Beyond Resistance: Free at Last.

Folks who know me or who have explored these pages very much, are aware that Arizona Prison Watch is often spared my more radical posts - I save those for my Prison Abolitionist blog. Thus, I haven't written much here about the Occupy Wall Street Movement - or about the Occupy Phoenix movement, for that matter. I came across this post by Chris Hedges this morning, though, and wept. My bet is that something inside you will weep as well. My hope is that it will also compel you to act. 


I see faces, too - the faces of the dead that go with the names I've etched out in chalk all over this city - and finally, one night, laid down in paint in a liberating act of civil disobedience. For that, I will no doubt have to pay, but it will be nothing next to what the loved ones left behind have had to endure...

 

 

 

 

 

 

--------from TruthDig.com-----------

Finding Freedom in Handcuffs
by Chris Hedges
Monday, November 7, 2011

Editor’s note: Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War brings with it a host of horrors, including famine, but the worst is always the human detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones behind the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we were a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as if we were creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.

A glass tower filled with people carefully selected for the polish and self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege, whose primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception and an incapacity for empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil. Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively mask the reality of what is happening—murder. These are words designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with a cold neutrality. Peace, love and all sane affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood, “soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech.”

We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain. The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.”

Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we will make things worse. This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on until corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes on until moral acts, such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress. And all this is done so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who lied to the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use their dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble outside their gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.

It is vital that the occupation movements direct attention away from their encampments and tent cities, beset with the usual problems of hastily formed open societies where no one is turned away. Attention must be directed through street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance companies, courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and firehouses that are being closed, and corporations such as General Electric that funnel taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and do not pay taxes, as well as propaganda outlets such as the New York Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which have unleashed a vicious propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted, shut down and occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation and destruction of human life are no less egregious.

It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills, N.J., who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek something else—a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say “this is wrong,” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t."

There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign correspondent. I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were not and did not. The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last breaths had marked my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me choose sides. As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I am free at last.”

Safer Spaces and Peace Councils: Alternatives to police.

There's been a lot of concern (and disagreement) at Occupation Phoenix about how to address the community's safety needs without instituting our own internal security/police detail (which bestows power in people, disrupting the otherwise egalitarian structure of our mini-society, among other things). If OP truly wants to do something revolutionary, we will explore alternative types of ideas - like these from Occupy Wall Street. Thanks to Melissa Gira Grant for such in-depth coverage on the issue...

------------

Making Safer Spaces: Occupy Wall Street Addresses Questions of Security at Zuccotti Park

AlterNet / By Melissa Gira Grant

November 6, 2011 

The question of how safe Liberty Plaza is – and for whom – has consumed occupiers and critics for weeks.

Rumors of a possible eviction of Occupy Wall Street began late in the afternoon last Thursday, right after Mayor Bloomberg alleged that the occupiers at Liberty Plaza – formerly Zuccotti Park – had refused to report a rape at the occupation last Saturday, October 29th. But members of the Safer Spaces working group have strongly refuted Bloomberg's assertions and attempts to smear the occupation:

“[When] the survivor decided to make a report to the police and to push for a criminal investigation and prosecution... supporters from OWS accompanied her to the police station, and will continue to support her throughout the legal process... we were troubled at the time of her report that responding police officers appeared to be more concerned by her political involvement in OWS than her need for assistance after a traumatic incident of sexual violence... It is reprehensible to manipulate and capitalize on a tragedy like this to discredit a peaceful political movement.” 

The question of how safe Liberty Plaza is – and for whom – has consumed occupiers and critics for weeks. With Bloomberg and his ad hoc protest committee within City Hall seizing on the issue of public safety as rationale for breaking up the protests, occupiers are working overtime to hold the park from threat of eviction, as well as to prove to the City that they are capable of keeping their own peace. That's meant addressing reports of sexual assault, along with rumors that NYPD are directing the homeless, drug users, and people struggling with mental illness to the park, and grappling with how to effectively prevent violence without relying on the kinds of policing that have been used against the occupation. Where once the occupation was thought of as its own demand, now the demands of how to keep occupiers safe dominate their days.

Responding to Crisis 

Early last Tuesday evening in the medic tent, you could find about a half-dozen people –  some new to the park and just wanting to help, some who have been here for weeks – calmly bustling around, laying out remedies for stress, cold, and aches, and making themselves available to anyone who just needed someone to talk to. In front of the tent, a woman who had only arrived at the occupation a few hours earlier staffed a table that served as a triage. “I'm in the process of moving,” she told me, “and I thought, I should just bring these things down here. Plus I have EMT training.” A shy-looking man in a trenchcoat and oversized backpack approached the table slowly, asking for hand sanitizer and then lingering for a moment to collect himself.

Behind the table, there was a small, more private seating area with camp chairs. An occupier came through looking for acupuncture to soothe an aching back, and was welcomed into the tent. A fresh pizza was delivered to the volunteer crew, which brought a friendly German Shepherd mix out of the tent. “That's Zephyr, our service and psychotherapy dog,” said Lucius, who was returning to Liberty after a few days at Occupy New Haven. He's a social worker who first came to the occupation about two weeks ago to provide administrative and process-oriented support, but found himself involved in the mental health team instead. “There's just an ambient stress, being part of the occupation. It became clear to me that the primary need here is to keep this community safe and secure and to assist those in need.” 

Contrast that with a comment that ran in The New York Times, from occupier and security team member Hero Vincent, when asked about the increasing numbers of people coming to the park looking for free food and clothes and other necessities: 

 “It’s bad for most of us who came here to build a movement. We didn’t come here to start a recovery institution.”

It's no surprise that different occupiers will have a different approaches to balancing the demands of an occupation – which has become the focal point of a rapidly growing movement – with the needs of the occupiers in Liberty Plaza themselves. But what is the occupation but a very public demonstration of how to care for one another in the midst of a cluster of crises: the deliberate hacking away at our social safety net; the rise of a police surveillance state that disproportionately targets low income communities and communities of color; the privatization and corporatization of public spaces and political speech. As a result, the democratic, autonomous way in which people have come together to ensure the success of the Occupy movement, in holding Liberty Plaza, is now inextricable from the both radical and practical ways in which they care for one another.

Take the occupation's newly formed Peace Council, a collaborative effort to respond to crises. “The Peace Council came together very spontaneously,” said Lucius, to mitigate threats of harm to others, or self-harm. Where it can take a long time for the full General Assembly to come to consensus on a given matter, the Peace Council is empowered to de-escalate crises as they occur. Trainings in non-violent communication and conflict de-escalation are offered daily at the park for those who want to join the Peace Council, and the Safer Spaces Working Group conducts their own training with a focus on meeting the needs of survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.  

The Peace Council and related efforts should not be understood as a demand from occupiers to one another to “keep it in the park,” as Bloomberg and other have alleged. Instead, they are mechanisms for involving outside agencies to support the occupiers, but with intention and regard for the overall well-being of the occupation. For example, the Medical Team has decided in advance, through their own consensus, that they can call in EMS without debate if they are caring for anyone whose vital signs are dropping. “We recognize that our own resources are limited,” Lucius explained, “and while we want to work in ways that might be alternative to these outside health systems, we also don't eschew them.”  

Consenting to involve city services –  from 311 to 911 – speaks to one of the core concerns driving the Occupy movement: how can we rely on these institutions to help us when they can also expose us to harm? In the case of the sexual assault on October 29th, members of the Safer Spaces working group immediately provided the woman who was assaulted with 24/7 support, according to Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who has been involved with the working group for several weeks. They made every option for outside support available to the survivor – from speaking with trained counselors, to going with her to have a medical and forensic examination performed off-site, to going to the police. It was her decision to have the attacker removed from the park, and when he violated that agreement and returned, “it was the decision of the woman to call the police,” explained Manissa. “And when she came to that decision, we supported her in it.” 

Once the attacker was identified by the Security Team, members held an active watch over him in the park. “We monitored him, 24/7 if possible,” said Sean McKeown, who is with the Security working group, “while Safer Spaces worked with the [survivor]. We know that dealing with the police in this regard can be as bad as the incident itself. One woman who was assaulted in the beginning of October – she told us that the police treated her like it was her fault.”

Even in cases where Security and Safer Spaces have turned attackers over to the police, the police can't guarantee an attacker won't return. Last Friday, a few posters with photos of a man captioned “This man has been arrested for a sexual assault” appeared in the park. “This an individual who has already been arrested,” said Sean, “but he was charged with only a minor sexual offense. He pled guilty, paid a fine and came right back to the park. We've tried to explain to the police that this person should not be here, but they say there's nothing they can do.”  

Strengthening the Movement

It is within this pressure-cooker  that the New York Daily News reported on an apparent physical and cultural rift at Liberty, dividing dedicated protestors from people they termed “lawbreakers and lowlifes.” In particular, the homeless population at the park have been targeted for contributing to the rift, and they have been charged by press and occupiers alike for committing thefts and violence. Some occupiers say that in the last two weeks, more and more homeless people are arriving at Liberty, directed by the New York Police Department to take up residence there.  

In truth, homeless people have been part of the occupation for several weeks, and of their own accord. Genghis Khalid Muhammad (or GKM), a member of Picture the Homeless, has been camping at Liberty for the last two weeks, organizing teach-ins on how occupiers can support the homeless, as well as workshops on how to survive living on the street. Standing by his tent during a General Assembly this week, GKM told me that the rift challenging the occupation is not about homelessness or crime, but about race and political power.

Because so many of the city's homeless population is black – according to a Coalition for the Homeless 2011 report, 53% of the people who comprise New York's shelter population are African-American – GKM sees the blaming of the homeless for disruption and violence at the occupation as an expression of unchecked racism. “The epidemic of homelessness nationwide is because the 1% are deliberately creating this situation, “ GKM explained. “The homeless being here is actually ideal. It allows the homeless to stand in solidarity with the whole people's movement.” 

“It's really easy right now to say 'there are a few crazy people who have been sent down here to mess up the movement,'” said Maharawal, “when it's really like, 'Actually, what Safer Spaces has been saying for a month now is: we need community guidelines and accountability.' The rhetoric 'it's people from the outside coming in' who are the problem is a huge issue, and it's just a way to sidestep it.”

In the case of the October 29th attacker, members of the Security and Kitchen working groups identified him as a member of the occupation's Kitchen crew, who had been staying in the park for a few weeks. This can't be ignored, said Maharawal, as “intimate and partner violence within our own movement is an ongoing and divisive issue, and if we don't take it on, it's a huge oversight. We won't change anything fundamentally if we don't take this issue on.”

In response to the limitations of relying on outside law enforcement, as well the concerns of Safer Spaces and others that the safety of occupiers must be ensured in order for the occupation to succeed, the Security Team is now shifting towards a prevention model, rather than a policing model. As McKeown explained their new approach, “We're trying to uproot the things that allow these behaviors to happen in the first place.”

How the occupiers at Liberty Plaza work to address and end violence, said Maharawal, is as important for Occupy Wall Street's safety as it is symbolic, for setting a tone for occupations across the country. It's also central to their success. “For movements or communities like ours,” she explained, “how we keep each other safe is not just a side issue –  it's a fundamental issue.” 

Melissa Gira Grant has written for Slate, the Guardian (UK), the New York Observer and Jezebel, among others. Follow her on Twitter: @melissagira.

Colorblindness, Capitalism, Democracy and the 99%...

Phoenix Riot Police swarming through Margaret T. Hance Park
(I was ordered to leave then arrested soon after taking this shot)
Phoenix, Arizona / October 15, 2011

Good critical analysis of the intersections of race and class, among other things, in the Occupy Wall Street movement as it's spread across the country. I hope folks bring this kind of stuff up at the General Assemblies for occupy Phoenix - this is what I've been trying to get at.

----from Bring the Ruckus----

Whiteness and the 99%

Submitted by bajin to Bring the Ruckus
Thu, 10/20/2011 - 00:11.


This piece was written by Joel Olson, a member of BtR-Arizona, as a contribution to ongoing debates about the occupations taking place in the U.S.

A printable PDF of this piece is available for download here, and a readable PDF is available here.

Whiteness and the 99%
By Joel Olson

Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race. This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%.

Left colorblindness is the enemy

Left colorblindness is the belief that race is a “divisive” issue among the 99%, so we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. According to this argument, the movement is for everyone, and people of color should join it rather than attack it.

Left colorblindness claims to be inclusive, but it is actually just another way to keep whites’ interests at the forefront. It tells people of color to join “our” struggle (who makes up this “our,” anyway?) but warns them not to bring their “special” concerns into it. It enables white people to decide which issues are for the 99% and which ones are “too narrow.” It’s another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment, even in a democratic movement.

As long as left colorblindness dominates our movement, there will be no 99%. There will instead be a handful of whites claiming to speak for everyone. When people of color have to enter a movement on white people’s terms rather than their own, that’s not the 99%. That’s white democracy.

The white democracy

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.

Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.

This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.

The cross-class alliance that makes up the white race.

As this white race expanded to include other European ethnicities, the result was a very curious political system: the white democracy. The white democracy has two contradictory aspects to it. On the one hand, all whites are considered equal (even as the poor are subordinated to the rich and women are subordinated to men). On the other, every white person is considered superior to every person of color. It’s democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In this system, whites praised freedom, equal opportunity, and hard work, while at the same time insisting on higher wages, access to the best jobs, to be the first hired and the last fired at the workplace, full enjoyment of civil rights, the right to send their kids to the best schools, to live in the nicest neighborhoods, and to enjoy decent treatment by the police. In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, reservation, genocide, and other forms of discrimination. The tragedy of the white democracy is that it oppressed working class whites as well as people of color, because with the working class bitterly divided, the elites could rule easily.

The white democracy exists today. Take any social indicator—rates for college graduation, homeownership, median family wealth, incarceration, life expectancy, infant mortality, cancer, unemployment, median family debt, etc.—and you’ll find the same thing: whites as a group are significantly better off than any other racial group. Of course there are individual exceptions, but as a group whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But history tells us that the white democracy, born in the 1600s, lives on.

The distorted white mindset

No one is opposed to good schools, safe neighborhoods, healthy communities, and economic security for whites. The problem is that in the white democracy, whites often enjoy these at the expense of communities of color. This creates a distorted mindset among many whites: they praise freedom yet support a system that clearly favors the rich, even at the expense of poor whites. (Tea Party, I’m talking to you.)

The roots of left colorblindness lie in the white democracy and the distorted mindset it creates. It encourages whites to think that their issues are “universal” while those of people of color are “specific.” But that is exactly backwards. The struggles of people of color are the problems that everyone shares. Anyone in the occupy movement who has been treated brutally by the police has to know that Black communities are terrorized by cops every day. Anyone who is unemployed has to know that Black unemployment rates are always at least double that of whites, and Native American unemployment rates are far higher. Anyone who is sick and lacks healthcare has to know that people of color are the least likely to be insured (regardless of their income) and have the highest infant mortality and cancer rates and the lowest life expectancy rates. Anyone who is drowning in debt should know that the median net wealth of Black households is twenty times less than that of white households. Only left colorblindness can lead us to ignore these facts.

This is the sinister impact of white democracy on our movements. It encourages a mindset that insists that racial issues are “divisive” when they are at the absolute center of everything we are fighting for.

To defeat left colorblindness and the distorted white mindset, we must come to see any form of favoritism toward whites (whether explicit or implicit) as an evil attempt to perpetuate the cross-class alliance rather than build the 99%.

The only thing that can stop us is us

Throughout American history, attacking the white democracy has always opened up radical possibilities for all people. The abolitionist movement not only overthrew slavery, it kicked off the women’s rights and labor movements. The civil rights struggle not only overthrew legal segregation, it kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible.

The only thing that can stop us is us. What prevents the 99% from organizing the world as we see fit is not the 1%. The 1% cannot hold on to power if we decide they shouldn’t. What keeps us from building the new world in our hearts are the divisions among us.

Our diversity is our strength. But left colorblindness is a rejection of diversity. It is an effort to keep white interests at the center of the movement even as the movement claims to be open to all. Urging us to “get over” so-called “divisive” issues like race sound inclusive, but they are really efforts to maintain the white democracy. It’s like Wall Street executives telling us to “get beyond” “divisive” issues like their unfair profits because if you work hard enough, you too can get a job on Wall Street someday!

Creating a 99% requires putting the struggles of people of color at the center of our conversations and demands rather than relegating them to the margins. To fight against school segregation, colonization, redlining, and anti-immigrant attacks is to fight against everything Wall Street stands for, everything the Tea Party stands for, everything this government stands for. It is to fight against the white democracy, which stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge.

Occupy everything, attack the white democracy

While no pamphlet can capture everything a nationwide movement can or should do to undermine the white democracy and left colorblindness, below is a short list of questions people might consider asking in movement debates. These questions were developed from actual debates in occupations throughout the U.S.

1. Do speakers urge us “get beyond” race? Are they defensive and dismissive of demands for racial justice?
2. If speakers urge developing “close working relationships with the police,” do they consider how police terrorize Black, Latino, Native, and undocumented communities? Do they consider how police have attacked occupation encampments?
3. If speakers urge us to hold banks accountable, do they encourage us to focus on redlining, predatory lending, and subprime mortgages, which have decimated Black and Latino neighborhoods?
4. If speakers urge the cancellation of debts, do they mean for things like electric and heating bills as well as home mortgages and college loans?
5. If speakers urge the halting of foreclosures, do they acknowledge that they take place primarily in segregated neighborhoods, and do they propose to start there?
6. If speakers urge the creation of more jobs, do they acknowledge that many communities of color have already been in chronic “recessions” for decades, and do they propose to start from there?

Attack capitalist power—attack the white democracy.

Build the 99%!

People of color at the center!

No more left colorblindness!