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So last night I wandered down to Occupy Wall Street for the second time. I’d visited the night before, and been impressed — impressed by the richness of the space, impressed by the process and enthusiasm of the general assembly. I wasn’t (and I’m still not) sure what it all adds up to, but I found it invigorating and compelling. So I went back.
I spent some time strolling around, talking to people and checking out what was happening. I ate some free food. I sat in on a workshop on building democratic structures in progressive organizations. I compared notes with a couple of friends who were there.
And then the general assembly got started. The evening GA is a decision-making meeting, but it’s also a place where lots of announcements get made — OWS has a lot of working groups on issues ranging from first aid to legal support to action planning, and the GA is where they all check in. I’d sat through all those announcements the previous night, and been mostly fascinated, but it was less compelling the second time through and the pavement was cold and hard, so after a while I figured I’d stretch my legs a bit and circle back in time for the meat of the meeting.
So I took a stroll through the neighborhood, and wound up at a deli that was open and had comfortable seating in the front. I bought a beer for a couple of bucks and sat down to check my email and read a few pages of the book I’d brought.
There was a young woman at the register, paying for a soda and chatting with the counter guy about the Occupy Wall Street protests — she worked in the neighborhood and was on her way to check them out for the first time. I didn’t catch much of what she said, but when the counter guy made a comment about Eisenhower, I listened … and tweeted:
@studentactivism: Counterman at a deli 3 blocks from #OccupyWallStreet just quoted Ike’s warning on the military industrial complex.
“And Eisenhower was a general.” I remember the guy saying. “A general.”
A few minutes later I tweeted this:
@studentactivism: “The government has become the puppet of the big corporations.” -The same deli guy. #OccupyWallStreet
And this:
@studentactivism: #OccupyWallStreet. It’s not just for dirty hippies anymore.
And this:
@studentactivism: “Ordinary folks are getting dicked.” -Same deli guy #OccupyWallStreet
I was tweeting all this, by the way, not because it struck me as strange, but because it struck me as so ordinary — while at the same time so at odds with dominant narratives of the Occupy Wall Street protests. (And not just those in the big media, those in the look-down-your-nose left, too.) New York City is a left-liberal city. It’s a city that went for Obama over McCain by an 85-15 margin. It’s a city whose majority white districts went for Obama 2-to-1. It’s a city where what passes for reactionary is Staten Island, where Obama took 47% of the vote. To hear this middle-aged white guy saying this stuff didn’t surprise me at all.
But I kept listening.
@studentactivism: “I buy you a beer today, you buy me a beer tomorrow. That’s the only way it’s gonna work.” -The OTHER deli guy #OccupyWallStreet
The other guy behind the counter was younger, and black. The woman who’d started the conversation had long since moved on, but a couple of regulars had taken up positions with their own beers at a table in front and the discussion was rolling on.
@studentactivism: Now the black deli guy is holding forth on the need for cross-racial class solidarity. #OccupyWallStreet #NotJoking
I wish I’d transcribed more of this, but by the time I thought to try to write down what I hadn’t tweeted, most of it was gone. I do remember him saying “some guys are all ‘The niggers! The spics!’ But niggers contribute to the economy too. Faggots too.”
He repeated the bit about faggots for emphasis, looking around, kind of hoping that someone would say something he could correct. But by now the four of them were all enthusiastically agreeing to everything, egging each other on.
@studentactivism: Black deli guy: “Everybody said ‘Obama’s gonna get shot.’ Nah. He plays the game.” #OccupyWallStreet
This was, I think, in response to the white deli guy saying that no American president in half a century had ever taken the interests of ordinary people seriously.
I’d bought a second beer at some point along the way, but by now it was kicked. As I was about to head out, I piped up for the first time. “You guys are killing me,” I said. The white counter guy grinned. ” I thought the meeting was up there,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of the plaza.
@studentactivism: Me: “I thought the meeting was up there.” Deli guy: “We’ve been saying this for 30 years.” #OccupyWallStreet
We talked for a few minutes more. None of the four of them had been up to the protest, it sounded like, at least not to do more than walk by and check it out on the fly, so I shared some of my impressions. We did the enthusiastically-agreeing-with-each-other bonding thing for a few minutes. We all agreed that the protest was a lovely development. Then one of the guys sitting at the front table said “But what’s their plan?”
I said I’d gotten the impression that people there had a lot of different ideas about what needed to be done, and that I wasn’t sure they were all going to agree on an agenda for change anytime soon. Then I said that I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.
I said it seemed like pretty much everyone there basically agreed on certain basic principles — that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness. People differed on how to address that problem, I said, but they all pretty much agreed about what the problem was, that it needed to be tackled, and that it wasn’t really being tackled now.
I was struck by the “what’s their plan” question in a few ways. First because it was the first even vaguely critical comment about OWS I’d heard in the whole discussion — for half an hour these guys had been been talking about and around the protests, and everything they’d said was emphatically positive. Second because it wasn’t asked in a spirit of attack but a spirit of curiosity, and maybe gentle prodding — a central premise of the conversation I’d snooped on was that there’s no obvious fix for what’s gone wrong. For many on the chattering left “what’s their plan” is the rhetorical leadup to a dismissal, as if it’s the job of five hundred strangers in a park to come up with a concrete step-by-step proposal for reforming (or overthrowing) global capitalism. But here it wasn’t that. Here it was a real question: “What can be done?”
If Occupy Wall Street is as marginal as its liberal-left critics assume, then no answer to the guy at the table’s question would make any sense at all. Five hundred strangers in a park will never themselves be the engines of any profound societal transformation. But if what I saw last night is real, if OWS is offering a critique that resonates in content — if not necessarily in form — with a broader and more eclectic swath of the country, then maybe those five hundred strangers are pounding on a door that’s a bit less well-armored than it looks.
Maybe what they have to offer isn’t a plan so much as an opportunity to have a bigger conversation, or even just an invitation to continue and expand a conversation that’s been going on in small ways in small places for a long time.
And that’s a conversation I’m really eager to see continue.
Last week six UC Berkeley students went on trial on charges stemming from a March occupation of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Unlike the Irvine 11, their fate was decided by a judge, not a jury. And unlike the Irvine 11, they were found not guilty.
The acquittals of these six students, however, were followed just two days later by the arrests of two more, at the campus’s “Day 1″ protests marking the start of the fall semester throughout the UC system.
Police say that protesters on September 22 threw chairs, bottles, and chunks of concrete at cops, and that members of the group used oversized book-cover props as shields and offensive weapons. But one officer’s claim that “we respect people’s right to protest, but we ask that they do it safely and peacefully” rings hollow in light of UC’s recent history with nonviolent protest.
As I noted earlier this week, hundreds of student activists have been arrested on UC campuses in the last two years, many in situations in which no protester violence was even alleged. (In the most egregious case, sixty-six students were woken from their sleep and arrested in the unlocked building they were peacefully and non-disruptively occupying, just hours before that occupation’s scheduled end.) One student journalist was not only put through the wringer of the campus judicial system — in an incident I’ll be writing about tomorrow — but forced to pay court costs when a legal challenge to the university’s procedures failed.
Berkeley, and the UC system generally, have systematically criminalized nonviolent confrontational protest over the course of the last two years. The result has been a wave of questionable arrests and prosecutions, a ratcheting up of student tactics, and a dramatic increase in police violence. With students chaining themselves together on high ledges and police officers pointing guns at angry crowds, the whole situation is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Something’s got to give.
UC Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans plan to host a bake sale on campus this morning as a commentary on affirmative action policies under consideration in the state legislature. (The idea is to critique affirmative action by offering food for sale to some groups for less than others.)
The “affirmative action bake sale” is a bit of a relic in conservative organizing — it had its heyday in the early 2000s. But it always provokes, and Berkeley is no exception. Some of the institutional reactions, however, have been fascinating.
Sunday, a group calling itself the Multicultural Coalition for Affirmative Action released a list of demands in response to the planned sale, calling on the Berkeley administration to — among other things — add clear anti-discrimination statements to the university’s Principles of Community, and to add those principles to the Berkeley code of student conduct.
On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”
And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”
Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)
I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgenau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.
As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.
That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.
Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.
That’s what’s under discussion. That’s what’s at stake.
Update | Zunguzungu has provided a report from the scene in comments, and there’s a lot more info to be had at the Twitter hashtag #theaffirmation. All in all, it sounds like student supporters of affirmative action responded cogently and soberly to the bake sale. And it’s worth noting that a list of demands released today by “The Coalition,” an anti-bakesale group, pretty much ignores the bake sale, and the College Republicans, altogether.
The coalition demand the passage and implementation of California’s Senate Bill 185, which would allow race and ethnicity to be taken into consideration in UC admissions, and Assembly Bill 540, which addresses admissions and tuition issues for undocumented students. They demand new funding and staffing for support services for students of color at Berkeley. They demand a restructuring of the school’s American culture course requirement to center scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender, and the inclusion of the university’s “Principles of Community” on course syllabi. They demand representation of underrepresented campus communities in admissions hiring.
Each of these demands is addressed to the functioning of the University of California as an institution. None of them have the College Republicans or those who share their views as their target. Crucially absent from the list are demands that appeared in a draft version that appeared on Friday, calling on the university to bolster its code of conduct with new restrictions on bigoted student behavior.
As I said above, Berkeley’s chancellor Birgenau is seeking to frame this conflict as a dispute between students over standards of civility. Berkeley’s campus activists have rejected that framing, and are properly centering the government and the university itself in their response.
Ten Muslim students from the University of California were found guilty of misdemeanor charges Friday after a 2010 incident in which they disrupted and delayed a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States on the UC Irvine campus. The students, who could have faced jail time, were sentenced to probation and community service.
The university had previously suspended the Irvine Muslim Student Union in connection with the incident, and many observers — including Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Irvine law school — criticized the decision to bring criminal charges.
I agree with those who are dismayed by the verdict. The interruptions of Ambassador Oren were brief and non-violent, the students didn’t resist ejection, and the ambassador was eventually able to give his speech in full. Clearly the students were disruptive, but they did not have the intent nor the effect of preventing Oren from speaking.
As a person who speaks on campuses with some regularity, I’d certainly be appalled if such an incident ever led to criminal charges against someone who was critical of anything I had to say — the idea that the disruption of a campus speaker would leave a student with a criminal record, and relying on the forbearance of a judge to avoid jail time, is astonishing.
But as I told the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the most important thing to underscore here is that this prosecution stands as part of a larger recent pattern of criminalization of non-violent student protest throughout California, and in the UC system in particular.
Again and again over the last few years, university officials in California have directed law enforcement to end protests by arresting students, including in circumstances in which those protests were neither violent nor substantially interfering with the functioning of the university. In many cases those arrests led (as here) to overreaching prosecutions, while in others the arrests themselves had a disruptive effect on legitimate protest.
It’s the university’s prerogative to set limits on student protest (subject to their First Amendment obligations to permit free speech and assembly), but those powers should be used with restraint and discretion. When the university finds itself deploying mass arrests of non-violent student protesters as a matter of course, as the University of California has in the last several years, something is seriously out of whack.
By contributing to the criminalization low-level non-violent protest as they have, UC administrators, police, and prosecutors have cowed some student activists while radicalizing others. They’ve fostered a charged, tense atmosphere in which students have chained themselves together on the high ledge of a Berkeley campus building and in which a UC San Francisco police officer pulled a gun on a group of protesters, all within the last twelve months.
The Irvine 11 were among some 250 California student activists arrested during the course of protests during the 2009-2010 academic year. That’s a mind-boggling number, and evidence that student-administration relations have gone profoundly off the rails.
Last night a group of at least fifty Greek student activists stormed the studios of their country’s state television network, taking over the room where the evening news was broadcasting live.
The students were leaders in a national wave of student protest that is sweeping Greece in opposition to fiscal austerity measures and proposals to privatize higher education in the country. Student protest has also been swelled by the recent repeal of Greece’s academic asylum law, which until last month barred police from setting foot onto the nation’s campuses.
Network officials pulled the broadcast from the air abruptly, switching over to a travel documentary after a short break, but home viewers were able to tell that something was happening in the studio before the feed went dark.
The students demanded airtime to read a statement on the current student protests in Greece, a demand that was rejected. But after several hours of negotiations the network agreed to allow the group to record a statement for broadcast later that evening. The statement was shown on the network at midnight and the students left the station without incident (Google translation).
In December 2008 a group of Greek student activists succeeded in unfurling a protest banner on live television during a news broadcast after police shot and killed a fifteen-year-old protester.
