Photo from Occupy Auckland, New Zealand, by Simon Oosterman.

If you ask most people who’ve been watching from the sidelines what the Occupy movement has accomplished, they’ll probably say something about “changing the national conversation.” But if you ask someone who has been more closely involved, having spent weeks or months in tents and meetings, they’re more likely to talk about a conversation that changed them—a case in which a painful disagreement, perhaps, was forced by the proximity of the occupation to turn into a useful dialogue.

In the days before Chris Hedges’ polemic against “The Cancer in Occupy” created a firestorm in the movement by stoking fears of “Black Bloc anarchists” hijacking it from the outside, we lit a bit of kindling here on this site with a post of mine about rising tensions around the diversity-of-tactics framework. My report spread through Occupy Wall Street email lists, resulting in an extended exchange in the comments that included several of the people I’d written about. Like most exchanges in online comments, it wasn’t especially constructive.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

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At an Occupy Wall Street meeting in midtown Manhattan on December 20th, a debate broke out about the general assemblies (hereafter, GAs)—the core decision-making forums of the movement and its most visible embodiment of direct democracy. The meeting was the second of its kind devoted to exploring the idea of a city-wide general assembly. About 80 people attended, including members of several OWS working groups and GAs across the city, of which there are now about a dozen. While some people seemed dissatisfied with the GAs, and perhaps even ready to dispense with them, others appeared intent on popularizing them even more. The discussion reminded me that this movement is growing and deepening its ties with local neighborhoods—yet as it does, it is encountering the challenge of how to accommodate new communities and support existing organizations that share its goals. While this challenge is still fairly new for OWS, it is one that has been faced and overcome by other movements before.

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Last month, TLC debuted a new reality show called All-American Muslim that follows the daily lives of five families in Dearborn, Michigan–home to the largest mosque in the United States. According to the show’s website, “Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”

Within weeks of its premiere, TLC got a taste for itself of such misconceptions and conflicts, as a right-wing attack, led by a Christian group in Florida, pressured 65 of the 67 companies they targeted to pull ads from the show. One of these companies is the home-improvement giant Lowe’s, which is now being petitioned by a coalition of activist and faith-based groups–including Faithful America, Change.org, CREDO, Sum of Us and Groundswell–to apologize and reinstate advertisements. The national chain has also been facing the prospect of store protests and a boycott.

Yet Lowe’s seems unswayed. After a meeting today with a group of interfaith clergy–who hand-delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the company’s headquarters in Mooresville, North Carolina–Lowe’s stated that the decision to pull its ads was internally-based and not influenced by the Christian group. “We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the company maintained, adding, “and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment.”

While the future of the show remains uncertain, cast members have spoken up about the controversy to say how much it has actually helped their community. In a Youtube video posted by USA Today, Nawal Aoude says, “Honestly, I just want to thank this Florida Family Association for doing this because I think what they were trying to do has totally backfired big-time.”

The burgeoning #OccupyWallStreet protest made headlines again on Saturday night when hundreds of demonstrators were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  And once again, the tried-and-true media narrative of protesters vs. police is played up.

It could be argued that the story here is not about police arrests and should instead be about the growing movement occupying public space across the United States as a symbol of disgust with the U.S. economic system.  That’s true, but you can’t expect corporate media to focus on the real story.  What’s also true is that the media’s focus on that narrative, and #OccupyWallStreet’s revulsion with the New York Police Department’s tactics, is an opportunity for coalition building with marginalized communities in the city.

Kai Wright, editor of the excellent ColorLines website, notes that the demonstrators are “largely young and white.” He also writes critically that the #OccupyWallStreet demonstrators have not included those “millions of people who have been kicked out of their homes, laid off or forced to work multiple part-time jobs, caught in predatory debt traps and, yes, so harassed by cops that they have petty criminal records that make them unemployable.”

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Communications are extremely important for civil resistance. At the most fundamental level, when a group has decided that it must try to halt certain practices, start specific reforms, change the policies of an unresponsive system, clean up democracy, bring down a despot, or lift a military occupation, it is critically important to convey the grievance with clarity. Yet attentive news coverage can never be taken for granted or assumed. It must be won. Gaining the attention of the news industry is one of the central functions that must be planned by a nonviolent movement that hopes to succeed.

The Brazilian filmmaker Julia Bacha’s captivating TED Talk, “Pay Attention to Nonviolence,” has attracted wide interest. Her presentation is thoughtful and powerful, as is her film, Budrus, a documentary case study on how civil resistance can sometimes be effective despite daunting odds. The Palestinian village of Budrus stood to lose 40 percent of its land by the construction of an Israeli “separation barrier,” but through nonviolent action it was successful in persuading the government of Israel to move the Wall off their land and to the Green Line, the internationally recognized armistice line.

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Desmond King and Rogers Smith, writing in The New York Times of our current bipartisan silence on matters of racial equality, argue that the economic calamity of the United States is also a racial crisis. They say that it is not only justifiable, but also necessary, to evaluate policy choices partly on the basis of whether they are likely to reduce or increase racial inequalities.

King and Smith note the findings of the Pew Research Center that in 2009, the U.S. median household net worth was $5,677 for blacks, $6,325 for Hispanics and $113,149 for whites. In the same way, in July of this year the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for whites, yet 16.8 percent for blacks. African Americans and those of Hispanic descent started far behind and they continue to trail. Democrats now rarely broach the subject of race, leaving “modern Republicans with little to criticize, lest they appear to be race-baiting, so they too keep quiet.” King and Smith contend that political leaders must openly recognize that neither ignoring race nor concentrating on it exclusively will bring progress.

This almost conspiratorial silence reminds me that there was a time when race was at the core of the U.S. national conversation. No citizen could ignore it. The nonviolent activism of the civil rights movement had roused the entire nation. The opponents of racial equality were not silent either—they dismissed civil rights workers as “outside agitators.” By their calculation, I was an outside agitator too, even though my father’s family had emigrated from England to colonial Virginia in the 1600s.

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Broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West just wrapped up their 18-city “Poverty Tour”. The aim of the trip that traversed through Wisconsin, Detroit, Washington DC, and the Deep South was to “highlight the plight of the poor people of all races, colors, and creeds so they will not be forgotten, ignored, or rendered invisible.” Although the trip has been met with a fair amount of criticism, the issue of poverty’s invisibility in American media and politics is unmistakable. The community organizations working tirelessly to help America’s poor deserve a great deal more attention than what is being given.

The main attack against the Poverty Tour is Smiley and West’s criticism of Obama’s weak efforts to tackle poverty. For me though, what I would have liked to see more is the collection of stories and experiences from the people West and Smiley met along their trip. The act of collective storytelling in and of itself can be an act of resistance.

American media is mostly fatigued of poverty and recession coverage, which is one reason that Republicans have been able to pass laws that damage needed social programs. Even with the increasing racial diversity in America, there is minimal neighborhood integration for African Americans. Hispanics and Asians remain as segregated now as twenty years ago.  Americans do not know each other, and especially middle to high income white communities have a dearth of comprehension of what life is like for those in low-income communities.

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The still-smouldering Carpetright store in Tottenham. (Photo: Guardian)

Rioting and rampages spreading across English cities have caused severe property destruction and raised public alarm. Writing in London’s Guardian, community organizer Stafford Scott describes how he was among the group that on August 6th sought information from the police in Tottenham, a poorer section of London. They wanted an official statement on whether Mark Duggan had been killed by police bullets, as had been reported in the news.

All we really wanted was an explanation of what was going on. We needed to hear directly from the police. We waited for hours outside the station for a senior officer to speak with the family, in a demonstration led by young women. A woman-only delegation went into the station, as we wanted to ensure that this did not become confrontational. It was when the young women, many with children, decided to call it a day that the atmosphere changed, and guys in the crowd started to voice and then act out their frustrations.

This event is what most media accounts have identified as the spark that set England on fire, which has caught the world by surprise. Yet, says Scott, “If the rioting was a surprise, people weren’t looking.”

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Speaking just weeks before his assassination, which catalyzed rioting across America, Martin Luther King offered his thoughts on the type of civil unrest that devolves into violence and looting, saying:

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

If there’s any question—in this time of deep spending cuts and high unemployment—as to whether the same can be said about the riots plaguing parts of London these past four days, one need only look at where they are occurring.

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