Occupy Wall Street is "overwhelmingly white."

Stacey Patton, in the Washington Post, deploys the same phrase that was used against the Tea Party. When journalists used "overwhelmingly white" against the Tea Party, they were showing a predictable aversion to conservative things. To say the same thing about OWS is, however, to deviate from the journalistic norm. You'd expect journalists to flatter and coddle the OWS folk.

But this column isn't about diminishing OWS for excluding/repelling black people. Patton is inquiring into why black people don't join up with a movement you're supposed to think they ought to want to join:

African Americans share white Americans’ anger about corporate greed and corruption, and blacks have a rich history of protesting injustice in United States. So why aren’t they Occupying?

The "rich history of protesting injustice" was about racial injustice, not left-wing class warfare. Some people like to mush those 2 things together, but where a movement begins with left-wing economic ideology, why should you expect black people to join up en masse?

From America’s birthing pains to the civil rights protests of the 1960s, blacks have never been afraid to fight for economic or social justice....

Afraid?  People declining to "occupy Wall Street" aren't afraid. It's demagoguery to insinuate that black people have opted out because they are afraid.

In 1969, James Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization, called on blacks to not perpetuate capitalism or contribute to the exploitation of blacks in the United States and elsewhere. He urged black workers to take over America by sabotaging U.S. factories and ports “while the brothers fight guerrilla warfare in the street.” And Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party renounced the American Dream as defective and called for the destruction of the capitalist system.

This is exactly the kind of linking of racial injustice to left-wing ideology that most people reject.