#OWS: The “99%” is more fractured than we would care to admit

(crossposted at ABLC)

I couldn’t go to #OccupyMobile. I wanted to, very much, but I was in the hospital. While everyone was taking over parks, setting up tents and camping out in protest of income inequality, I was nearly wasted away in constant pain in a sanitized bed in a room where everything smelled sterile, drowned in antiseptic. Were I able to attend, anyway, it wouldn’t have been for very long – I am in a wheelchair and camping out in a park, getting out of my chair, sleeping on the ground in a cold and dirty tent, even if I could have gone I couldn’t have stayed – I couldn’t have been a part of this. The privilege of being able to forgo thinking about your health, where you might find a place to sleep or even some flat ground to wheel across is a privilege to which I’ve never had access. From the outset I was stuck “participating” in the movement – since I do believe in a lot of its underlying goals – by going online and reading or writing about it.

For a movement that rests on visibility at parks or other open areas, this isn’t much of a way to participate and to feel welcomed.

It’s bigger than ableism, though.

How many black Occupiers have there been? Not too many. We have a so-called justice system in this country that was formulated at the same time our forebears were beginning to dabble in slavery. This system has for centuries worked to arrest and detain blacks and keep them in prison throughout much of their lives. Three strikes laws and the “War on Drugs” have made it necessary for black people to consider every thing they do very carefully so that they don’t upset the ugly institutions the country was built upon and end up in jail one too many times, or under the batons of some angry white cops; even in so-called liberal cities police violence has always been rampant and extensive. Racial violence and fears run deep.

This necessitates many potential Occupiers who care about issues of income inequality staying home, away from violence and arrests. An arrest of a black person does not have the same consequences that an arrest of a white person has, and that is a problem that deserves wider attention if we are ever going to discuss real equality in this country. So many Occupiers were so happy to be arrested, so proud of ‘taking on the system’ because getting arrested isn’t as bad for a majority of Americans. I wish people could see how that is not taking on any system at all, but is instead exercising a level of privilege to make a smaller point on a vague issue that is divorced from other issues and should not be.

How can we discuss “income inequality” but not racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia or transphobia?

A friend of mine once argued with someone about issues facing people who are both black and gay, and he was told that “gay trumps race any day.” It sometimes feels that this type of thinking goes on in this country, and that it’s going on in OWS, even as they are trying to fight some of the problems facing both gay and black people, and those who live in both of those worlds. It feels like people think “class trumps race/gender/homophobia/biphobia/transphobia.” It doesn’t. It’s impossible to take on those things one-by-one, just separating each out in a clean and accessible way.

There is a depth to the problems in this country that many are missing – and this is happening among our liberal and progressive friends.

In a lot of ways we are not “the 99%,” because we are the 12% of blacks, the 72% of whites, the 16% of latino/as. We’re the 1.7% of gays 18 years old or older.

We’re separated by bigger institutional issues that have been around for centuries, since at least the 1600s. And we are not discussing them. They’re not seen as a part of the Occupy movement, only a separate issue to be worked out once there is “income equality'” and people have jobs and the economy is great again.

There is no mention of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or the fact that in 34 states, people are being fired-at-will because of their gender identity. In 29 states, people can legally be fired for their sexual orientation. What about jobs for them? What about their “income inequality”? There is no mention of any way at all to prevent joblessness and income inequality for our community.

It is the same for disabled people even with laws that are designed to prevent employment discrimination: they just come up with new and different ways to not hire us or to fire us for not having the ability to be in two places at once or to do a lot of tasks that involve standing. This shows that these issues are far bigger than laws or biases but are part of a bigger institutional system of injustice aimed at keeping people white and heterosexual and cisgender.

Women continue to make less money than men.

And what about police violence, or crime measures? The 0ccupiers are getting arrested and seeing police violence and getting a taste of the life of an average black person – or at least the daily fears that this life may become something that they deal with at any given moment – and the occupiers are still not discussing ways to end anti-black police violence, or violence in general.

When I started reading the reports of the violence against transgender occupiers, that’s when I knew that the thinking behind this movement might not be as spot-on as some say that it is.

A problem with building a real “99%” movement – one of the biggest problems – is that we all have so many personal biases. We all engage in stereotypical thinking and I include myself in this on purpose – I may be gay and disabled, but living in Alabama, whiteness is so “important” that it makes me privileged, regardless of the other parts of me. The face-to-face, personal racism/homophobia/transphobia that we are dealing with can be staggering. It’s incredibly difficult to get people to confront issues like anti-black police violence or criminal injustices when so many whites just don’t like black people.

We saw it with Proposition 8 in California.

That was blamed on the black community with such rapidity that it immediately brings to mind the fact that we are all a fractured society. We were “trying to build a movement” then, too, to fight homophobic laws. The fact that we in the LGBT community would not just blame that on a single minority with one distinctive feature – and I’m not getting into whether “race” is even a real thing in this piece because it is getting long enough already – but that we would “go there” so quickly really frightened me from almost the moment it happened.

Those of us who know that blaming race is not an accurate story are still fighting against the myth even today, in 2011.

That is but one example of the bigotry of every community, the unconscious, or even sometimes conscious, biases we all deal with that prevent us all from truly coming together and really being “the 99%” Until we do that, and until we fight “income inequality” alongside some of the bigger issues that are institutional, we won’t have justice or equality. We can be the 99%, but we are not there yet.