[OccupyCU] Race, Gender, and Occupy

[Elizabeth Simpson]

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From: jordan flaherty <jordan at floodlines.org>
To: jordanhurricane at lists.riseup.net 
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 11:35 AM
Subject: [jordannola] Race, Gender, and Occupy
 

Dear friends,

Yesterday, Al Jazeera premiered the first part of a two-part documentary I've been working on, focusing on the Occupy movement. The film was made for Fault Lines, the award-winning public affairs documentary program. 

You can watch part one of the film here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4VLYGfGDZg

Part two premieres next Tuesday.

The first film is called History of an Occupation, and explores the first two months of the Occupy movement. Part two looks at the movement as it expands into actions around housing and other targets, and also moves from fall through to spring.

This film is truly a collaboration. I worked very closely with Sweta Vohra, my co-producer on the film, as well correspondent Sebastien Walker, Mathieu Skene, the executive producer for Fault Lines, and editor Warwick Meade. We also spoke with scores of people - both on and off camera - and looked at the footage from dozens of independent filmmakers, some of which is in the final film. Everyone we spoke with, even if they didn't make it into the final film, helped expand our analysis and sharpen our focus. For full credits, see this link: 
http://louisianajusticeinstitute.blogspot.com/2012/03/two-new-documentaries-explore-occupy.html

There are many more issues we wish we could have discussed in the film. Sweta Vohra and I wrote an article exploring in more depth some of these issues, based on reporting we did for the film. You can see the article pasted below.


Race, Gender, and Occupy
By Sweta Vohra and Jordan Flaherty, Fault Lines
A version of this article originally appeared on the Al Jazeera website
http://louisianajusticeinstitute.blogspot.com/2012/03/race-gender-and-occupy-by-sweta-vohra.html
 
At a recent panel discussion on the Occupy movement, a left-leaning professor from New York University speculated that identity politics - the prioritizing of issues of race and gender 
in movements for justice - could be a plot funded by the CIA to 
undermine activism. While most commentators do not go this far, the idea that activists who focus on these issues are "undermining the struggle" has a long history within progressive organizing. And in Occupy Wall 
Street encampments around the country these debates have often exploded 
into public view. 

For the past six months, we have been following the Occupy movement for a two-part documentary on Occupy for Fault Lines. We have spent weeks in conversation with activists as they have planned actions and struggled to keep their movement relevant through a cold 
winter. And organizers have told us repeatedly that they feel these discussions around race and gender, far from weakening the movement, have lent it strength and made 
organizing more accountable to the communities most affected by the 
economic crisis.

The process of challenging structural oppression
 has been difficult. We spoke to many women and people of color who 
felt pushed out of Occupy. Some activists, already bruised by dismissive
 media coverage, tried not to let these conflicts show. When internal 
conflicts would arise they tried to not let it happen on camera. But 
what we did observe are many fiercely intelligent activists dedicated to
 waging these struggles within Occupy and strengthening the movement 
with their work.

The 99 per cent

When 
people gathered in Zuccotti Park on September 17, the anger at corporate
 greed was a unifying call. This was a protest that in large part was 
about shifting power from the wealthy to the many. It was a mostly white
 crowd, but it sought to incorporate a wide range of voices.
The economic crisis in the US had made the white middle class 
question their future. Soaring unemployment rates, suffocating student 
loan debt, and thousands of foreclosures began to close in. This reality propelled the Occupy movement forward. And many feel that the presence 
of so many relatively privileged white people brought increased media 
attention and public sympathy. 

Organizers told us they 
immediately saw the next step as needing to raise awareness among the 
many young people new to activism that came flocking to occupations. 
"It's the job of the social justice movement to continue that 
conversation," says Max Rameau, a co-founder of Take Back the Land, who has advised many of the Occupies.
He told us that occupiers need to "make sure this isn't just a 
movement of the way white people have gone from being able to every day 
shop at particular malls, and now they have to shop at reduced, discount stores … this has to do, really, about inequality and long-term 
inequality, including communities who have suffered for years, not just 
because of the recent economic downturn."
Many women reported harassment in the camp, and even assault - especially those that stayed overnight. "I think there were some (Occupy camps) that allowed homophobia and sexism to thrive in a really significant way," says Rameau. "I think homophobia and sexism in society exist everywhere, but were allowed to thrive in some of these areas."

Manissa Maharawal, a PhD student and Occupy activist, said: "I love the discourse of the 99 per cent. I think it's great, I think it's been really unifying. But I would like it to go along with saying something like: ‘We are the 99 per
 cent, but the way that we experience the 99 per cent can be very 
different'."

Jack Bryson, a 49-year-old Black public service 
worker, became an activist after his sons witnessed the killing of their
 friend Oscar Grant at the hands of transit police in Oakland. When he 
heard that Occupy Oakland had named their camp Oscar Grant Plaza, he 
came to check it out. He was excited by what he found, but also thought 
many young white activists he met had a lot to learn about poverty and 
repression. "The black community, for 400 years, [have] always been the 
99 per cent," Bryson said. "Welcome to our world."

Bryson was one
 of many who told us that Occupy activists needed to understand the ways
 in which communities of color experience the criminal justice system. 
He noted that Occupy Oakland had faced intense police repression. But, 
he told us, what many failed to realize was that police brutality is a 
daily fact of life in many communities. "Black, young men … would love 
to come out here. But what happens here, with the police? It happens on 
Saturday nights to Black young men leaving a nightclub, or a black young
 man going into a gas station and being followed by the police."

Boots
 Riley, a hip-hop artist and Occupy Oakland organizer, told us that he hopes the Occupy movement can challenge the ways that people have viewed policing. "I think 
that what happens normally is the media has most of white America 
looking at people of color as deficient, savage, and when they see 
something happen to them by police they believe that it was somehow 
their fault," says Riley. "Our ideas and views about the police are very tied in to our ideas and views about why people are poor."

If
 OWS wanted to be a movement that was going to shift power in the US, 
these organizers felt it had to come to terms with the fundamental 
differences in the ways that communities of color experienced racism, 
how women experienced patriarchy, and how queer and transgender 
communities experienced homophobia and gender bias. If Occupy Wall 
Street wanted to talk about envisioning an alternative community, 
activists would first have to face their own privilege. 

That 
awareness has involved active engagement by white anti-racists, as well 
as the activists of color who committed deeply to the movement, despite 
often facing attacks for bringing up issues of race and gender.
"I was totally impressed by the leadership that was coming from young people of color, young women of color," activist and scholar Angela 
Davis told us in a conversation about Occupy camps she visited on the 
East coast.
"I think it's good that there's some white men getting involved, but 
they also have to recognize that, in order to be involved in this 
campaign of the 99 per cent against the one per cent, we have to 
recognize that the 99 per cent is hierarchically developed by itself." 

Davis
 told us that Occupy was indebted to a long history of direct action led
 by women and by people of color. She specifically noted the legacy of 
resistance in prisons, led by those behind bars. "Let's recognize that 
we're not artificially imposing these issues on the Occupy movement," 
added Davis. "The Occupy movement has organically risen from those 
movements."

For Lisa Fithian, one of many white activists who 
seeks to challenge race and gender bias in the movement, this 
consciousness raising is a crucial part of struggling for justice."What I teach is that those with more privileges whether 
because your color of your skin, your gender, your education, whatever,
 how do you use those privileges strategically to raise those of all?"
"We have to take our privileges, become conscious and use them to 
actively change the social relationships, and access, and availability 
of resources," she added. 

Blocking the process

Manissa
 Maharawal, a South Asian woman, has been one of Occupy Wall Street's 
most eloquent and passionate defenders. But she almost walked out of the
 movement on one of her very first visits to Zuccotti Park. When she, 
along with several people of color, stood up in front of hundreds of 
people to block a proposal at a very early Occupy Wall Street assembly, 
she felt anger and hostility from many of those present. She says it's 
"still one of the more intimidating things that I've had to do in my 
life". The proposal was for a document called the Declaration of the Occupation, and she felt language in the document erased oppression faced by people of color. 

She
 did not want to have to block the proposal and face the angry stares of
 hundreds of people. However, says Maharawal, it's something she had to 
do. "What struck me then was that if I want Occupy to be something 
that's around for a long time in my life … it needs from the very 
beginning to be a movement that's taking these things on," she 
explained. "And that is thinking about not just corporate greed and 
financial institutions, but is thinking about how these things are 
connected to racism, to patriarchy, to oppression generally."

Ultimately,
 Maharawal and others who agreed with her succeeded in changing the 
language of the declaration. Nearly two months later, one of the white 
male activists who had expressed his frustration with her came up to her
 to thank her for her intervention. "I'm really glad you did that, I 
learned a lot right then," he told her.

"Making these connections
 is difficult, it's been like constant work in this movement," says 
Maharawal. But, she adds, "this stuff doesn't feel like minutia, it 
feels fundamental to me". She says this movement is about creating a 
real alternative to our current system, and, for her, that means 
fighting these systemic issues. "Why are we going to create a system 
that just re-creates all these oppressions? That recreates racism, that 
recreates oppression, that recreates gender hierarchy. Why would I want 
to be a part of that?"Sweta Vohra and Jordan Flaherty are producers of Al Jazeera's Fault Lines. Fault Lines presents two special programs on the Occupy movement premiering March 20 & 27.

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