly photoshopping Pepper Spray Cop into artwork?

When some of us say "Hey, you guys have a leaderless movement and it's being marginalized, maybe you should take some pointers from the civil rights movement" we're not saying it because we want to co-opt anything, we're saying it because we've friggin' been there.

Does this mean we're all finally ready to at least have this discussion now?

In other words, what BlackCanseco said.  Every word of it.