Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was at kind of a crossroads last fall where I was actually starting to plan to leave New York. I had been here for ten years. I came here to go to school. I’m a video editor. At that time, I was doing commercials and advertising. I hated it. I was visiting the Bay Area in October and hadn’t really engaged with Occupy yet. While I was there, I saw San Francisco, Berkley and Oakland all start forming their own occupations. I was at my friend’s apartment waiting for her to get home, and I saw things on my Twitter feed about the Times Square action and started watching one of the livestreams. As soon as I turned it on, clashes were starting between the cops and the protestors, and the occupiers started chanting, “Overworked and underpaid. We’re doing this for you.” Something clicked. I was like, “huh, there’s something interesting here.” A few days later, once back in New York, I went to a general assembly and just fell in love with it. I went to the general assemblies every day for a couple weeks. My first GA was October 18th, and almost exactly a month later, I stopped working. A month after that, I gave up my apartment, and I’ve been doing this full-time since.
It’s important because a big word a lot of us are trying to focus on is intersectionality. We started on Wall Street, and we see the way that Wall Street’s tentacles are in everything. Then, you look bigger, and you see that Wall Street is just a face of capitalism. This image that I saw recently is of a tree where capitalism is a trunk. The roots are patriarchy, racism, sexism, ableism. The leaves and the fruits are basically every negative thing you can think of – foreclosures, the prison industrial complex, the police, all these things that come from this corrupt, oppressive system. Occupy is important because it’s trying to address these things at that root level. You can’t just pick out all of the flowers because the roots of it are deep. That’s one of the reasons why Occupy hasn't and can’t really make any demands because anything tangible that we can go for that labor unions go for or even the Civil Rights Movement went for, like constitutional structural changes, is still empowering the system to make those changes.
Occupy is taking the stance, at least in my view, that it’s the system that’s the problem, and you can’t address the system without addressing institutional racism and centuries of sexism. Any one step that we would try to address would just be replaced by something else if we don’t replace the roots of it. We see how people’s lives every day are affected by an oppressive system that makes money and benefits off of their suffering. I don’t want people to suffer. I want people to have the same access and privileges that I've been granted as a white male, just because I was born this way. It’s trying to even the playing field.I’d like a world based on equity. There’s a saying, “To each according to their need; from each according to their ability.” In a system of equality, the pie is just cut into equal pieces and doesn't acknowledge the fact that everyone comes to the table with different histories. I come to the table with white-skinned privilege and male-presenting privilege, which means that my piece is larger, and my needs are much smaller. Someone coming to the table that’s queer-identified, a person of color, female-presenting, has years in their own life, not to mention generations before them, that put them at a disadvantage. Any structures that we create, any society or community that we live in needs to acknowledge those things honestly and make adjustments for it. That’s why a system and a community based on equity, I think is the end goal. That’s something that Occupy has the potential to do. Obviously, there were many things wrong with Liberty Square, but we had the potential to create a community based on equity, based on mutual aid, and not based on privileges or based on generalizations. That’s what I’d like to see us continue to focus on, mutual aid and human interests.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
It’s important because a big word a lot of us are trying to focus on is intersectionality. We started on Wall Street, and we see the way that Wall Street’s tentacles are in everything. Then, you look bigger, and you see that Wall Street is just a face of capitalism. This image that I saw recently is of a tree where capitalism is a trunk. The roots are patriarchy, racism, sexism, ableism. The leaves and the fruits are basically every negative thing you can think of – foreclosures, the prison industrial complex, the police, all these things that come from this corrupt, oppressive system. Occupy is important because it’s trying to address these things at that root level. You can’t just pick out all of the flowers because the roots of it are deep. That’s one of the reasons why Occupy hasn't and can’t really make any demands because anything tangible that we can go for that labor unions go for or even the Civil Rights Movement went for, like constitutional structural changes, is still empowering the system to make those changes.
Occupy is taking the stance, at least in my view, that it’s the system that’s the problem, and you can’t address the system without addressing institutional racism and centuries of sexism. Any one step that we would try to address would just be replaced by something else if we don’t replace the roots of it. We see how people’s lives every day are affected by an oppressive system that makes money and benefits off of their suffering. I don’t want people to suffer. I want people to have the same access and privileges that I've been granted as a white male, just because I was born this way. It’s trying to even the playing field.I’d like a world based on equity. There’s a saying, “To each according to their need; from each according to their ability.” In a system of equality, the pie is just cut into equal pieces and doesn't acknowledge the fact that everyone comes to the table with different histories. I come to the table with white-skinned privilege and male-presenting privilege, which means that my piece is larger, and my needs are much smaller. Someone coming to the table that’s queer-identified, a person of color, female-presenting, has years in their own life, not to mention generations before them, that put them at a disadvantage. Any structures that we create, any society or community that we live in needs to acknowledge those things honestly and make adjustments for it. That’s why a system and a community based on equity, I think is the end goal. That’s something that Occupy has the potential to do. Obviously, there were many things wrong with Liberty Square, but we had the potential to create a community based on equity, based on mutual aid, and not based on privileges or based on generalizations. That’s what I’d like to see us continue to focus on, mutual aid and human interests.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/