A white progressive who organized Occupy Wall Street (OWS) excluded white allies from a critical meeting with New York’s Local 1199 union, which has since thrown its enormous resources behind the media-magnified protest.
The local, which has up to 350,000 members, is part of the Service Employees Union International (SEIU). It invited the one of the leading OWS organizers to a Sept. 30 meeting after the organizers sought its support.
The protester invited to the Sept. 30 meeting was Jesse Myerson, a white male who describes himself as an “independent journalist and activist.”
In an email to the other organizers, he asked for a second organizer to accompany him to the meeting, but he specifically barred white activists.
“I am meeting the 1199 executive council tomorrow to try and convince them to come out for us. It’s in midtown and I *need* someone to be with me, and that person needs not to be white,” he wrote in a Sept. 29 evening email. “This will mean the difference, I bet,” said Myerson.
Myerson’s request for a non-white companion reflects the progressive movement’s desire to showcase non-white supporters, and to comply with the ideology of diversity.
“Occupy Wall Street is officially committed to the right of marginalized voices to be heard,” Myerson wrote to The Daily Caller. “It won’t do for us to be complicit in the tendency that arises to put straight, white males in the spotlight, especially when addressing 1199/SEIU, which has historically been one of the most valiant organizations in the country in championing the interests of the American underclass.”
The diversity ideology seeks government rules that promote racial and sexual variety in business, education, religion, law-enforcement and other social sectors, regardless of which people choose to participate in those sectors.
None of the other progressive organizers on Myerson’s list objected to Myerson’s racial discrimination.
“If you want a white woman, I could come … I drive & have a disability parking permit,” responded Jackie DiSalvo. She is a labor activist, and an associate English professor at Baruch College, which is part of the government-funded City University of New York.
Myerson quickly accepted an offer from someone named Mae. She described herself as “Puerto Rican, a single mom, and gen x, so I fit into a lot of ‘unexpected’ boxes for the OWS movement if you need to pimp out any of that.” Mea’s e-mail name is ‘grimwomyn.’
The next day, Myerson announced the organizers got the union’s support. “Today, 1199, the largest local union in the country, voted unanimously to support us … The 1199 press team is working with us on media roll-out and agreed that I should break the story tomorrow on ‘Up with Chris Hayes’ on MSNBC (big platform, very pro-labor host, &c.) — tune in and then let’s play this up big,” he said.
“This support is going to be amazing: 1 week’s worth of food, [nurses] to train our medical team, the formulation and development of a committee to liaise with us, continued support as conditions change, mobilization on actions, a motion to the Central Labor Council to recruit other labor support — the works!”
The union’s statement declared that, “1199 SEIU’s executive leadership voted unanimously to support the Wall Street protesters’ demand that corporate America be held accountable for the current economic crisis. Corporations and the wealthy should pay the fair share in taxes they owe to middle-class Americans so this country can get back to work. We need jobs, not cuts.”
According to the union, “1199 SEIU is the largest healthcare workers union in [New York]. It represents over 350,000 workers in “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Florida.”
Ironically, Mae wrote in an Oct. 8 email that she dislikes the diversity ideology’s insistence on group representation. “I am a nonwhite person (Puerto Rican) who never fills out surveys that ask me to specify my ethnicity,” she wrote. “There are people in the world who could give a crap about reporting their race/ethnicity, or who deem it something to pay attention to. I am here to make a change for everyone.”