Why Occupy Wall Street Matters to Me and How It Can Continue to Matter

January 9th, 2012 by Guest Contributor

4) Capitalism has always relied on racism to exist: If this is a movement about confronting capitalism and creating alternatives to it, which is my understanding of Occupy, then we also need to understand that capitalism relies on racism to perpetrate and reproduce itself; that it has always relied on a racialized division of labor and that we cannot tackle either without taking on both. The capitalist class has historically used racism to divide the working class, so if we are going to survive, we have to work hard, right now, to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us. When racism is thought about in this way, it is everyone’s problem. Everyone is affected by it, not just people of color. I am talking about both interpersonal racism as well as structural racism. In order to be strong, grow and survive, we need to be able to address both these levels of experience and analysis. We need to be both anti-oppressive as well as organize with a racial justice framework, and both must be done simultaneously in order to move forward.

The movement I am a part of still inspires me all the time. It inspires me for a range of reasons: because hundreds of people show up and stand in the freezing cold for the General Assembly like they did this past week; because I still have some of the most inspiring and exciting conversations with my friends from OWS; because on New Year’s Eve we re-assembled in Liberty Plaza and danced and hugged and chanted: “Whose year? Our year!”; because we are re-occupying homes in East New York; and because I think we do have the potential to create real change in this country. I am excited for the future of this movement and our communities and I agree with Choi that oppression should always be intolerable, but I also believe that in order to create the spaces that we want to see, we have to work for them. This is constant work, this is work that I do in my personal life and my political life, and I have found true allies within OWS who take on this work with me.

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Posted in activism, asian-american, privilege | 4 comments

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  • Adccake

    Wonderful piece. Thank you.

  • Pingback: Still Occupying « A Gaming Girl's Take on Life

  • Tnicholes16

    I cant agree with this more.  Balance is key.  The answer is rarely heavily weighted on one end.

  • ChicityQPOC

    I gotta disagree with you here jason.  Things that are seen as “middle of the road” were actually ridiculously right wing not too long ago and only through a serious onslaught by the right have they been re-branded as “pragmatic” or “middle of the road”.  As People of Color we have a long history of opposing capitalism & its off bread imperialism.  A system that relies on a permanent lower class can never be just to any oppressed person.  There is no “excess” that needs controlling, the entire system needs to be scrapped for a just model.