Beyond Barricades and Privilege: Reflections from the #OccupyWallStreet Community/Labor March

By Sonny Singh

Yesterday was a great day in New York City.  Tens of thousands joined the #OccupyWallStreet movement in downtown Manhattan, demanding an economic system that ensures justice for working people, students, the unemployed – the 99%.

It’s been a little over a week since I began going down to Liberty Square to support and participate and exactly a week since our desi bloc block of the movement’s Declaration over our concerns about it obfuscating the history and present realities of systemic racism and other forms of oppression.  I have to say that yesterday, as I marched while banging the hell out of my dhol alongside so many passionate and angry and hopeful and beautiful people from so many different walks of life, the color and vibe of this movement may very well be shifting in a promising direction.

With a huge presence of labor unions and community organizations taking to the streets yesterday, the culture on the ground felt and looked really different: it looked like New York City.  I saw posters in Punjabi, Farsi, Mandarin, and Spanish (and probably missed many other languages as I was pretty focused on my dhol), an indigenous people’s contingent, tons of POCs from grassroots organizations like FIERCE!, NYCPP, CAAAV, Make the Road New York and the Arab American Association of NY.

Desis Walk to #OccupyWallStreet, Thursday, Sept 29th

By Thanu Yakupitiyage

You’ve all probably seen or heard of the intervention that happened last Thursday when an ad-hoc bunch of us, mainly South Asians, went to #OWS in time to hear the draft of the ‘Declaration of the Occupation of NYC’ read aloud.

If you haven’t read about it yet, here is Hena’s run-down of what happened and Manissa’s reflections on that evening.

Also check out Sugi Ganeshananthan’s Sepia Mutiny blog-post, “The Color of the Call: Desis at Occupy Wall Street, Pt. 1”

Here is some video footage as we walked towards #OWS that night, including interviews with Manissa and Sonny:

Reflections on #occupywallstreet on Wednesday, Sept 28th

By Thanu Yakupitiyage

A lot has changed since I first went to #OccupyWallStreet last Wednesday. The momentum is magnificent and certainly speaks to a movement that is learning from each other and continuing to grow and change. For the sake of memory and documenting these changes, here is some flipcam footage from my first evening at #OccupyWallSt on September 28th, including interviews with a few folks there and Hena and my initial reflections on that day. My first reaction was that those at occupywallstreet were mostly white and so were most of the speakers at the General Assembly. But instead of merely dismissing #OWS, I and many other fellow people of color felt the need to keep coming back, intervene, challenge, and push conversations around issues of oppression and oppressed people. This process has started and so many are involved now.

Also check out Sugi Ganeshananthan’s Sepia Mutiny blog-post, “The Color of the Call: Desis at Occupy Wall Street, Pt. 2“

Here are reflections from last week:

 

Wall Street Sikhs, Corporate Tyranny, and the 99%

By Sonny Singh

Originally published on The Langar Hall

By now I imagine most of you have heard about Occupy Wall Street in New York City and the growing “Occupy” movement all over the country.  Inspired by the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring, the movement is uniting under the banner, “We are the 99%”, in its protest of unprecedented economic inequality and Wall Street and corporate power and influence in the United States.

The official declaration of #OccupyWallStreet, released last week (as a working document), states:

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

The mainstream media coverage of the protest, now in its 18th consecutive day, has largely downplayed its significance or remained silent all together.  Some in the movement, thus, raised $12,000 on Kickstarter in 3 days (now over $40K) and published 50,000 copies of the “Occupied Wall Street Journal,” grassroots media at its best.  This says a lot about what is going on at Liberty Square (what protesters call the park they are occupying).  People, many with little background in activism, are taking matters into their own hands, and building a democratic movement against corporate tyranny.

So Real It Hurts: Notes on Occupy Wall Street

By Manissa McCleave Maharawal

Published on Racialicious and Left Turn

I first went down to Occupy Wall Street last Sunday, almost a week after it had started. I didn’t go down before because I, like many of my other brown friends, were wary of what we had heard or just intuited that it was mostly a young white male scene. When I asked friends about it they said different things: that it was really white, that it was all people they didn’t know, that they weren’t sure what was going on. But after hearing about the arrests and police brutality on Saturday and after hearing that thousands of people had turned up for their march I decided I needed to see this thing for myself.

So I went down for the first time on Sunday September 25th with my friend Sam. At first we couldn’t even find Occupy Wall Street. We biked over the Brooklyn Bridge around noon on Sunday, dodging the tourists and then the cars on Chambers Street. We ended up at Ground Zero and I felt the deep sense of sadness that that place now gives me: sadness over how, what is now in essence, just a construction site changed the world so much for the worse. A deep sense of sadness for all the tourists taking pictures around this construction site that is now a testament to capitalism, imperialism, torture, oppression but what is also a place where many people died ten years ago.