A snapshot from Occupy Wall Street. (Photo by Christine A. Scheller.)
What I haven’t seen written about in the many stories about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) encampment at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan is its proximity to the World Trade Center (WTC) site. The park, which fills a small city block, sits across from the southeast corner of the site, where Four World Trade Center is being resurrected.
As I mingled briefly yesterday with men and women protesting corporate greed, construction workers labored above us and a bevy of police officers ushered visitors toward the nearby entrance to the new 9/11 memorial.
I had thought I could quickly connect with a few occupiers before my scheduled appointment at the memorial, but discovered that building rapport with OWS sources would take a lot more time than I had.
Things began on a promising note as I approached Marvin Knight, a retiree who lives in Brooklyn. “Herman Cain is Clarence Thomas minus a black robe,” Knight’s sign said. When I inquired about it, he explained that when he heard Cain express support for Thomas, he knew there was “no difference between them.” He also said Cain’s 999 plan “will make the poor pay more money, the rich pay less, and the middle class pay more.”
Knight has been protesting corporate greed for the last ten years, he said, and he hopes OWS “opens up the eyes of the world that capitalism has failed.” He’d like to see socialism take its place, he said. He estimated that ten-to-fifteen percent of the Zuccotti Park protesters are African American and said he thinks their interests are represented. “Everything is covered as far as I’m concerned,” said Knight.
Flush with that success, I approached an older man who was sitting on a chair next to a sign for a homeless organization. As I introduced myself, a handsome younger man sat down next to him, so I offered to interview them together. The older man objected to a dual interview and couldn’t be dissuaded. He shooed me away.
Next I introduced myself to Derek Brown of the Bronx. I ignored Brown’s request for a donation and asked why he was there. “I got occupied in this movement, not actually thinking I was going to be a warrior or soldier for the movement. I came down to check it out. Once I got here, I never left. I’ve been here for fourteen days,” said Brown.
He left his job as a messenger to join OWS, he said. “When I leave here, I’m going to have to re-establish my ties with the economic system because I have to subsist.”
The scale of justice and economic equality is tipped, Brown said. “We don’t want the rich to be poor, we don’t want the rich to be middle class, we just want you to concede and understand that you have to spread the bread to a degree where people are not so discontent,” he explained. “What we want as a whole is equality. We want room for growth and development and there seems to be no capacity for that right now.”
Brown asked me for money again. I declined, saying ethical journalists don’t pay for interviews. He implied that I had knowingly deceived him. I said if that was true, I wouldn’t have waited until the interview was over to ask if I could take his picture. He let me take it anyway.
With my memorial appointment looming, I approached a young woman who was manning a literature table. She expressed skepticism when I told her I was particularly interested in speaking to people of color at Zuccotti Park, so I said I was actually trying to find a source to dialogue with an African American from the Tea Party movement. She and her fellow protesters expressed derision at the idea.
I caught wind of conversations about putting bags out for collection in a timely manner. Trash bags were piled high, but the site was organized. An emergency community meeting was called with five minutes notice.
Leaving the park, I passed a group of musicians playing bluegrass on the north side walk. The sounds pouring from their instruments spoke of the discipline, nuance, and complexity that I struggled to find at OWS.
When I returned after my visit to the memorial, a drum circle was pounding out another beat. I couldn’t’ stay however, or I would have been late for a screening and discussion of CNN’s fourth Black in America documentary “The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley,” which was hosted by journalist Soledad O’Brien at the Time Warner building in midtown. There a room full of African Americans talked about how they could garner a bigger piece of the tech entrepreneurship pie. (More on this soon.)
The dichotomy reminded me of 2001-2002 when I worked at a public television show on Park Avenue and took the subway down to Wall Street to catch the ferry back to New Jersey. I couldn’t help but see Zuccotti Park through the lens of that terrible time.
Four World Trade Center from NYC's 9/11 Memorial. (Photo by Christine A. Scheller.)
At the 9/11 memorial, I found the vast pools of flowing water that lie in the footprints of the Twin Towers profoundly depressing. From a certain vantage point, the victims’ names etched on stone around their perimeter appear on the verge of disappearing forever into the void below.
Somehow that image feels to me like a better metaphor for the folly of “too big to fail” than a protest in the park, even though, or perhaps because, my earliest New York City protest memory is of attending the 200,000 person No Nukes protest concert in Battery Park on the east side of the WTC in 1979.
That park was replaced by an expensive planned community a long time ago and we’re still dealing with nuclear disasters. But a 2004 New York Daily News article concluded that No Nukes wasn’t “the first, last, biggest or most musically striking” cause concert in rock history, but it may have been the most effective. “In the quarter-century since those shows, no nuclear power plants have been built; indeed, a number have been decommissioned,” the Daily News declared.
I wonder what we’ll say about OWS in 25 years.
*Note: Most of the links in this post are to my OWS photo set on Flickr. To view a slide show of the collection, go here.
In an excerpt from her new memoir published in Newsweek, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she didn’t think much about dire Hurricane Katrina warnings when she left Washington D.C. to watch U.S. Open tennis in New York in August 2005. Turning on the TV after a trip to an upscale shoe store in the city, she saw the devastating images of mostly black faces in New Orleans and knew right away that she should have never made the trip.
“Mr. President, I’m coming back. I don’t know how much I can do, but we clearly have a race problem,” she recounts telling the president. “I wasn’t just the secretary of state with responsibility for foreign affairs; I was the highest-ranking black in the administration and a key advisor to the President. What had I been thinking?”
The Lingering Wound of Katrina
Rice admits that Katrina was “the first in a spiral of negative events that would almost engulf the Bush presidency” and says the federal response was slower and more flawed than anyone, including George W. Bush, wanted. Yet, for her, the “lingering wound of Katrina” is that “some used the explosive ‘race card’ to paint the President as a prejudiced, uncaring man.”
“It was so unfair, cynical, and irresponsible,” she writes, saying she remains “appalled” that it was necessary to defend him on this issue.
The Moral Case for Opposing Tyranny
In an interview with The Daily Beast about the book, Rice defends the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda,” framing it as both a moral and practical pursuit.
“We pursued the Freedom Agenda not only because it was right but also because it was necessary,” Rice is quoted as writing. “There is both a moral case and a practical one for the proposition that no man, woman, or child should live in tyranny. Those who excoriated the approach as idealistic or unrealistic missed the point. In the long run, it is authoritarianism that is unstable and unrealistic.”
Gadhafi’s “Black Flower in the White House”
A New York Times review of No Higher Ground focuses on clashes between Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney over the war on terror, but includes the curious revelation that recently deceased Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Gadhafi was “eerily fascinated” with her and “made a video showing pictures of her while a song called ‘Black Flower in the White House’ played.”
Rice’s Biggest Regret
Neither Katrina nor Freedom Agenda challenges top Rice’s list of regrets, however. In a Q&A with readers of the Charlotte Observer this week, the former Secretary of State answered a question about what she would change from her White House tenure if she could by saying she wishes that the Bush administration had been able to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.
“Because resolving our massive immigration problem is essential to securing a prosperous future for generations, I truly wish we had been able to see those reforms come to fruition,” said Rice.
Asked what has built character in her life, she told readers that throughout every season of her life, “the Lord has built character in me as I rely on Him.”
What do you think?
Was George W. Bush’s Katrina “race problem” the beginning of the end of positive public perception for his administration? Is his record on race defensible?
As Republican presidential candidates continued to rumble their way across the country, the Obama administration stepped up its game this week, publishing a Pathways to Opportunity report that outlined what the administration claims to have done and intends to do to get the unemployed back to work, and engaging with voters on the economy.
While President Obama embarked on the American Jobs Act bus tour, The Root hosted a live-streamed discussion Thursday with White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett and outgoing Domestic Policy Director Melody Barnes about poverty, and African American poverty in particular.
Jarrett and Barnes mostly repeated talking points from the report and promoted the jobs act as they fielded questions from a live audience and from Twitter and Facebook.
Jarrett said Republicans want to see the president fail, but the jobs bill isn’t about him. “This is about what’s good for our country,” she said.
Barnes said the president is resolved to keep pushing Republicans to pass the bill, but the senate rejected a scaled down version Thursday and the Associated Press reported that Democratic support for the measure is dwindling and “future votes on individual pieces of the measure … aren’t likely to fare better.”
Americans Are Fed Up With Government
To make matters worse for the incumbent president, a new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are more fed up with government than with business.
“Americans are more than twice as likely to blame the federal government in Washington (64%) for the economic problems facing the United States as they are the financial institutions on Wall Street (30%),” Gallup reported.
Why Now, Mr. President?
The Root’s Cynthia Gordy asked Jarrett and Barnes why the report and the jobs act are being introduced now.
“We decided to draft the report in many ways to respond to questions about what we have done,” said Barnes, before recounting ways she says the administration has been addressing poverty issues from “day one,” including the 2009 economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, expansion of tax credits, summer jobs for youth, and health care reform.
“We’ve been working on this since we set foot in the White House,” said Barnes.
Barnes on Getting Out of the Hot Seat
Barnes also confirmed reports that she is leaving the administration at the end of the year to spend time with family and pursue private sector opportunities.
Asked what the most significant policy she developed is, Barnes said choosing would be like picking one child over another. Even so, she said she is especially proud of her work on education and described early, primary, and post-secondary education as a three-legged stool upon which to build success.
To illustrate her point, she recounted how her father went to college on the GI bill while she was a little girl and fondly recalled sitting next to him as he studied at the library. She also said her maternal grandmother worked in a tobacco factory and that her mother went to college on a scholarship
“Education changes lives; it changes communities,” said Barnes, as she expressed wonder at how it led to her own ascent to the White House.
Earlier she had recounted how “little old ladies at church” would tell her how proud they were of her, but would balk at the scope of her domestic policy task.
Jarrett affirmed Barnes’ passion, commitment, drive, and “second to none” breadth of policy knowledge. “If I go much further, we’ll both start crying, so I’m going to stop,” said Jarrett.
Is Obama Backing Away From People of Faith?
UrbanFaith asked (via Twitter) what the administration is doing to support the faith based groups that are filling in service gaps, and if the president is backing away from these groups? The broadcast ended before the question was answered, but the Democratic National Committee announced yesterday that it had hired Rev. Derrick Harkins, senior pastor of Washington D.C.’s historically Black Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, as its new director of faith outreach so, at least from a political standpoint, he appears ready to embrace them.
The Middle Class Is Recovering?
Meanwhile, at a Virginia stop on his bus tour, President Obama sounded positively conservative when he said, “It’s going to take time to rebuild the kind of America in which everybody has a fair shot, everybody is paying their fair share; where responsibility is rewarded; where the deck is not stacked against middle-class families.” He also claimed that the middle class is growing, solid, and secure again.
Is Obama Avoiding Black Communities?
But an article at Politico about tensions between the president and California Rep. Maxine Waters contrasted the Congressional Black Caucus’s summer jobs tour with Obama’s efforts, noting that he has largely avoided stops in Black cities and neighborhoods.
The Psychology of Black Unemployment
Setting aside the politics of Black unemployment for a moment, the North Dallas Gazette published a compelling article Thursday about its psychology. In it, University of Michigan Sociologist Alford Young Jr., Ph.D. said the stress of constantly thinking about supplementing insufficient income “provides an interesting spin on the long-standing notion that Black people, particularly lower income folk only live for today.”
The article said challenges remain, but researchers “retain their optimism for the future in part because of the past resiliency and creativity of the African American community.”
What do you think?
Has the Obama Administration avoided African American concerns or has the president done what he could in a political and social environment that rarely prioritizes them?
LIVING PROOF: Radiance Foundation co-founder and pro-life activist Ryan Bomberger.
Ryan Scott Bomberger is co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, an organization whose mission is to illuminate, educate, and motivate others about the intrinsic value of human life. He is also the creative force behind a controversial billboard campaign that described black babies as an “endangered species.” What didn’t make the headlines is the fact that Bomberger was conceived during a rape. He is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent. UrbanFaith talked to him about his work and what motivates it. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
UrbanFaith: What does the Radiance Foundation do?
Ryan Bomberger:The Radiance Foundation is comprised of three main components: media campaigns, one-on-one community outreach where we live and in other areas, working in conjunction with other organizations, and our educational component. We create all the content, whether video, print, web, or otherwise to illuminate the truth that we are all born with this beautiful intrinsic value. We want people to understand it and embrace it and to effect positive change in their own life and in the lives of those around them.
How did you become passionate about the pro-life cause?
I’m passionate about the pro-life cause mainly because I had two parents who defied the myth of the unwanted child and believed that they could simply love a child and help unleash that child’s purpose in life. They had three biological children and then adopted ten. That’s what inspired me throughout my life to reach out to the broken, to reach out to those in need.
My wife Bethany and I started the Radiance Foundation in 2009. For our first public campaign, we decided to tackle the subject of abortion. Like a breast cancer awareness campaign, we wanted to address where abortion’s impact is the greatest so we addressed the black community’s crisis of abortion. That is what led us to launch TooManyAborted.com and the billboard campaign that has been in numerous states across the country.
What inspired media frenzy around those billboards?
It was the billboard that stated “Black children are an endangered species.” We were the first organization to ever do a public ad campaign about abortion’s disproportionate impact on the black community. That campaign exploded in the media. Each subsequent campaign that continued to highlight the disproportionate impact while promoting adoption as a life affirming alternative has continued and it’s raised the ire of Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups. They’ve tried desperately to remove our billboards. Three hundred billboards later, they’ve never removed a single one. I think part of that is our diligence in doing the research. When these billboard companies look on our website and they see the message we’re conveying and they see how documented all of the information is, they feel satisfied and comfortable that the billboards that they’re placing up there, although they may be controversial, they are rooted in fact.
SHOCK TREATMENT: This billboard set off a storm of controversy when it was posted at dozens of locations last year in Atlanta.
What about the billboard that was removed in New York City?
Those are from a different company. Their billboards have been brought down. Ours, thankfully, haven’t.
In the New York case, the parent of the child that was used in the billboard objected. How do you deal with challenges like that?
That’s not been an issue. We use some original photography and in some of our work we use stock photography, but that’s part of the agreement. When that particular parent signed away the rights, there was no caveat as to who could use it. That’s the thing with the pro-abortion or pro-choice side. They’re always trying to find the distraction, and they succeeded instead of talking about the numbers. In New York City, 60 percent of black pregnancies end in abortion. It is epidemic in that city, the home of Planned Parenthood. They successfully were able to divert the conversation, which I think is tragic for all of us.
Are you able to speak on this issue more easily because you are an African American man rather than a white activist?
I don’t believe in hyphenations, I’m just American. I happen to be as black as Obama, which means I’m mixed, biracial. There are times when I feel like I have to use the label, but the thing I like to focus on is that because I’m biracial I’m able to be a bridge on a number of different issues. However, I may say I’m biracial, but the next person wouldn’t have a clue. Throughout my life, I’ve been treated unfortunately in quite racist ways, so it does allow me to address this. I am a black, biracial child who was adopted and so it does give me an authority in a sense to speak from that perspective. It’s also hard to argue with my story of being born of rape.
What has the response been?
We were completely overwhelmed and inundated with email responses, phone responses, media interviews. But what it showed was this issue that many believe is a settled issue isn’t settled. The unexpected portion of the response was the venomously racist emails and phone calls we would get. I can’t tell you how many emails and phone calls I’ve received that have said, “More niggers need to die” or “Abortions don’t kill enough niggers.” But thankfully, the majority of the responses have been incredibly positive, particularly from African American women, from post-abortive men and women. And so, we know that there’s been a positive impact.
I would say the other response that we weren’t expecting was a direct response from Planned Parenthood. Our billboards have caused them to hold two separate conferences. One was a phone conference and other was a bloggers/journalists conference. So in the last year-and-a-half, two major conferences from the nation’s largest abortion chain to try to figure out how to combat specifically our TooManyAborted.com campaign.
What tactics have they employed?
Their response has been relatively simple. They love using buzz words, so they have resorted to calling us racists or mysogynists or anti-woman. That would pretty much encompass their strategy. Every billboard we’ve placed, there would be this response and it comes from a Planned Parenthood funded group called Sister Song that is a radically pro-abortion minority collective. Their whole tactic is laughable considering that the team of leaders nationwide that have endorsed and championed this campaign are all black, and many of them are black post-abortive women like Catherine Davis, like Dr. Alveda King. What they can’t do is refute the numbers. Even in their phone conference, which I managed to attend, they couldn’t refute any of the actual numbers, mainly because they’re from federal sources and from Guttmacher.
Were you shocked to be called a racist?
Having grown up in a multi-racial family with Native American, Black, Vietnamese, White, White and Black, to be called a racist is just laughable. The ultimate consequence of racism is death and we’ve seen it in American history. We’ve seen it in the horrific acts of lynching. That’s the ultimate end of racism and here you have individuals across the nation who are passionately pro-life being called racist. We are simply trying to save life. That’s what abortion does, though, it’s a complete inversion of things: an inversion of justice, an inversion of racism, an inversion of reality. So, yes, it was shocking and ludicrous.
At toomanyaborted.com, I read an article that connects feminism to abortion. Is there a way to separate the positive aspects of the feminist movement from the negative aspects?
I consider myself a feminist. I think the distinction is from an ideological or poltical standpoint where that falls on the spectrum. There’s liberal feminism, which I think in large part has been very destructive because of its emphasis on areas of “equality” that have nothing to do with empowering a woman. We emphasize those aspects of feminism which are healthy and we talk about liberal feminism that advocates abortion for any reason at any cost, and often to the exclusion of men. We also talk about many of these pro-abortion groups, which are radically feminist and their destructive approach to gender relationships and even gender itself. How did Roe V. Wade empower a woman? Our conclusion is that it’s empowered men far more than it’s empowered any woman.
You’re an adoptive parent of four children. Are they all adopted?
Two are adopted, my oldest and my youngest. My wife recently went public with how she was a single parent at one point and was faced with the same decisions. She understood, but she never considered abortion. Our daughter Hailee Radiance transformed her life. She transformed my life. That’s the beauty of possibility. Our youngest, Justice Nathaniel, is such a gift. His biological mom, we love, honor, and cherish her, and we’re trying to help her get back on her feet. She’s made some bad decisions, but there’s always redemption.
What do you have coming up next?
Our fatherhood campaign is now focusing on one of the biggest missing components in childrens’ lives. Forty-one percent of children in our nation are born in homes without fathers, and that statistic is even more drastic in the black community because it’s almost 73 percent in the black community, whereas it’s 35.7 percent in the white community. Our Fatherhood Begins in the Womb campaign is our way of calling men to responsibility and calling out the culture of abortion that has encouraged abandonment. The problem is widely ignored, but we see the results: higher incarceration rates, higher drop out rates, higher poverty.
I haven’t yet read complaints that The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial dedication ceremony was a dangerous church/state hybrid, but surely those will come as the event felt, to some, like a mix between a church service and a political rally, with thousands in attendance and multitudes more (myself included) watching on TV. &
Worship in Action
“With all the smiling and handshaking going on, you would swear you were at church, welcoming the visitors after the morning’s announcements. But if you closed your eyes and listened, you would think you’d landed at a campaign event,” wrote Kenrya Rankin at Loop21. “We might have been there to honor the legacy of a black leader of days gone by, but the legacy of the black leader of today loomed large.”
Likewise, Religion News Service’s Adelle M. Banks said the event blended worship and a call to action. “Held during the traditional Sunday morning worship time, the ceremony featured choirs, gospel artists Mary Mary, and Aretha Franklin singing one of King’s favorite hymns, ‘Precious Lord,’” said Banks. “More than 200 churches contributed $1.8 million to the $120 million memorial, for which $117 million has been raised.”
Political and Partisan?
Dignitaries’ response to the ceremony “was enthusiastic but slightly reserved,” according to The Root’s Cynthia Gordy. But the reaction of those gathered on the National Mall was “more emotional,” she said. “During the president’s speech, which visitors could see on two jumbo screens flanking the stage, chants of ‘four more years’ erupted from the crowd.”
This was a problem for Christian Post reporter Napp Nazworth, who described the dedication speeches as “highly partisan” and noted that many connections were made between King’s legacy and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.
March to the Library Instead
In a slightly sardonic nod to the event and the OWS movement, Washington Post local columnist Courtland Milloy advised D.C. school children to overcome by marching to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library to devote themselves to academic excellence.
“Long after Occupy DC has decamped from the city and the protests over economic inequality have faded from memory, you’ll still have to occupy those classrooms and continue to struggle against educational inequity,” said Milloy.
More Complaints About Missing Words
Perhaps taking a cue from poet Maya Angelou, two men complained about missing words on the monument.
“I am not surprised that in a nation where discussing racial inequality is politically costly, that this issue would be left off the table,” said Watkins. “If Dr. King had not been a Black man in America, he would never have become Dr. King.”
And, noting the faith that motivated both King and that the Civil Rights Movement, Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition in Washington, D.C, issued a press release complaining that God is absent from the monument.
“Not to include any mention of ‘God’ in the quotes at the memorial is a betrayal of the life, legacy and teachings embraced and lived by Dr. King. I think he would have been stunned and disappointed to see this oversight.”
What do you think?
Did the dedication ceremony strike an appropriate “walk the talk” tone or was it an uncomfortable mix of church and state? Does the monument itself accurately reflect King’s legacy or is it hindered by its location on public land?
In an excerpt from her 
