maya's (l)inklings

There it is. Right there. For anyone who ever doubted, for those who continue to doubt that women’s liberation and the fight for socio-economic justice are part of the same struggle against complicity and complacency. Dare to speak your mind? Dare to make trouble? Dare to wear a short skirt, a hoodie, a bandana, a placard, an ingenious costume in the shape of a tent? Well then, you deserve to be hurt and humiliated. You deserve to be frightened and bullied and beaten. Sit down, shut up. Get a job and work till you drop like the rest of us, and if you can’t get a job then get on your belly and beg like the rest of us. You deserve it. You asked for it, by daring to make your desires known, by showing your anger, showing your heart, showing your skin. Be quiet and do as you are fucking told. Bitch. Scrounger. Benefit scum. Hippy. Whore.

The most dangerous thing in the world for the one per cent is desire. Unsanctioned desire, desire for things that we can’t be made to buy, things like power and sex and and social justice, is always dangerous when it can’t be controlled. The only possible solution is to punish the desire and blame the victims for inviting that punishment.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

This is the power of “We are the 99%.” That includes Joseph Stiglitz and Kyp from TV on the Radio and me and the CWA workers with their Verizon Greed sign and the girl who flew over here from Spain after being in the square with the indignados and the Filipino-Americans who marched in with BAYAN USA and Troy Davis and the homeless man who comes in for a warm meal and some friends.

Do you own a politician? No? Then join the occupation.

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I’m going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it. It felt worth it to sit down on the on a street corner in the Financial District at 11:30 pm on a Thursday night, after working all day long and argue for the changing of the first line of Occupy Wall Street’s official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. It felt worth it not only because we got the line changed but also because while standing in a circle of 20, mostly white men, and explaining racism in front of them: carefully and slowly spelling out that I as a women of color experience the world way differently than the author of the Declaration, a white man, that this was not about him being personally racist but about relations of power, that he needed to, he urgently needed to listen and believe me about this, this moment felt like a victory for the movement on its own.

And this is the other thing. It was hard, and it was fucked up that we had to fight for it in the way we did but we did fight for it and we won. The line was changed, they listened, we sat down and re-wrote it and it has been published with our re-write. And when we walked away, I felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed a movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see– one that takes into account historical and current inequalities, oppressions, racisms, relations of power, one that doesn’t just recreate liberal white privilege but confronts it head on. And if I have to fight to make that happen I will. As long as my people are there standing next to me while I do that.