White Privilege and the OWS Student Occupation

There’s really no good place to begin with a critique of this sort, so I’ll just begin by laying my cards on the table. The current student occupation at 90 5th Avenue, a two-story New School building (pictured here to the right) which houses our Study Center and several university offices, began a little over two days ago on Nov 17th during the Citywide Walkout and Student Strike. I’m a New School student who supports the idea of using space occupations like this as a political tactic for social change. I was heavily involved in the last round of campus actions and occupations in 2008-2009, although I was not inside 65 5th Ave. during the second militarized raid and crackdown in April of 2009 under former President Bob Kerrey. I’ve been in the space part-time every day since it was occupied, helping with some media and outreach efforts, but I haven’t spent the night as others have been doing, or as I did last time around. [For those of you against identity politics, you can skip to the 99% part…] I’m also a part of the University Student Senate, as well as some university committees and other political bodies. I’m also a white, male bodied, 30-something, gender non-conforming, anti-authoritarian PhD student and teacher raised with a middle class protestant background in Appalachian Ohio. That is where I stand and speak from. My personal 99%.

What I’ve seen in the last two days in the space at 90 5th Avenue is deeply troubling on multiple fronts, for reasons both personal and political. First, there is the problem of messaging, both internally and externally. Secondly, there is the problem of political vanguarding, or what I see as a sort of posturing by the New School young Marxo-Hegelian and their ilk in defining the political vibe of the space. Finally, there are the covert and overt forms of white privilege and various other forms of oppression and denial all sitting there in plain sight yet still totally ignored.

Messaging

Most of the banners or signs hanging in the windows facing 14th and 5th Ave contain slogans of marginal political value to our movement, and say even less about who we are or what we are doing in the space. The sign above reads–“The Zuccotti Virus has Spread”–but what exactly that is supposed to mean, I have no idea? And neither do most New Yorkers who walk past. If anything, a phrase like that calls up memories of the recent raid on Zuccotti for “sanitation reasons.” Hardly a powerful or clever political message, if you ask me. And then there’s my personal favorite, the handwritten sign I saw this morning which read something to the effect of: “Tim Hearin Supports This Occupation.” I know Tim. We occupied 65 5th together in 2008 and sat through a Resistance class with Tim Pachirat here at the New School. I had us read about anarchist direct action movements. I’m not positive, but I think Tim had us read Hammered by the Irish, a book about the Pitstop Ploughshares and a political action that destroyed US Navy aircraft and did millions in damage in the lead up to the 2003 military invasion and occupation of Iraq. Or maybe it was Peter Gelderloos’s How Nonviolence Protects the State. Or maybe it was Negroes with Guns by Robert Williams. I don’t remember anymore. The point is, it’s great Tim supports this occupation, and it would be great if he was here with us, but is that our political message? Right now, it appears it is.

Then there’s the mess inside. I don’t want to call it vandalism, since I’m not really a defender of private property, and calling it graffiti would be an insult to the amazing grafers in this city, so I’ll just call it what it is: the writing on the wall. And there’s a lot of it. And a lot of it is extremely problematic. From the huge 4 foot “KILL ALL COPS” to the much smaller “#83: terror” and “#100: still more RPG’s”, just a few examples from a long list running into the hundreds of things people want. One entire part of the space is now covered in hundreds of similarly pointless political postures, and a few random freestyle drawings. There is a nice hand someone drew just below the KILL ALL COPS, but any aesthetic value that was there is now lost, at least for me, in the jumble of slogans.

Political Vanguarding

The second issue is more problematic than just the messaging problem, because it reflects a larger political atmosphere that is being set in the space by a group of people with questionable political commitments. I call them the young Marxo-Hegelians. You could probably also call them the Abolish All Time and Space propagandists, or the Occupy Everything Negationists. Or the Hipster Black Bloc. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that their political views, analysis and party lines are defining the overall tone of the space from everything I can see, which has been confirmed in numerous conversations I’ve had with people spending more time there than me and seeing the same things. This involves a fetishizing of occupations and militant rhetoric. It’s the “Zuccotti Virus” and giant eyeballs and Marxist proletarian terror. They are violently hostile to cops and the media, and wary of outsiders, especially those outside the self-selected movement.

They’re also the people who claim to be occupying 90 5th and making it an open space that people can come in and hang out and talk or study or hold meetings or listen to talks. The talks that just started have been good, and the discussion today with Olivier Besancenot from France was powerful and exactly what this space should be doing. But it’s also pushing out New School students who have a real need for space to study and work on group projects. I spent the better part of an hour talking with a group of New School students who have been using this space regularly–“occupying” it for the past 6 weeks as one woman said, one of the Milano students, and now that the space has been “occupied” they are having a hard time using it for a study space. They also had reserved some of the enclosed study rooms for group projects for this coming week, but now don’t know if they will be able to use the rooms, as they have been taken over for meetings of the OWS folks, as well as sleeping rooms and a make-shift health clinic/first aid room. They are also extremely worried about the writing on the wall, and the overall atmosphere of the space, which was described as very unfriendly and not very welcoming. As another woman said, these occupiers are guests here, but all they seem to be interested in is trashing the place and driving us out. This is about the 4th time I have heard some version of this complaint, and the occupation is barely 2 days old. That’s a problem.

They all support the occupation and what is going on, or at least they have been so far. I talked with this group of students as they waited patiently–for nearly an hour–for the 5pm Occupation General Assembly to start so they could raise these concerns to the group. Once the meeting finally started, getting this concern onto the agenda was an uphill battle, as even setting the agenda became a torturous process of point of process, point of information, direct response, clarification and side arguments that ultimately led to the issue being given 15 minutes of time after 25 minutes of bickering over how to address it, in what order, etc. By this time some of the students had already left, and after what was a very exasperating discussion, the women who had raised this concern left having no resolution or commitments from the group. When I finally made it to stack, I proposed two actions to try and address her and other concerns I have been hearing.

1. Guarantee the set of conference rooms along the hallway at the top of the stairs be set aside for studying.

2. Move the welcome table back from the escalators so that the people who work in the OSDA/HEOP office can go to work, as well as making the space feels less militarized and hostile.

The first motion was voted down, and the second one blocked, and never came up for any kind of vote at all.

Here’s why this is problematic. OSDA, which does all of the student event and group planning from their corner office on the second floor, supports students. Why would we shut down the only office in the university that actually works with and for students? And how does doing this help students? The other group that has an office in that corner space is the Higher Education Opportunity Program or HEOP. Their program supports economically and educationally disadvantaged students in New York by providing access to a college education through a joint state–private university partnership, of which Eugene Lang and Parsons (both New School divisions) are participating members. HEOP is already one of the most ignored and marginalized parts of The New School community precisely because they advocate for working class students and students of color. Keisha Davenport-Ramirez, who runs the office and also acts as the university Ombudsperson, who I have worked with through the Social Justice Committee, does amazing work with the limited space and budget that she has. That space also serves as a place where students in the HEOP program can get help, tutoring and other academic support that they need.

By occupying the space and closing down both offices, we are displacing important student resources in the name of supporting students, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. But the message is clear. If you’re down with the occupation, you will find a way to study–although let’s be honest, you do not get much work done in an occupation, especially one this large and in flux. But that’s the current myth of the space. So what were the reasons given for why these proposals were voted down?

1. This is an occupation. We are disrupting people’s daily routine. That’s a good thing, deal with it. If you can’t study here, the President opened up other spaces on campus, go study there. People already study here, so why can’t you too. We’re against the reproduction of commodified intellectual labor. Etc.

2. We can’t move the barricades because then the cops can get in. The one time we did move them security came up and walked around and saw everything in the space. We can’t let that happen again, so we have to keep the barricade where they are. It’s a security issue. Block. End of discussion.

It’s clear that the first set of arguments are largely false. People aren’t, and largely can’t, study in the space as is claimed. We’re actually not disrupting the university operations in the slightest, or stopping any commodification of labor, except perhaps to shut down student support services. At best we’ve given some maintenance or security guards some extra overtime shifts and something to talk about on smoke breaks and shift changes. The President is happy to have us there PRECISELY because we are NOT disrupting the normal operations of the university!!! It’s business as usual in 66 w 12th.

In terms of security, let’s be real. So what if the security walks around? The stated reason for why we don’t want them in there is because then they would walk around and see the place. Ok, so what exactly don’t we want them to see? The graffiti on the walls? The political handouts on tables? The food and coffee table? The occupied film theatre? The trash and recycling stations full of beer and plastic drinking cups? The compost? What are we doing that we are so afraid of the public seeing? And as to the tables as police barricades–really guys–tactical 101 classes are in order. Two flimsy tables at the top of the stairs are not going to keep the NYPD out, period. If that’s all we have for a tactic to stop the cops, then we might as well just occupy the escalator with our bodies, it would be far more effective. So I don’t buy the table as barricade=security line either. They’re all just political covers. Which brings me to the real heart of this critique, unacknowledged white privilege.

White Privilege

Sitting today in the Occupied General Assembly I looked around and could count the number of students of color on two hands. Maybe even on one if we removed the international students that I know were in there and part of that mental count I did. And this is in a group of 100 or so people at the height of the Assembly. The handful of New School students of color that I had been talking with earlier left frustrated while trying to raise their concerns. Let’s rewind 24 hours. The day before, on the 18th, a group of students who go by the name of the “Friday Group,” sponsored a 2.5 hour discussion about racism, white privilege and inequality at the New School and within the larger OWS movement. It was not in the occupied space. Only a handful of students from the occupation were there.

The lead-up to this event, which involved an equally painful demonstration of white privilege and elitism by members of the Student Senate in trying to block the event from happening with the USS name on it–(The discussion idea had originally been pitched as a collaboration between the USS’s Dinner and Discussion events and the Friday Group’s ongoing concerns about racism on campus and possible collaborations with the People’s Institute and their Undoing Racism courses.)–but the USS withdrew its support in the last minute over “funding concerns” and whether we had “approved” the event as planned. It’s a much longer story I won’t get into here, but needless to say, even having the Friday meeting was a battle in itself.  I ended up opposing the political decisions of several of my fellow Senators and calling people out on their white privilege. That didn’t go over too well. But the point is, it’s telling that this discussion did not happen in the occupied space, but rather in a building in Milano, precisely because many of the students of color at this university feel an open hostility from the university and many of our white faculty, students and administration. White privilege–which for those not familiar with the term–is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want with whoever you want without having to think about it. It’s prejudice+access+power. Tim Wise, who has written and organized around white anti-racist politics for years, offers a useful definition that I like to use:

White privilege refers to any advantage, opportunity, benefit, head start, or general protection from negative societal mistreatment, which persons deemed white will typically enjoy, but which others will generally not enjoy. These benefits can be material (such as greater opportunity in the labor market, or greater net worth, due to a history in which whites had the ability to accumulate wealth to a greater extent than persons of color), social (such as presumptions of competence, creditworthiness, law-abidingness, intelligence, etc.) or psychological (such as not having to worry about triggering negative stereotypes, rarely having to feel out of place, not having to worry about racial profiling, etc.). (FAQ)

The issues of race and class are rife within OWS, but we’re still not doing a very good job of dealing with them openly or honestly. One example of how to do it right happened in a clip with Melissa Harris-Perry and Tim Wise from an Oct 21. Rachel Maddow show on the Stop and Frisk laws and the intersection of race and class in the OWS movement.

The fact that a discussion about how students were not feeling welcome in the space, were intimidated to be in the space, or felt offended by actions and comments in the space–and that these same students raising these concerns are mostly students of color–while the ones making the bulk of the decisions and participating in the 90 5th occupation are white–especially white males–is not accidental. It’s called white privilege. And the fact that that there are very few white anti-racist activists in that space speaks volumes to the total lack of awareness of white privilege and an absence of a critical race or intersectionality lens. As one of the participants in the racism discussion said about his first visit to the occupation, when you’re first interaction with the occupy space is a barricade and white students asking a person of color if they’re a cop or press, something is deeply and fundamentally wrong with the movement.

After a 2.5 hour discussion about these issues a large group of us, perhaps 20 or so, all walked over together to the occupied space to check it out again, as a number of the students in the meeting had not been to the space yet. Needless to stay, they didn’t stay very long. And why should they? What that space primarily offers is unquestioned white privilege and radical political posturing. If you’re looking for people to build a real anti-racist, multiracial coalition for social and economic justice with, the occupied student space at the New School is short on allies.

I left Saturday evening with a bad taste in my mouth. And as much as I agree with some of my friends that we should stay and fight for these issues in the space, to be honest, I’m not sure it’s worth it? People have to first want to raise their own consciousness and challenge their positionality and privilege. I’m not convinced that a lot of white radicals in that space are willing to do that work. I’ll give the space one last try, and after that, I’m putting my energy into organizing with others on campus who really want to see change, not just talk about it all night long. I’m committed to this movement and this work, but I also have to pick my battles.