On Christmas Eve, 2012, I participated in a service event with Occupy Sandy on Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York City. Several local charities gathered together to provide Christmas gifts and food for Rockaway residents who had lost everything in the storm and the flood two months before, at the end of October. My spouse and I had worked in a church kitchen in Brooklyn, the day before Christmas Eve, in collaboration with others, cutting apples, arranging dough in massive baking pans, to prepare apple crumbles for this holiday event.
But there were too many volunteers on the beach on Christmas Eve, and most of them volunteers were white. The residents, most of whom were people of color, had to wait in line for their gifts and food. The line stretched far beyond a fence topped with barbed wire, and the NYPD kept watch over the line. Inside the fence, we were asked to entertain the children while their parents and guardians selected donated Christmas gifts inside a small tent filled with tables of odd-shaped and hastily wrapped boxes.