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Sunday, November 27, 2011

BooMan on Race, Progressive Politics, and the "Occupy Disconnect"

A thought experiment. If the federal government forgave all student loan debt above ten thousand dollars and then demanded the refinancing of all underwater mortgages at their present diminished values at a reasonable fixed rate on terms affordable by most of these homeowners, do you really believe that the Occupy Movement would not declare victory and go home?

Like postwar kids pampered into the expectation that they would be The Future's princes of the world and who suddenly found themselves drafted to fight an evil irrational war in Southeast Asia, their own children who grew up in the dreadful delusive Reagan era have woken up to find his lies about "Morning in America" all dried up as well, and while the military-industrial complex and neoliberal plutocracy are indeed evils that demand righteous confrontation it is easy to mistake the scene of such a confrontation for a deeper and more clearheaded thing than it really is, when the confrontation is driven by a situated distress as personal as it is progressive.

There are calls to prosecute financial fraudsters, to introduce financial transaction taxes, to make tax rates steeply more progressive, to break up banks that are too big to fail and hence too big to exist coming out of the Occupy movement, and I do think these get at deeper more structural evils of neoliberal capitalism. But there are also voices just as prominent calling for the total transformation of society to "consensus based" processes of public decision making, which is more or less a call from a different 1% all too eager in my view to marginalize Occupy into yet another Burning Man. Sometimes I think people actually forget that the Situationists FAILED in 1968, even if they made a joyful noise and that isn't nothing.

But, to return to the thought experiment with which I started: While I certainly do think student debt amnesty and serious mortgage cramdown would be very welcome, it is striking to me that the capitalism that would remain intact in the aftermath of these stunning progressive victories would remain profoundly and perniciously stratified by racial inequity and violence as American capitalism always has been. If I am right to believe the implementation of these policies (which, sensible though I think they would be, I don't actually expect to be implemented any more than most of the other sensible things I've mentioned, certainly not while Republicans control both Houses of Congress, one by holding a majority and the other by requiring supermajorities to get anything accomplished, not that such matters ever find their way into much of the discourse of the Occupiers) would indeed cause the Occupy Movement to evaporate in a roseate glow of satisfaction, it suggests that Occupy symptomizes most of all the distress of the shrinking white working middle class at the realization that neoliberal capitalism isn't working for them, as it has never worked nor even pretended to care to work for millions upon millions of others to much of that white working middle class's longstanding indifference.

There are even more obvious ways that such stratifications are playing out in Occupy, as when young white activists righteously court arrest, a prospect that means something profoundly different to, say, an African-American male all too accustomed to the random humiliation of racial profiling, serial rituals of stop and frisk, tales and experiences of police brutality, and awareness of surreally high rates of incarceration in underserved overcrowded Boschean Hells in a for-profit prison industrial complex swelled by a multigenerational racist War on (some) Drugs.

It is with that context in mind that I recommend to your attention, this recent provocation by BooMan:
58% of the Progressive Caucus is non-white. If progressives represent the leftward border of the Democratic Party, why then… [do] African Americans, who are 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, make up only 1.6 percent of Occupy Wall Street[?] One… [has] to occasionally remind people in the blogosphere, who are also overwhelmingly white progressives, that the bigger half of the progressive movement is non-white and that this non-white bigger half has distinctly different opinions about the president, the party, and the state of American politics. This is why the blogosphere periodically convinces itself that the president is losing his base of support only to discover that polling data doesn't back it up… Blacks are accustomed to glacial progress. They're familiar with cutting shitty deals that move the ball a few inches down the field. They've never been under the misimpression that the cards aren't stacked against them. They are no strangers to high unemployment, job insecurity, or grinding undeserved poverty. If there is one defining difference between how the black and brown progressives have reacted to the president and how white progressives have reacted, it has been that black and brown progressives had much more realistic expectations. I think a lot of blacks look at the white people protesting income disparity and think to themselves, "when did you notice?" People might expect blacks to leap into the fray, relieved that they have new allies. But the lack of solidarity whites showed them in the boom times helps explain the lack of solidarity now. “Occupy Wall Street was started by whites and is about their concern with their plight,” Nathalie Thandiwe, a radio host and producer for WBAI in New York, said in an interview. “Now that capitalism isn’t working for ‘everybody,’ some are protesting.” New Jersey comedian John “Alter Negro” Minus says he won’t participate in the Occupy protests because black people are being besieged by so many social injustices, he can’t get behind targeting just the 1 percent... [I]t's not like black people have been historically shy about protesting for their rights. By and large, they're not motivated by this fight. I can't say that I fully understand why they're not motivated by it, but I can say that it indicates some massive flaw in the movement. A real progressive movement would encompass the entirety (and certainly the sizable majority) of the progressive spectrum. Some will blame the black community and say that they are just being protective of the president. But I think they're showing a shrewder political understanding and more maturity. The pace of progress may be agonizingly slow, but that's the same as it ever was... if you've been really paying attention. It's not a shock or a disappointment if you've been the one waiting the whole time.
Of course, BooMan's provocative comments are full of overgeneralizations -- people of color and concerns about race and poverty and police violence are conspicuous and indispensable to Occupy here in Oakland, for example -- but rather than make easy recourse to that objection to dismiss the thrust of his critique I think we would all do well to dwell for a moment in his larger point.

I do want, by way of conclusion, to re-iterate that I am and have remained throughout these months a happy celebrant of Occupy (more so than BooMan has been, to be fair). I was enthusiastically blogging Occupy even before it began, when it was just a call to Occupy, and then in its first smallish weekend, and all along since then. Here I am, literally thanking Occupy on Thanksgiving Day, okay? Occupy has diverted Establishment discourse into more actually real concerns and actually progressive frames -- and this is painfully long overdue and nothing to sneeze at. It is an incubator of effective new activist tactics, it is a space of indispensable network-building and progressive education. Also, of course it is true that there are more ways than just one to do activism or to contribute one's measure to human progress toward equity-in-diversity.

The point of critique -- as I am forever telling my students in critical theory courses -- is not through criticism to provide an easy excuse to dismiss and so fail to be touched by a testament or program or proposal, but to take us deeper into that fraught worldly situation out of which the testament or program or proposal emerged the better to connect to it in our own, different, also partial, also imperfect, also fraught, situation. Occupy claims to speak for the 99%. In many ways it does just that, and with a power and a promise like nothing else in the world. But there are also ways in which it fails to speak for the 99%, symptomizes stratifications it would do better to address -- in itself and in the world. The point of BooMan's critique is not to dismiss Occupy but to understand it and to enrich its address, at least that's how it looks to me.

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