Unity With Whom in the 99%?

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism for Dimwits and Divine Right

Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

Just what does it mean to join in solidarity with the 99% whose Occupy movement is upper-middle class and heterosexual white male centered?

A prison guard who makes $50,000/year or more plus health and dental benefits, a pension and paid vacation may not be part of that 1% on Wall Street, but can he really stand in solidarity with poor black males with NO jobs (let alone good-paying union ones) who have a 1 in 4 chance of becoming fodder for the prison-industrial complex that provides middle class jobs for men (not many women) at the expense of poor racial minorities and women?

Being poor and non-white significantly increases your chance for ending up wrongly convicted and slapped with the death penalty. How much solidarity should those most at risk for ending up strapped to an execution gurney feel with those whose middle class paychecks and benefits require participation in the carrying out of capital punishment?

And who else is in this 99% that many might have difficulty feeling solidarity with? Gary Leon Ridgeway (“the Green River Killer”) was not, by any definition, part of the wealthy 1%. Neither was Larry Singleton, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Robert “Willie” Pickton. These serial rapists and psycho killers who hailed from the 99% preyed on society’s “throw-away” women — poor, marginalized vulnerable women of all races at the very bottom of the 99% that no one ever really cared about, not even other men in the 99% who now want us to stand with them in “unity.” Asking poor and vulnerable women to feel solidarity with social predators of any stripe is like asking Jewish Holocaust survivors to feel solidarity with the Nazi guards who were “just doing their jobs” at those death camps.

Would any sane person really argue that Nazi bureaucrats and guards were “just as oppressed” as the millions of genocide victims whom they first dehumanized, socially and economically excluded, and then herded into sealed ghettoes from which they were marched at gunpoint onto the death trains bound for the death camps that were the size of small cities?

What about rapists and child molesters that are part of this 99%? Do we really want to sit in solidarity with them and hold hands and sing Koom-Bye-Ya? Their violation of women’s and children’s human rights has nothing to do with the economic abuses committed by the 1%, but everything to do with patriarchy and the culture of rape: Rape of women and children, rape of the earth, rape of everything — all excused and justified by “divine right.”

And what about middle class employees of utility monopolies who previously rationalized the enormous suffering they inflicted on the poorest of the poor at the very bottom of the 99% who weren’t lucky enough to have a good-paying job to afford their rent, food, utilities, clothing, and medical and dental care and access to an advanced education? Where was all this unity when poor women and children and poor seniors and the disabled were either left to freeze to death or die in fires caused by unsafe space heaters because middle class utility company workers — who had their good jobs, their food, their nice homes, and their winter heat — shut off utilities on the poor, leaving them to die because there really wasn’t “all this help out there”?

Sylvia Young, a destitute 29 year-old single mother in Detroit with seven children to support on her own with no opportunity and no middle class job, lost everything except the clothes on her back in March of 2010 when her gas got shut off by DTE Energy during a deadly cold snap. She had to scramble trying to make do with old space heaters — one of which started the fire that ended up claiming the lives of three of her seven children. Less than two hours before the fire started, the utility worker who shut off Young’s gas spoke with her face-to face. He saw the infant she held in her arms. He saw her other children. He saw the squalor and poverty that she and her children were condemned to live in. Poor women across racial lines never got a chance for anything in this “land of opportunity” where the haves and have-nots are divided along the lines of gender and/or race.

And what was this middle class man’s response to the pleas of Sylvia Young and countless other marginalized and poor women like her when she begged him not to shut off the gas and leave her and her children to freeze to death? His answer was, “Sorry, but I have to do my job.”

How nice for him that he had his good-paying job enabling him to afford plenty of good food to eat, medical and dental care, and a nice warm home! Two hours after he “did his job” of shutting off Sylvia Young’s gas, a raging fire broke out. She lost what little bit of nothing that she had. Three of her children burned to death. The worst was yet to come when Michigan’s Democrat judges and middle class social workers from the child welfare authorities took Sylvia Young’s remaining children away from her and criminalized her for being a poor woman. Where was all this middle and working class “solidarity” with the poor then? I don’t recall seeing much middle class support and sympathy for the poorest of the poor in my lifetime as a marginal woman who struggled all of my life to climb up from total destitution up to poverty, never having access to health and dental care outside of the emergency room, and never getting a chance to make it to even the lowest rung of the lower-middle class.

As of December 2010, there were approximately 10 million US households from the bottom of the 99% that were without at least one life-sustaining utility; poor households whose utilities were shut off due to extreme poverty. Long before now, 80% of those below poverty either couldn’t get enough help to make it or they got turned away and sent home empty-handed altogether. But no one ever talked about those of us at the very bottom of the 99% who were turned away from all those charities and social service agencies; denied adequate help, denied hope, and denied a fair fighting chance of ever being able to escape dire poverty in America (which had been denied by everybody else for a long, long time until Hurricane Katrina opened the world’s eyes).

The truth is that nobody ever cared about us. The middle classes dismissed us and claimed we had it made compared to the poor in the slums of Mumbai; that we should “shut up and stop whining.” Now they want to talk about “unity” and how we’re all part of this 99% and trot us out as the mascot for their movement — which is really only about getting a better deal for their middle class selves within the capitalist paradigm while nothing gets better for those of us at the very bottom.

My personal past experiences with cross-class social justice coalitions is that the poor always lose out every time. The only outcome that those of us in extreme poverty can count on is being thrown under the bus for the sake of “political compromise” while we’re chastised by our middle class “saviors” for not being “pragmatic” enough. I’m not interested in more of the same, thank you.

Approximately half a million dollars was donated to Occupy Wall Street protesters alone. It went to pay for supporting a movement that is dominated by middle class white males under age 40. How many truly poor and destitute Americans could that support have helped instead of going for the publicized building of a middle class ‘Skid Row’ just to make a political statement by pretending to be destitute and homeless after the real poor and homeless have been shoved out of mind and out of sight for as long as I can remember? The middle class was all too happy these past 30 years to push for laws that criminalized the truly homeless and destitute by voting for lawmakers and leaders who slashed what little miserly help there was for America’s poor prior to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

As a deeply impoverished woman over age 40 who has been unemployed since 2004 with no real hope of ever getting re-employed due to age and gender discrimination that has always been pervasive even in better job markets, I’m not getting the help I need to be able to make it — I suffer from long-term deprivation of basic human needs that are not being met: medical and dental care, nutritious food, adequate clothing, basic utilities, and adequate housing that isn’t substandard. I can’t afford reliable transportation (a necessity when one lives in a semi-rural area). I have no income other than a meager food stamp benefit. I can’t get Medicaid because I’m not a parent or a low-income senior citizen. And until the middle class found itself under the barrel of capitalism’s Hotchkiss guns, they were very eager and willing footsoldiers who lubed the gears in the bureaucratic machine that runs the world on behalf of the super rich by sacrificing the poor.

Funny how middle class people can always find tons of money to push their class interests to the front of the line, using those of us at the very bottom as their disposable poster child to further their own agenda at our expense while they never have any money and support to give directly to someone in poverty and really lift someone up out of utter destitution and despair. And this is what they call “unity” and “solidarity” with those of us who can’t afford the luxury of being able to travel to a protest, camp out, and get our voices heard because we can’t even afford to live?

I don’t find much solidarity with upper-middle class college kids, well-heeled union leaders and professional “activists” living large off of honorariums and donations who talk about the unearned wealth of those with trillions of dollars while they exert their own privileges to step on those of us who suffer the oppression of sexism and legitimized misogyny and/or racism and/or colonialism for whom the issues transcend the economic injustices of capitalism. Yet, when marginalized people suffering from the redistributive injustices of more than one oppressor try to speak out, we get accused of being divisive. We get silenced. Our concerns are excluded from the social justice agenda, and we get accused of engaging in “oppression Olympics.”

Oppression Olympics is a term used to describe the dynamics of two or more groups competing to prove themselves more oppressed than the other. It’s a silencing tactic. It’s a way of invalidating others’ viewpoints by trying to place them lower down on a scale of significance. But the reality is that many people experience oppression daily in their lives from multiple fronts, and they’re not always comparable. To dismiss that by saying “we’re all in the same boat” ignores that oppression and even legitimizes it as part of the “sacrifice” some of us are expected to make for the benefit of those who ignore their own privileges and begin to exert them against us — in the name of “unity.”

When comfortably off union workers and wealthy union bosses in Ohio recently launched a political campaign by preaching unity among the middle class, the working class, and the poor, they were eager to get voter support for their Democrat candidates enabled through unity. But once their boys got in, that unity with the poorest of the poor went up in smoke — they protected their middle class wages and health benefits through Obamacare at the expense of eliminating access to medical care for the poorest of the poor — 84% whom are women, according to US Census data, human rights reports, and US Department of Health & Human Services records. The middle classes once again protected their own economic turf at the expense of the poor whom they threw under the bus — after benefiting from our solidarity with them.

We’re told that all of the 99% is equally oppressed by the 1%. Sorry, but no. No, we are not “all oppressed equally.” We are not “all in the same boat.” And openly acknowledging that is not being “divisive” or promoting “identity politics” — it’s simply telling the truth.

And it is not only many of us from poverty that are mistrustful of this Occupy movement, the Haudenosaunee also don’t seem to be supportive of it either. And mostly for very similar reasons: they were ill-used for others’ gain at their expense one time too many.  As Jessica Yee pointed out,

“Colonialism also leads to capitalism, globalization, and industrialization. How can we truly end capitalism without ending colonialism? How does doing things in the name of “America” which was created by the imposition of hierarchies of class, race, ability, gender, and sexuality help that?”

[Read the rest of her article here: http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wall-street-the-game-of-colonialism-and-further-nationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/ ]

In every war since Britain and France colonized North America — the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, etc. — the Haudenosaunee fought to help the British and later, both the Americans (the Iroquois helped the North win the Civil War) and the Canadians in two devastating world wars resulting from imperialism. All they ever got for it was short-shifted. They got kicked out of the newly independent colonies after the end of the American Revolution (even though much of that land was their home) and offered a tiny tract as payment by the British Crown for their service in the American Revolution. But that land was already part of their traditional hunting territories anyway, and that land was held in trust, thus reducing the Iroquois (and other Aboriginals) to the status of diminished sovereigns. The Haudenosaunee lost lots of people in battle, fighting other people’s wars — rich, inbred foreign crowned heads’ wars — none of which were to their benefit.

As Rastia‘ta‘non:ha, a Seneca historian for the Iroquois Confederacy, says:

“Have we not been drawn into enough of their battles in the past, and look where it got us? This movement is bad for all Indigenous people, and none of us should be involved with it on any level.”

I have to agree with both Rastia‘ta‘non:ha and Jessica Yee. The original North Americans did not invite this trouble into their lives, just like they did not cause the “War on Terror” that they bear the consequence for with enormous border-crossing difficulties that neutered the Jay Treaty and put a “Berlin Wall” through the middle of their traditional territories.

I think this movement is also bad for the poorest non-Natives at the bottom of the 99% who are being used as pawns and tools for the preservation of unearned middle class white male privilege. Social justice solutions won’t be found within the non-reformable capitalist paradigm. The system of unearned privileges is the sine qua non of capitalism and its handmaiden, colonialism. If women and the poorest of the poor non-Indigenous are to be anyone’s ally, we should be allies with the original North Americans whose country this really is — not with a middle class white male centered 99% Occupy movement.

Solidarity for the Few

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right

This movement struck me as being centered on young middle class white males, and they’re not welcoming or receptive of older people — including older people who have a lifetime’s worth of experience and battle scars from fighting the oppression created by unearned privilege. And according to Reena Walker, a seasoned older black woman and veteran activist, male privilege and how it is used by men in the 99% to beat women down and oppress us is ignored or rationalized by a busload of mansplaining. As a black woman who suffered a lifetime of poverty, sexism, racism and misogyny, Ms. Walker is hardly one of the 1% and yet the way she and other women are being treated at OWS sends the message that women (who make up 51% of the 99%) aren’t viewed as being human enough for harm against us to matter. Funny how freedom and economic justice is only for a few which usually does not include women. Some 99%ers are more equal than others.

It is no accident that women comprise over 70% of those living below poverty worldwide. The status quo of local and global capitalism depends on women’s unpaid/under-paid work. It could not survive without women’s unpaid work as primary caregivers, the childbearers, and the child-raisers. Capitalism is patriarchal to the core. The poorest of the world’s poor are women who also do upwards of two-thirds of the world’s work and own only 1% of the means of production and reproduction. Women hold up half the sky on our unpaid/under-paid backs.

Despite all of the claims by Occupy facilitators that rapes are not occurring at the Occupy Toronto camp at St. James Park, a few men from the Aboriginal community who are staying in the camp full time say otherwise. One of those men, identifying himself only as “Davine”, who is half Blackfoot and half Arab, said that the camp’s marshals have not been able to minimize or prevent sexual assaults on the women there and that “these [white] people are coming to us Natives for help.” What is really tragic in all this is that one of those Natives — Jayson Fleury — is a real opportunistic shmuck and sociopathic grifter who has ripped off poor and marginal women to support his lifestyle of partying across Canada 3-4 times a year. And he is one of a tiny handful of men who is willing to protect the women from rape. How sad is that?

What is supposed to be a movement about unity of the masses against the 1% is really looking more like the same ol’ same ol’: freedom and economic justice and a bigger slice of the pie for men; rape, invalidation, exploitation, abuse, oppression and discrimination against the poorest and most downtrodden victims of capitalism — poor women of ALL races. Somehow, I don’t find that very unifying, uplifting, or liberating as a poor and marginal woman.

And please don’t tell me that women’s human rights — including the right to a job with dignity, the right to an education, the right to food, housing, and healthcare, and the right to reproductive/sexual enfranchisement and bodily autonomy/self-determination, and most important of all, the right to NOT be raped and impregnated against our will at peril to our health, well-being, liberty, and lives — is less important that “the big picture” of those traditionally privileged members of the 99% getting their justice at poor and destitute women’s expense in the name of “social justice.” Sorry, but I’m not down with that.

As a woman from deep poverty who suffered more under capitalism than poor men due to institutionalized sexism, misogyny, and the social acceptance of patriarchy and its culture of rape, I have no interest in “taking one for the team” for the sake of the 99% movement (which is looking more like a Rapists’ Rights bowel movement) just so men can get a bigger slice of the economic pie while nothing changes for the better for women, especially poor and marginal women of all races.

Since colonization of North America, women in the US and Canada have been told to wait until after the men got all the more important issues resolved and then we women would eventually get our turn. But our turn never came — at least not for those of us in extreme poverty that never got to make it to even the lowest rung of the middle class. But then this Occupy movement has never been about us, has it?

A glaring example is the Occupy Vancouver list of demands included a call for the legalization of prostitution. Prostitution is rich white male-centered. It exists because capitalism is patriarchal and there’s a direct link between that and human trafficking and rape. Also at the crux of it is the larger societal view of women as non-persons, as cheap commodities that exist solely for male self-gratification.  These issues cannot be bifurcated.

Desperation, poverty, abuse, addiction, job and pay discrimination, lack of opportunities and a need to pay the rent and feed the kids, a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, and a misogynistic culture that devalues women and reduces us to disposable products to be bought and sold — all act in synergy to create a society where prostitution and sex trafficking exists and flourishes with men being the prime beneficiaries of it while women are further victimized.

What kind of social justice movement seeking to rectify the injustices of capitalism and the inclusion of women in the name of solidarity is this, anyway?

Why is the response to the rapes, the abuse, the exploitation, the trauma and the deaths that many poor and marginal women suffer as a result of being prostituted to simply treat this as “just another job”? What other job demands that the worker be raped, impregnated against their will, infected with an STD, violated, abused, and maybe even murdered? What kind of person supports that this sort of treatment should be legitimized? What kind of person seeking solidarity with women — especially poor and marginal women — would agree that women’s bodies should just be another disposable commodity available for purchase by men and that every woman should be OK with that?

Women need to be safe, but how safe are women when we’re not even viewed as full human beings? Yes, prostituted women deserve rights. But they also deserve to have real choices. Why would anyone think that johns will provide equitable treatment and respect for women? No man who thinks he has the right to trade in human flesh or take a woman against her will is a man who believes in real equality. A man who can do this is a man who doesn’t see women as being human enough for harm against us to matter. We should not have to accept and legalize exploitation and oppression from men in order to decriminalize the women being prostituted in the name of “unity.”

Legalized prostitution neatly sweeps under the wraps the insidious human rights catastrophe of the global human/sex trafficking industry. Women ensnared in that are literally forced into brutal sex slavery; bought and sold, beaten and raped over and over and over. Approximately 80% of those trafficked are women and girls. The average age of a trafficking victim is 14. The average life span once trafficked is 4 years. The victims usually die from HIV/AIDS related complications after being forced (often violently) to give unprotected sex to their male purchasers. Legalizing and sugar-coating the exploitation of women does not protect our human rights. It undermines them.

A genuine unity and people’s movement doesn’t consider women’s suffering irrelevant, or as a trivial “special interest”, or as titillating grist. Nor does it function as a microcosm of this capitalist economy with men competing for all the power, wealth, and status at the top while women serve as mere cheerleaders and poster children only to be trotted out for the convenience and benefit of male privilege.

Women deserve safety and decriminalized from doing what they have to do in order to survive, but women also deserve to have real options. As 51% of the population, women should be 51% represented in all mainstream jobs, instead of being herded into pink collar-ghettos, and the sub-poverty glass ceiling of Wal-Mart with the exploitative sex industry as the only other option available for poor women for whom college and grad school is as out of reach as a day trip to Sedna while male high school drop-outs and ex-felons get all the good-paying blue-collar union jobs in the skilled trades and all of the opportunities and hope for a better life that goes with that at the expense of women’s exclusion.

Women make up more than half of the 99%. Where is our liberation from male oppression and domination through rape, “honor killing”, FGM, hiring and pay discrimination, sexual and reproductive slavery, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence which are the all too common realities of women’s lives every day?  These are the realities that are disproportionally inflicted on poor and marginal women by men in the 99%. Yet these are all dismissed as “special interest issues” that are accepted as part of “the price of being born female”, which is why anti-oppression is needed.  And that is why a movement of unity for real social and economic change must be willing to accept constructive criticism and not get offended when male privilege is challenged.

What is uplifting, unifying, or liberating about Occupy camp facilitators designating untrained peers as “marshals” to serve as the “sexual assault response team” to deal with the rapes — not by offering rape kits that include emergency contraception and STD testing/treatment, and the arrest/removal of the rapist, but by counseling (read: pressuring) the women who’ve been raped against going to the police? (Not that the criminal justice system has ever been any panacea for women, especially rape victims — police, lawyers, and judges are products of the same patriarchal, misogynist, fetid capitalist sepulcher that has always oppressed and abused women through unearned male privilege at women’s expense. )

I have no interest in being ill-used and thrown under the bus for the sake of “solidarity” with fauxgressives just so that men can get justice while nothing changes for the better for poor women of all races.

If destitute and marginal women of all races are at these camps, it is because this shit is real for us. We have been the most oppressed, the most excluded, the most downtrodden, and the most harmed by the inherent injustices of capitalism which is inherently a gender war. Chronically poor and marginal women don’t have the safety nets that young working class and middle class white males have: the freedom from potentially life-threatening unwanted pregnancy, or the privilege of a job and/or families with resources to return to at the end of all this.