John Wessel-McCoy of the Poverty Initiative leads Drew students on a tour of Wall Street.
Last week Professor Traci West (’94) brought over 35 students from her Christian Ethics course at Drew Theological School on the Poverty Initiative Wall Street tour. Below is Professor West’s reflection from the trip.
“Does the economy serve human beings? Or, do human beings serve the economy?” John Wessel-McCoy asked our Christian Ethics class as we walked around the Wall Street area of NYC. I thought: what a wonderfully profound question for our discernment. A chilly wind, occasionally bringing cold, plump rain drops, blew in our faces. Because of the “Occupy Wall Street” campaign, there was a highly visible police presence. Silver painted bars of police barricades protruded on almost every side-walk tripping-up a few of us and squashing all of us together with the business people, tourists, food vendors, and others darting around the business district in the late afternoon. At one point as John spoke, I heard a member of our group whisper: “How many trillion dollars of the economy did he say were tied to derivatives?” And another: “When did he say those immigrants were rounded up and jailed on the suspicion that they were somehow tied to a terrorist explosion on Wall Street?” As I listened to John speak at the conclusion of our tour, I tried (unsuccessfully) to hide my anger, not sorrow, but anger, about the easiness of forgetting my African slave ancestors who were brought shackled, hungry, and frightened to the New York port, to the same streets where we stood. I looked up at the steel and glass skyscrapers and recognized them as a testament to societal amnesia about those slaves and how their labor and suffering had contributed to building the wealth of this city and this nation. But, I thanked God for the Poverty Initiative and its gift to our class of the opportunity to learn from John, of John’s reminder to us to remember. I prayed that the ways that we remember will produce resistance to varying forms of racialized, socioeconomic exploitation occurring now.
–Traci West
