Roundtable: After 1 Year, OWS Gives Voice to Resistance of Mass Debt and Widening Inequality

Democracy Now 

The Occupy Wall Street movement is largely credited for reframing the national dialogue on economic inequality and popularizing the phrase: "We are the 99 percent." We host a roundtable with Frances Fox Piven, an author and professor at City University of New York who has studied social movements for decades; Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence, which has extensively covered the Occupy movement; and Suzanne Collado, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street since its inception and member of the group "Strike Debt," an effort to organize a mass upsurge of debt resistance.

What’s the Deal with Russell Simmons? Deconstructing the Black 1%

The Def Jam icon is part-activist, part-capitalist...so who is he really?

What’s the Deal with Russell Simmons? 

Deconstructing the Black 1%

by Mark Anthony Neal | Ebony.com

For far too many Americans, there is little distinction to be made among those who comprise the so-called 1%; this was made apprent recently in the dismissive reaction to the travails of locked-out NBA ballers, where the conflict was reduced to a battle between millionaires and billionaires (as if the NBA owners were not in position to set labor relations precedents—worker mobility, depressed wages, the value of labor unions—that could impact everyday American workers). The general lack of nuance with which many in this country engage the issue of wealth is symptomatic of a general inability to make broader distinctions between power and wealth. Thus it’s not surprising that many lump all of the so-called 1% into one group, as if they shared common values, traveled the same routes to their wealth, or deployed their wealth to the same ends—ends that are thought to be inherently antithetical to progressive movement.

The criticism faced by #Occupy Movement supporter Russell Simmons is emblematic of a trend among critics of Black elites about their seeming contradictory support of the movement. In one critique, “The Black Millionaires of Occupy Wall Street,” writer Cord Jefferson takes Simmons to task for his own business practices—like predatory pre-paid debit cards—noting that the Hip-Hop mogul’s support of #Occupy is “convenient” in that it “doesn't call into question the foundation on which he’s amassed a 35,000-square-foot home.” Simmons’ business practices are, of course, fair game—yet to think that Simmons, or any of the Black celebrities who have empathized with the movement are some how complicit in the world that the 99% are symbolically dismantling, is to not really understand how power really functions.

Simmons’ depiction as a celebrity endorser of a pre-paid debit card—as figures such as Suze Orman and Lil Wayne have recently launched such cards—has recently drawn his ire. In an open letter to the “Financial Press,” where Simmons compares himself to Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerburg, he writes, “With the issuance of the first RushCard, I created the first Prepaid Debit Card Account, requiring no linkages whatsoever to a consumer checking account. Today, millions of Americans manage their financial lives with the assistance of prepaid debit cards issued by UniRush and our competitors.”

Yet underlying Simmons’ complaint and response to the reduction of his business acumen to his celebrity is largely motivated by a dismissal of hip-hop culture and its constituents (or consumers, depending on your vantage) as anything of value. It is a well-worn accusation, that is more often on-point than not, but also highlights the classic spin of a cultural gatekeeper, who resists having to address real issues of accountability by continually highlighting his (now tenuous) relationship to hip-hop culture. Simmons may not be of a 1% that actually impacts policy in this country, like say the Koch Brothers or the substantial number of elected officials who are amongst the nation's most wealthy. Yet, his role in contemporary Black life is deserving of some level of scrutiny.

Read Full Essay @ Ebony.com

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Jasiri X and 1Hood Media Talk with Occupy the Hood

Jasiri X:

It’s hard to believe Occupy the Hood is just a little more than 3 months old. Inspired by Occupy Wall St, Malik Rhasaan and Ife Johari formed Occupy the Hood to make sure issues specific to the Black community were not overlooked. In the subsequent media firestorm Occupy the  Hood was featured on sites as diverse as CNN and WorldstarHipHop and was highlighted in Time Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year, “The Protester“. 

But, with attention comes haters, some upset that Occupy the Hood is getting the recognition they feel they deserve, some afraid they may lose their funding to Occupy the Hood, and some who feel because they haven’t personally co signed Malik and Ife they’re not “legitimate” leadership.

In this interview Malik Rhasaan breaks down the origin of Occupy the Hood and takes on their critics and detractors.

What If We Occupied Language?

Dread Scott and Kyle Goen

What If We Occupied Language?

by H. Samy Alim | New York Times | The Stone

When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.

Occupy.

It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.

Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy, ” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to obscure the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation —  a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land

Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.

As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.

In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Word Committee, noted on NPR’s “On the Media” that the meaning of occupy has changed  dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. “It’s almost always been used as a transitive verb,” Zimmer said. “That’s a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It’s being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it’s this very flexible word now that’s filling many grammatical slots in the language.”

What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like?  We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.

Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.

For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When  white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.

Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”

Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term “illegals” and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.’s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.

But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against “Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services.” In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak “English with an accent” (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized “accents” as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an “accent” to receive equal opportunities.

In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.

As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint .

***

H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.

My Barack Obama Problem

My Barack Obama Problem

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency.  As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars,  attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the  nation’s  struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty.

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured in Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers.  The Obama of Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. 

The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future.

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither.  When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people.   And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them, it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different.  The people who come to the White House, whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency.

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher.   This is the real Barack Obama—someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top.”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in seventy years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

FILM THE POLICE - B. Dolan feat. Toki Wright, Jasiri X, Buddy Peace, Sage Francis

DOWNLOAD THIS MP3 FOR FREE on the homepage of http://StrangeFamousRecords.com right now!

B. DOLAN's "FILM THE POLICE" pays tribute to N.W.A.'s infamous "F*ck the Police," serving as a call to action for the digitized media movement while responding to the recent explosion of police brutality all across the world.

This free MP3, courtesy of STRANGE FAMOUS RECORDS, features a reconstruction of Dr. Dre's original beat, brilliantly reanimated by UK producer BUDDY PEACE. Label CEO, SAGE FRANCIS, opens the song by picking up the gavel where Dr. Dre left it 23 years ago, introducing a blistering, true-to-style flip of Ice Cube's original verse by SFR cornerstone, B. Dolan. TOKI WRIGHT (Rhymesayers Entertainment) follows up by stepping into the shoes of MC Ren, penning the people's struggle against cops as a case of "Goliath Vs. a bigger giant." Finally, Jasiri X (Pittsburgh rapper/activist) rounds out the track by filling in for Eazy-E, reminding us that police brutality disproportionately affects poor people of color.

With the Occupy Movement bringing various forms of injustice to the forefront of people's consciousness, "Film the Police" is a reminder that cops have been a continued and increasingly militarized presence in public streets. Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and video cameras, along with the popularity of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, the power of the media has been put back into the people's hands as they document the injustices perpetrated by those who have sworn to serve and protect them.

The lyrics are available at: http://bdolan.net/film-the-police-lyrics/
http://facebook.com/BDolanSFR
http://twitter.com/BDolanSFR
http://facebook.com/StrangeFamousRecords
http://twitter.com/SFRupdates

This video was directed by Mason Johnson (Klepticenter Productions) and edited by Weston Woodbury.

"Film the Police" will be included on B. DOLAN and BUDDY PEACE's "HOUSE OF BEES VOL. II" mixtape at http://StrangeFamousRecords.com

This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

This is What Democracy Looks Like:   

The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

by Mark Naison | NewBlackMan

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity.

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated; one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.  The young people in this movement—part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt—discovered  they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. 

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.  

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge—that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.  What the Occupy movement created was a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another.  Do such free zones exist in our schools,  universities and workplaces?  If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!  There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.  To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new—they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples (the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule.

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images of police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security.  Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press.

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers  in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

The Resistance: Bronx Students Release 10-Point List of Demands to Reform NY Public Education

From Colorlines.com:

1. We demand free quality education as a right guaranteed by the US Constitution.
2. We demand the dismantling of Bloomberg’s Panel for Educational Policy. We demand a new 13 member community board to run our public schools (comprised of parents, educators, education experts, community members, and a minimum of 5 student representatives).
3. We demand quality instruction. Teachers should ethnically, culturally, and racially reflect the student body. We demand experienced teachers who have a history of teaching students well. Teacher training should be intensive and include an apprenticeship with master teachers as well as experiences with the communities where the school is located.
4. We demand stronger extra-curricular activities to help stimulate and spark interest in students. Students should have options, opportunities, and choice in their education.
5. We demand a healthy, safe environment that does not expect our failure or anticipate our criminality. We demand a school culture that acknowledges our humanity (free of metal detectors, untrained and underpaid security guards, and abusive tactics).
6. We demand that all NYC public school communities foster structured and programmatic community building so that students, teachers, and staff learn in an environment that is respectful and safe for all.
7. We demand small classes. Class sizes should be humane and productive. We demand that the student to teacher ratio for a mainstream classroom should be no more than 15:1.
8. We demand student assessments and evaluations that reflect the variety of ways that we learn and think (portfolio assessments, thesis defenses, anecdotal evaluations, written exams). Student success should not depend solely on high stakes testing.
9. We demand a stop to the attack on our schools. If a school is deemed “failing”, we demand a team of qualified and diverse experts to assess how such schools can improve and the resources to improve them.
10. We demand fiscal equity for NYC public schools: as stated in the Education Budget and Reform Act of 2007 by the NYS Legislature, NYC public schools have been inadequately and inequitably funded. We demand the legislatively mandated $7 billion dollars in increased annual state education aid to be delivered to our schools now!

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackman

Now that Occupy Movements are being evicted from public parks in cities throughout the country, almost invariably by Democratic mayors, many Democratic Party organizes and some labor activists are hoping the movement will fade away and concentrate its energies on electing progressive candidates for office and putting forth a progressive political agenda.

In my opinion, that would be a grave mistake.  There are a bevy of important issues that given current political alignments, and the power of money in American politics,  cannot be translated into a viable legislative agenda. It will take years of disruptive protest- strikes, boycotts, walkouts, sit ins and occupations- to place them on the national agenda and the only force in American society capable of  employing those tactics for a sustained period is the Occupy movement.

Here are some key issues that neither party is willing to take on that the Occupy movement can influence if it keeps growing and becoming more diverse in the next five years.

1. The student loan crisis and the escalating cost of a college education. There is no way, without major disruptions of university life, and pressure on the banks, that student loan debt can be erased, or significantly reduced, and tuition at public colleges frozen or lowered.  Until universities cannot carry on their normal business without making dramatic changes in loan collections and tuition charges, you can be sure elected officials won’t touch these issues with a ten foot pole.

2. The legalization of drugs and the release of non-violent drug offenders from the nation’s prisons. Given the powerful interests fighting any dismantling of the prison industrial complex-ranging from prison guards unions, to elected officials in communities where prisons are located, to corporations who benefit from cheap prison labor, it will require massive social movements, to force states, localities, and eventually the federal government, to end the irrational arrest and imprisonment of people who sell drugs no more dangerous than alcohol or prescription medications.

3. The dismantling of a domestic police state apparatus which uses advanced weaponry and intrusive surveillance technology to suppress dissent and control and intimidate minority and working class youth.  The weapons that were used against Occupy demonstrators in Oakland, at Zuccotti Park and at UC Davis have been used for many years against minority youth to prevent them from inhibiting the gentrification and re-segregation of American societies and to assure order in schools and communities stripped of resources.  Libertarians, civil rights organizations, and a growing Occupy movement can  create an alliance to  undermine the domestic police state. The two major parties will never do it without immense outside pressure.

4.  A moratorium on foreclosures and the passage of legislation to allow arts groups, youth groups,  affordable housing organizations and advocates for the homeless to occupy abandoned commercial and residential space in America’s towns and cities. Such actions will only be taken if Occupy groups and their allies make foreclosures difficult, and begin occupying abovementioned properties in such numbers that it will be counterproductive for authorities to evict them. There is no way elected officials will take such steps without being presented with a “fait accompli” by protesters.

5. A radical reformation of the tax system that places the burden of taxation on the 1 Percent and reduces taxes on individuals and small businesses.  There is no way, given current political alignments, and the vast power of  corporate and Wall Street lobbies, that that such a revolution in the tax code could be legislated. But five more years of disruptive protest could change that Occupy movements have to create a scenario where the only path to restoring social order would be a revision of the tax burden to benefit ordinary citizens

These five policy areas are hardly the only ones which would require years of protest to attain-I am sure people reading this could identify issues in education, environmental protection, job creation and US military policy that would require movements of equal force to implement

But I have identified these five areas to show how far away we are from any real political change in this country through the two major parties  We need grass roots social movements of such force that it will reinvent what is possible in mainstream American politics. The Occupy movements have started such a process. It would be a shame if they prematurely embraced the electoral process rather than pushing protests activity to much higher levels.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Social Media, Occupy, & Hip Hop in the Academy

Exceptional Brutality: Police Violence on Campus

Exceptional Brutality

by David J. Leonard and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Like many, we have been outraged by recent episodes of police violence at UC Berkeley and UC Davis in recent weeks.  The sight of police officers brutalizing men and women with batons and pepper spray is antithetical to justice.  Yet, we have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the public discourse, one that has given an inordinate amount of attention to these instances, treating them as unique and exceptional rather than indicative of systemic state-sanctioned violence.  The overall tone of shock works from an idea that police violence should not happen on American college campuses. But in the absence of a similar level of outrage resulting from police violence in urban communities throughout the United States we are left wondering about the dangers in this exceptional discourse.  For example, in her otherwise powerful call for leadership, Cathy Davidson asks, “How could this be happening at Davis—and at other campuses too? Why are students who are peaceably protesting being treated like criminals?”  Rather than asking how could this happen at college campuses, shouldn’t we be asking how could this happen anywhere? How can any person be subjected to repression, violence, and instruments of dehumanization? A discourse that imagines police violence, whether bully-club justice or pepper spray, as proper when dealing with criminals rather than students gives us pause because of its inability to advance justice for all. 

Similarly Bob Ostertag, in “Militarization Of Campus Police,” furthers the denunciation of the violence at UC Davis through the systematic juxtaposition of students from real-criminals.

And regulations prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. Any prison guard who used pepper spray on a seated prisoner would face immediate disciplinary review for the use of excessive force. Even in the case of a prison riot in which inmates use extreme violence, once a prisoner sits down he or she is not considered to be an imminent threat. And if prison guards go into a situation where the use of pepper spray is considered likely, they are required to have medical personnel nearby to treat the victims of the chemical agent.

Apparently, in the state of California felons incarcerated for violent crimes have rights that students at public universities do not. 

Beyond the establishment of a binary that situates students in an oppositional relationship to felons, the logic here leads one to conclude that students are subjected to more state violence than those subjected to incarceration within the Prison Industrial Complex.  Worse yet, if anyone should be subjected to pepper stray, it should be felons who within the national imagination are both undesirable and dangerous, unworthy and suspect.   In yet another layer of news media irony, these recent displays of brutal and inhumane police force reaffirm the reluctance of black, brown, and poor folk to enter into the Occupy movement in the first place.  The specter of police brutality haunts poor, black, and brown communities.  Students’ experiences – with this commonly experienced interface between citizens and those charged with protecting citizens – garner lead-story status while daily victims struggle to find any modicum of public support, or media coverage, much less - justice.

The sentiment of exceptionalism is not limited to the public reaction to police violence at UC Davis.  It was equally evident in the wake of police brutally attacking members of Occupy Berkeley as part of their efforts to disperse the group and remove tents.  Prompting widespread condemnation from the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, from various national commentators including Stephen Colbert, the police violence against Berkeley students elicited a disproportionate level of attention.  In our estimation, the attention and the rhetorical tone reflects the presumed exceptionalism of these instances and the presumed innocence and humanity reserved for students. 

We wonder also how these peaceful demonstrations – violently policed – compare to those violent ‘demonstrations’ moderately policed at Penn State University.  Somehow students violently demonstrating in support of a football program in an academic institution that is allegedly complicit in the rape and sexual abuse of children, warrant greater consideration than students peaceably demonstrating in solidarity with OWS and in support of their own challenges with the rising costs of college tuition.  Something simply is not right here.  The police acting on behalf of the state/institution is now commonplace praxis in the 21^st century.  But the synthesis of these recent actions with certain ideological positions and the media’s depiction and coverage of these events paints a sinister portrait of police institutions.  KRS ONE’s critical question,– “Who Protects Us from You?” – directed at the boys in blue circa 1989  – remains eerily unanswered.

The media coverage and the outrage, while warranted, illustrates how police violence against students – middle-class and overwhelmingly white – prompts outrage while eliciting accountability, whereas the daily violence against the poor, against communities of color, often goes unnoticed and unchecked.  “Not to diminish what happened at UC Davis, but it's worth considering what happens in poor neighborhoods and prisons, far from the cameras. I'm not saying that to diminish this video in anyway,” writes Ta-Nishi Coates in “The Cops we deserve.” “But I'd like people to see this as part of a broad systemic attitude we've adopted as a country toward law enforcement. There's a direct line from this officer invoking his privilege to brutalize these students, and an officer invoking his privilege to detain Henry Louis Gates for sassing him.”

In treating violence on college campuses, and that directed at student protestors as exceptional and therefore deserving national attention, the conversation inadvertently normalizes and erases the much more commonplace violence experienced by black and brown youth in communities throughout the United States.  Worse yet, the emphasis on the students as undeserving in comparison to those “real criminals” advances a Jim Crow system of justice where the systemic level of state violence besieging America’s poor and communities of color is rendered as justifiable.  “Bridging communities is difficult, writes Erinn Carter. Yet “Connecting the day-to-day struggles of communities of color to the immediate violence of police brutality is something that groups must do if they are going to garner the support of the community.”  What happened at Davis and Berkeley is what happens in communities across America, where black and brown youth, where America’s poor, are subjected to the power of the state, a militarized police that holds in check those populations that are deemed surplus, undesirable, and suspect in the national imagination.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackManand blogs @ No Tsuris.

James Braxton Peterson is director of Africana Studies and associate professor of English, Lehigh University. Peterson’s academic work focuses on Africana studies, narrative, graphic novels, and hip-hop culture. He is the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC, an association of hip-hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban, and youth cultures. Peterson is a regular contributor to The Root.com and he has appeared on Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, and various local television networks as an expert on hip-hop culture, popular culture, urban youth, and politics.

It's Time to Form "99 Percent Clubs" in Your School or Neighborhood

It's Time to Form "99 Percent Clubs" in Your School or Neighborhood

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

If you part of a large and growing number of Americans who support the Occupy movement, but  may  or may not be able to “Occupy” yourself, you might want to form a 99 Percent Club at your school, your workplace or in your neighborhood, to organize financial, legal and political support  for the Occupy movement and educate people in your community about what it stands for.

The idea for these 99 Percent Clubs came from renowned educator Ira Shor  and they are modeled on the “Friends of SNCC” organization that mobilized support for the non violent Southern civil rights movement in the early 1960’s. Given that the Occupy movement is under assault from elected officials and university presidents around the country, and that people in this movement, like their counterparts in the southern civil rights movement, face arrest and beatings, along with more modern police weaponry such as pepper spray and rubber bullets,  it is definitely time to create  a support group to raise funds and educate the public about these brave activists.

A 99 Percent Club is one vehicle that can do just that.  We have called for a first meeting of such a club at Fordham and the response, from students, alumni, and staff has been overwhelming.  Our Fordham group does not have a program- just a commitment to support the Occupations. So far, nearly 30 people are committed to attend.

Occupy Wall Street and its counterparts around the nation have put the questions of economic inequality on the nation’s agenda for the first time since the 1960’s. And the response from policy makers has been ferocious as that of southern segregationists confronting a challenge to their way of life.

It’s time for Americans who support the goals of the Occupy Movement to mobilize in behalf of popular democracy and economic justice, even if they don’t feel they can participate in the movement directly. Forming 99 Percent Clubs is one way to do so.

If you would like to start a 99 Percent Club in your area, please email Ira Shor at irashor@comcast.net with a cc to me at Naison@fordham.edu.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project(BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Things to Consider While Occupying America

Things to Consider While Occupying America

by Timothy B. Tyson | special to NewBlackMan

If police officers leveling assault rifles at unarmed citizens were not so disturbing, folks in Chapel Hill might act like Sheriff Andy Taylor does whenever Deputy Fife misuses his service revolver. "Give me the bullet, Barn," he'd say.  Poor Barney fishes into his shirt pocket and forks over the shell.  

Chapel Hill is not Mayberry, but a big university town where law enforcement is dangerous and complex; we honor and support the men and women who protect us.  When our cops point assault rifles at our citizens, however, they imperil our values—not just our image--and court real tragedy.  We cannot pretend this was okay.  Whoever decided that our police officers should go in with assault rifles leveled at unarmed citizens needs to resign right this minute.      

Self-romanticizing hotheads are shouting, like the muddy peasants in Monty Python, “See the violence inherent in the system!  I’m being repressed!”  In the society of the globalized spectacle, front-page pictures of cops with AR-15s make their own fevered case.  To the extent to which those dystopian images speak the truth about us, we must change Chapel Hill; to the extent that they misrepresent us, we must tell our own truth still more loudly.

“Our police department responded,” Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt announced, “in a deliberate and measured way.”  In the next breath, he denied responsibility, saying that our council-manager system won’t let the mayor direct the police.  This is the classic hallmark of a politician who knows he landed on the wrong side.  In fact, he claimed, Police Chief Chris Blue did not brief him about the weekend seizure of a downtown building by a violent mob until Monday morning. 

Every parent can translate the mayor’s dubious narrative: this was not a mistake and I am not responsible for the mistake; in fact, I knew nothing about it.  Not once did my kids ever get the car keys back until they did better than that. 

Chief Blue’s decision to reenact the Normandy invasion also defies grown-up logic.  That goes double if he actually thinks a two-day building seizure by what he described as a threatening mob does not merit informing the mayor.  “Our deliberate response was appropriate,” he says. 

Uh, would either of you gentlemen care to try again?   

Incidentally, the activists who took over the old Yates Motor Company are not Occupy Chapel Hill.  And disdain for Chapel Hill’s official idiocy is not an endorsement of the Unfettered Rave-Action Coalition.  Occupy challenges the gap between rich and poor and confronts the corporate purchase of our political system; it is a democratic movement, not the hipster version of a frat party.  Occupy defies the framework of politics-as-usual, but it does not attempt to resolve land use questions by mass-action late-night booty calls.

Before we suffer any of these fools further, we should ask ourselves what the words "Kent State" mean four decades after the National Guard fired into that crowd of students in Ohio.  Any actual “deliberate response” to the recklessness of this lost weekend must weigh the enduring costs of having "Chapel Hill" become that kind of national metaphor.     

To a large extent, I share the rage of this flubbed-up flash mob.  Land-use policies and real estate prices in Chapel Hill are pushing working families and the poor out of town; neighborhoods long owned by people of color are being replaced by high-rise housing for millionaires.   If the fashionistas wanted a community center in the long-abandoned Yates Motor Company, though, they might have recruited, well, the community.   We desperately need to talk about what is happening in this town.  A public education campaign, some recruitment at the churches, a few press conferences and protest rallies, and it might have happened.  We all know that property rights are not absolute, as zoning ordinances, building codes, eminent domain and affordable housing laws attest.  Had the groundwork been done, this old building could have become a symbol of our generous vision;  most people in town know the building exists only because of the front-page showdown. 

But the Anarcho-Stylin’ Dance Alliance yearned less for a community center than for a confrontation that would validate their paranoid fantasies, some of which, alas, are not entirely paranoid.  Their victory created a global spectacle that a single cop stumbling over the curb could have turned into a tragedy for Chapel Hill and a debacle for Occupy Wall Street.        

I embrace the Occupy movement, which sparks my hopes for a better world.  At the invitation of our brilliant offspring, my wife and I spent several days at Zuccotti Park.  (Unlike our kids, Perri and I slept at a friend's apartment.  It is possible that we did not subsist solely on the granola bars we bought for the masses.  We can neither confirm nor deny the yummy sushi buffet.)   Figuratively speaking, and almost literally, we saw Pete Seeger meet Kanye West in that park.  Young and old, poor and affluent, aspiring democrats vowed that the gap between rich and poor in America must not continue to widen and that corporations will not be allowed to purchase our political system.   

Occupy Wall Street has shifted the national conversation sharply for the better.  But its future depends on our poise.  We must reach beyond the fashionista impulse to outrage the uncool and instead recruit and educate a larger movement.  That means coalition politics.  (See Rustin, Bayard.  See also Wellstone, Paul.) 

As a historian of American social movements, I assure you that the national security state is infiltrating the movement and attempting to strengthen its fringe and isolate its influence.  Agents provocateurs or local hotheads—it does not matter much which is which—will  always advocate extremist adventures.  They will berate more thoughtful activists as “Uncle Toms” or the timid bourgeoisie.  If this spirit of ginned-up recklessness prevails, fueled by infiltrators, Occupy’s political vision will descend into a fun-house mirror in which moral authority passes by default to the craziest sumbitch in the room. (See Panthers, Black.  See also Underground, Weather.) 

Instead, we must invoke the ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu: "Do not do what you would most like to do.  Do what your opponent would least like you to do."  Those desperate to avoid a public conversation about the power of corporate money will relish seeing the Occupy movement tied to mob seizures of property.    

It is time for Chapel Hill, whether we are Occupied or merely residential, to say who does and does not represent our community: this includes the Car-Lot Seizure Cooperative, our officially not-responsible mayor, and whatever mallet-head passed out the assault rifles.  Hand over the bullet, Barney.

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Timothy Tyson is the author of several books including Blood Done Signed My Name and Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williamsand the Roots of Black Power.