Elephant Graveyard

The day after New Years, I took a trip down memory lane to engage in what was one of my favorite activities during my undergraduate days at Princeton: digging through trash on the streets of New York with the members of freegan.info.*  My ostensible reason for going was that I’ve been playing with the idea of revisiting some of my research on freeganism for publication; in truth, though, I wanted to remind myself, personally, why I find freeganism not just a relevant topic of study but a captivating mode of political praxis.

I’ve always insisted that you can’t really understand dumpster diving without having actually done it.  I could, of course, cite statistics about how half of America’s food production is wasted, but—in a mental environment saturated with graphs and pie charts and poll numbers—the magnitude of the waste is impossible to understand until you’ve seen it.  As we approached our first stop of the night, one freegan remarked, “Oh my god, this is going to be outrageous”, and it was.  The sidewalk was an utter mess: some divers had clearly gotten there before us.  But there were still hundreds of pounds of food: boxes and boxes of unexpired vegan burgers, mounds of fresh strawberries and asparagus, and trays of muffins and cookies covered in plastic wrap.

New York has no shortage of activist groups espousing similar values of radical ecology and anti-capitalism as freegan.info, so it is—in a sense—puzzling that night after night, their events continue to draw a diverse range of people and reporters from around the world.  It wasn’t until this trip back, though, that I started to realize why freeganism is not just sociologically interesting, but also deeply resonant.  In part, my new insights are thanks to Occupy Wall Street, and the realization that the latter movement has been able to do something that has rarely been done publically in the last twenty years: challenge the morality of capitalism.

And why is it that we have spent so little time in recent decades debating whether the world’s dominant economic system is just?  The answer is simple: because anytime you raise such questions, the response will be “You may be right, but socialism just didn’t work.”  Of course, many people do believe that capitalism is a morally just system, but since the fall of the Soviet Union, they haven’t had to offer much explanation for their position.  There is no need to discuss the morality of capitalism, because there is no alternative: without the magic of free markets and the invisible hand, we are told, any economic system will collapse under the weight of its own inefficiency, incompetence, and yes, wastefulness.

But as we see on the streets of New York, night after night, this technical, a-political justification for capitalism rests on a monumental lie—on locked dumpsters hidden in back alleys and on trash bags quickly whisked away to distant landfills.  On a freegan trash tour, neo-classical economics falls apart before your very eyes: supply doesn’t equal demand.  The much-vaunted efficient allocation of resources that the market is supposed to provide simply doesn’t hold water in a society that throws away 96 billion pounds of food a year.  Freeganism may not offer a clear alternative, but it does reveal the inner workings of the present system in a tangible way.  “Why don’t the stores donate the food to the hungry?”, new freegans always ask.  The answer is simple: donations don’t contribute to the one thing capitalism is exceptionally good at creating—profit.

Ramblings about the logic and justification of capitalism are, of course, very abstract ideas.  But the garbage we encounter is undeniably real, and—even after well over one-hundred trash tours with the group—seeing it is an emotional experience.  There’s an element of freeganism that is about confronting capitalism; but there’s another side to it: an attempt to dignify that to which our society attaches no value.  Everything we consume represents a fragment of someone’s life: the embodiment of someone’s labor that went into producing it.  When we throw things in the trash without using them, we are not just wasting natural resources, then, but also lives.  And as the thirty-or-so packages of hamburgers we found at our first stop testified, it’s not just human lives that are being squandered.

On that night’s dive, we quickly realized there was far more food than the trash tour attendees could possibly take home.  In the end, we just piled up the food we found.  I asked one of my friends why we were even bothering to take stock of what was there, when we would have to put it back in the trash anyway, and she responded “It’s like an elephant graveyard.  Right now, we’re just here mourning the food.”  Eventually, though, we had to move on.  We were hoping to hit up five more grocery stores, and we knew there would be plenty to mourn there too.

“I Don’t Actually Hate Bankers” and Other Thoughts on the Open Letter (Part 1)

With all the time I spend reading Marx with other graduate students and talking revolution with other activists, I occasionally forget that my world is largely populated by people who don’t share my particular line of leftist politics.  I’ve been reminded of the political diversity of my friends during conversations about the open letter which a group of alumni wrote in support of Occupy Princeton.  Caveats within the letter’s message that were clear in my activist brain are, understandably, not obvious to others.

I’ve written this post to respond to some criticisms—both voiced and unvoiced—that could be and have been made about the form of the open letter, in the hopes that it will allow us to talk more about its substance: the question of the appropriate role of finance on campus and Princeton’s response to growing economic inequlity.*

“Investment bankers are not bad people; why are you attacking them?”  Princeton graduates working in finance—like Princeton graduates who go on to do more school, become fellows at Teach for America, or work in other industries—are not good or bad people; they’re just people.  I know that Princetonians go into finance for all sorts of reasons: some like the challenge, others the money, and still others because they see the industry as playing a valuable role in our society.  I have friends who work in finance, and I certainly don’t think I’m “better” than them: after all, reading social theory in graduate school isn’t exactly saving the world either.  But institutions matter, and there is now ample evidence that the milieu of Wall Street has created cultures of excessive risk-taking and hyper-competitiveness which have proven themselves to be harmful both to society and the people taking part in them.  

“What Occupy Princeton did was really rude!” As Michael Lewis pointed out in his recent column on Occupy Princeton, an easy way to ignore the substance of a message is to criticize the way it is delivered.  I have some misgivings about the way Occupy groups are using “Mic Checks” to shut down events, but let’s keep some perspective: we live in a society where millions of dollars from anonymous donors can be poured into nasty attack ads and protesters are being beaten, gassed, and shot while peaceably assembling.  The fact that Occupy Princeton’s three minute interruption in a recruiting event might have made some people uncomfortable is not a good reason to ignore it.  Princeton students ought to be made of sterner stuff.

“Wouldn’t it have been better to hold a debate about finance?”  No, it wouldn’t have.  In my time at Princeton, I helped organize a number of debates and lectures on vegetarianism, nearly all of which were poorly attended.  Why?  Because people generally don’t seek out situations where they’re going to be told they’re doing something wrong.  Certainly, I doubt that stressed Princeton seniors would be interested in hearing about how they should not take jobs in one of the few industries still hiring.  But sometimes people do need to be shown the implications of their decisions, and at times the only way to do so is through confrontation.

“Why kick J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs off campus? Shouldn’t we be trying to engage with them more constructively?”  Bankers are well aware that most Americans loathe their industry (although banks are still slightly more popular than Congress and Fidel Castro).  Rather than make a public case for the value of finance, though, institutions like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have used backdoor influence to thwart overwhelmingly popular efforts at financial regulation.  When Occupy Wall Street started, these same institutions engaged in ad hominem attacks on protesters—deriding them as unwashed, lazy hippies—rather than countering the substance of the protesters’ message.  Given the unwillingness of these institutions to even entertain the idea that they need to reform, the best course of action is to challenge their bottom line—by pinching their top source of employees—and force them to get serious about their obligations to society.

“But Princeton students have a right to work where they want!”  We throw around “rights” too much.  In my time at Princeton, I was told that people have a “right” to eat meat every day of the week, a “right” to have a tray (not just a plate!) in the dining hall, and a “right” to make six figures straight after graduation.  But what if I say I have a “right” to go to a school that does not offend my values by reinforcing income inequality?  Throwing around the “r” word not only cheapens real rights—think, free speech or due process—but also shuts down the possibility of debate or compromise.  All of us have rights, but we also have responsibilities: our conversation should be about what duties we have as Princeton graduates entering a world in which we are incredibly privileged and, as a result, poised to do much more than just make money.

“It’s not Princeton’s job to tell students what they should do after graduation.”  Princeton offers its students a world-class education, which—even for students paying full tuition—is largely funded by others.  In exchange, it imposes certain obligations on members of the community to behave in certain ways and to fulfill certain requirements.  There would therefore be nothing drastic or new about telling grossly misbehaving financial companies to take recruiting off campus; it’d simply be an extension of existing standards that Princeton has about who gets access and support from Princeton.  This isn’t about where graduates are “allowed” to work, but which organizations and institutions get to receive Princeton’s institutional blessing.

“You’re not going to change anything, so why are you wasting your time?”  As I’ve written over and over again on this blog, cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Our conviction that things are unchangeable is a big part of what prevents change from happening, since it provides easy cover for those of us who don’t want to act even when we know we should.  Princeton obviously does change, albeit slowly.  I was recently contacted by an alumnus who mentioned how, in the 1980s, people demanding that the university divest from apartheid were derided as wasting their time on a fool’s errand.  History proved them wrong.  Princeton can either join a national movement to rethink the place of finance in society—or it can, once again, be a laggard, and make Harvard look positively dynamic by comparison.

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* I speak only for myself here, not for the 70+ other individuals who have signed the letter.  Have you yet?  Send me an e-mail!

What does democracy look like, anyway?

Call: “Show me what democracy looks like.”

Response: “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!”

If you’ve been to a protest—really, almost any protest, but especially an Occupy Wall Street protest—you’ve heard this chant.  No movement should be judged by its chants: “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” may not capture a lot of nuance, but “Bring back the Glass-Steagall prohibition on the same financial institution both issuing securities and accepting deposits” just lacks pizzazz.  Still, I’ve always found the notion that a bunch of people in the street shouting is even remotely close to what democracy looks like to be problematic.  If anything, protest is the unfortunate but necessary responses to malfunctioning democracy—not democracy itself.

That said, Occupy Wall Street is teaching us some important lessons about democracy—it just isn’t doing it in the streets.  Indeed, I think even people unsympathetic to OWS’s particular message could benefit from reflecting on what the movement can teach us about the practice of democracy:

• Democracy is slow.  We tend to judge political systems by the outcomes they produce: do they reach good decisions, and do they do so efficiently?  Judged by this metric, OWS performs only slightly better than Congress: general assemblies are time-consuming, messy, and not very productive affairs.  But democracy really isn’t just about outcomes; it is also about creating a process that meaningfully incorporates diverse values, opinions, and experiences.  Participation in these processes should be celebrated as an end in and of itself.  But doing this takes time.  True democracy will require the acceptance that politics demands more from us that a quick trip to the polls every two years, but constant—and at times, tedious—engagement with the community around us.

• Democracy requires listening.  As embodied in the First Amendment, the right to speak out is, to most of us, a prerequisite for democracy.  In a sense, our means to exercise this right have expanded dramatically: we can now blast our opinions across the internet through twitter and comment trolling or even “speak out” through campaign donations.  What seems to have been lost is the recognition that expression has value for democracy only when someone else is willing to listen.  It is precisely for this reason that I love the much-maligned “People’s Mic” of OWS.  Repeating the words of another is not a form of brainwashing: it’s a way of slowing down communication, giving us time to consider and internalize other people’s opinions.

• Democracy involves more than just “governing”.  Within Occupy encampments, the business of everyday life becomes a collective concern.  Even in the marches and protests in which I have participated, basic decisions about which way to turn at an intersection involve a debate followed by a vote.  Occupy recognizes that nearly all of the decisions we take as individuals have impacts on others, and that therefore these decisions should be considered as part of a broader democratic process.  This is different from saying that “government” should be extended into spheres of our lives where it isn’t already; instead, it’s about building respect for the needs of others into our quotidian thinking and personal actions.

• Democracy requires that losers cooperate.  As became incredibly clear after Obama’s election in 2008, our political system has devolved to the point where the losing party no longer accepts the winner’s electoral mandate, but instead uses every procedural and substantive power to block them.  Occupy Wall Street would seem to take this obstructionism to the extreme by allowing a small number of individuals to “block” a proposal backed by the majority.  In practice, though, consensus decision-making works because many individuals realize that while they may disapprove of a course of action, they’re willing to defer to those who are going through with an action anyway.  Blocks are rarely used because the goal of the process is not to find perfect harmony, but precisely the kind of accommodation that our erstwhile politicians appear incapable of achieving.

Are Occupy Wall Street’s mass general assemblies, autonomous working groups, and arcane procedures of consensus decision-making a model for society as a whole?  Maybe not: my experiences in the last few months make me think that each of these would be a deeply flawed blueprint for a democratic society.  But the collective puzzling-out of what would be a truly democratic system requires, on a deeper level, that each of us build democratic values into our interactions, thoughts, and speech.  If it achieves nothing else, #OWS may at the very least create a generation that can figure out what democracy should look like after all.

Even Princeton

It so happens that the very night Occupy Princeton mic checked J.P. Morgan, I myself was talking about Princeton—or, more specifically, avoiding talking about Princeton.  A cohort-mate introduced me to one of her friends, and she asked me where I went to school before Berkeley.  As per usual, I mumbled something about Central New Jersey.and attempted to change the subject.  My friend wasn’t having it, though: “He went to Princeton”, she said.

My secret out, I offered my stock derision of my alma mater.  Did you know that there are eating clubs where you have to do ten interviews for admission, in a process that’s actually called “bicker”?  Have you heard about how Princeton got sued because so many of the students from its school for public policy went to work for hedge funds?  Or that upper-classmen put on double-popped collars, play croquet, and smoke cigars outside the site where newly admit pre-frosh congregate, just so incoming students start off with the right impression?  The implicit message, as always, was that if she thinks Princeton students are a bunch of over-privileged douchebags, she’s probably right.

The funny thing, though, is that I myself don’t even believe the stereotypes I’m conveying.  When I think of Princeton, I don’t think about eating clubs or polo shirts.  In my mind, “Princeton” is the professor who came into my first class freshman year and announced she had been kicked out of the prison system for teaching Marxism, the misfits who welcomed me into the marching band, and the young activists who strong-armed me into going vegan my sophomore year.  When I sing “In Praise of Old Nassau”, I mean it: it’s just that I’m thinking about the group of upperclassmen who took me to punk shows in Asbury Park when I was a lonely freshman, the old alumni who decided to give a scholarship to a kid who spent his hour long interview talking about anarchism, and the sociology professor who told me to follow my passions into a dumpster.

There are, of course, people at Princeton who are assholes from the second they set foot on campus.  But I truly believe, as Occupy Princeton said in their mic check, that most Princeton students don’t come to campus wanting to work for Goldman Sachs.  A significant minority, like me, arrive completely unaware of Princeton’s reputation as “the country club of the Ivy League.”  By the time we get to Princeton, though, most of us are hardwired to constantly look for the most exclusive eating club, the most selective major, and the most prestigious job.  The sad fact is, if you’re a Princeton freshman looking for role models, the most successful people you see are the ones going into finance.

And so Princeton’s reputation for elitism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The people who have no qualms about turning a half-million dollar education into a six-figure salary are also the people who are oblivious enough to wear Princeton on their sleeve.  The rest of us are afraid to associate ourselves with a name that others have made synonymous with greed and exclusivity, filled with guilt about the benefits we have accrued from a place we claim to hate.  The progressive alumni keep away from reunions, and by extension, each other: after all, it would be a bit incongruous if we expended much effort on a community that we are constantly bitching about.  The result is that a minority—and yes, it really is a minority—of Princeton students get to define what Princeton is to most of the world, and, in so doing, control the meaning of one of the most momentous four-year-periods of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong: Princeton has an awful history.  There is an important conversation to be had about whether Princeton should exist at all—if there really is a place in our society for such a lavish educational experience while public education is being cut to the bone.  But so long as Princeton does exist, those of us who have benefited from it ought to be able to have an open debate about how we can best use that privilege.  But before that can even happen, we need to challenge the basic narrative—that many of us alumni are ourselves perpetuating—that Princeton is an unredeemable, reactionary hell hole.

I’m glad that Occupy Princeton directed their message at the banks: their action had incredible power because, as so many media outlets seemed to say, even Princeton seems to be waking up.  But for me personally, the message they conveyed was one I’ve yet to find the courage to say:

Mic Check! /

We at Princeton /

Are not all assholes /

Some of us /

Are just twenty-somethings /

Who got lucky /

And are trying to figure out /

How to do some good

An Open Letter to the Princeton Community

After the tigers of Occupy Princeton mic-checked recruiting events for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, a few concerned alumni collaboratively drafted an Open Letter to Princeton Community to send to the Princeton Alumni Weekly and the university administration.  If you are an alum and want to sign it, shoot me an e-mail (also, let me know if you want to be on our e-mail list, discussing further actions that could be taken along this vein).

Bringing concerns about income inequality and economic injustice into the heart of American privilege is itself a good thing; as a Princeton alum, I also think it’s important to seize on this moment to try to change a deeply problematic culture of entitlement on campus (exhibit A-Z).  No letter drafted by a group of people is ever going to express any individual’s views perfectly.  I hope, though, that people who agree with the spirit of Occupy Princeton’s action will consider adding their names in support.

For those who can’t open links, the text is below.

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To the Princeton Community:

When we were at Princeton, we were often reminded that Princeton’s motto is ‘In the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.’ Despite this ideal, we have discovered that to many outside the Orange Bubble, Princeton symbolizes something much less noble: greed, privilege, and elitism. We believe that part of this perception stems from Princeton’s strong institutional support for careers in the financial services sector, an industry that includes firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, which have taken billions of dollars in public money and used it to pay excessive bonuses and manipulate our political system to their own advantage.

We applaud the students of Occupy Princeton for challenging Princeton’s dominant culture of political disengagement. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your peers and speak uncomfortable truths. Princeton graduates are entitled to work in the industry of their choosing, but if they do choose to work in finance, they should know they are entering an industry with a condemning historical record of breaching public trust and engaging in practices that run directly counter to Princeton’s motto. We believe that the Occupy Princeton protests send an important message to these financial institutions about the University’s values and serve to educate students considering a career in finance.

The burden of showing that Princeton University is more than an elite playground should not fall on the shoulders of students alone. The administration should support—not discipline—those students who are attempting to bring Princeton into a much-needed national conversation about income inequality and economic justice.  Moreover, we urge the administration to stop providing institutional support for recruiting on campus by the worst offenders of the financial industry, such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, until they show that they meet basic standards of accountability and economic fair play.

Lastly, we call on fellow alumni to join us in making it clear to current undergraduates that there are better ways to use the immense privilege of a Princeton education. We say this not just to encourage students to look outside of finance, but also to suggest that they use the skills and connections they have developed at Princeton to achieve positive good from within financial careers.

It’s time to decide whether ‘the nation’s service’ refers to the entire nation, or just 1% of it.

Signed:

The Zero Sum Movement

The first time I walked into the Occupy Oakland encampment, I felt like I had set foot in utopia.  I had been to Oscar Grant Plaza, in front of city hall, just a few days prior, but left the occupation’s first general assembly quickly after it devolved into an endless series of ideological pontifications: this isn’t going anywhere, I thought.  But it did.  When I returned, Occupy Oakland was a veritable city, except that most cities don’t provide their own power via bicycle generators, don’t provide free food and medical care for anyone who needs it, and aren’t bursting with beautiful artwork and transformative ideas in equal measure.

Over the next month, I returned to Oakland repeatedly—to march in the occupation’s first demonstration, to help them retake the plaza after the first time they were evicted, to aid in shutting down Oakland’s port as part of a general strike, and, once, to show it off to some visiting friends.  It’s funny, because media reports always emphasize how angry occupiers are, and in public, there’s some truth to that.  Yet behind that there was always a palpable sense of joy and possibility.  Every time I left Oakland, I felt rejuvenated and inspired.  If we can create an egalitarian, democratic enclave in the heart of Oakland, with all its racial conflict, violence, homelessness, and deprivation, then how could we possibly deny the possibility of organizing our entire society around these principles?

Somehow, over that same month, Occupy Oakland came to symbolize something very different to the rest of the nation.  Reports of a shooting outside the encampment (no rareity in the 5^th most dangerous city in the U.S.) and images of protesters rioting in downtown (actually, they were trying to set up a library in an abandoned building until they were attacked by police, but whatever) came to define the occupation.  The city did its part by deliberately attempting to make the park an unsafe and unclean space.  Eventually, the encampment became not just physically but semiotically contaminated, the manifestation of all the concerns about violence and hedonism that even erstwhile sympathzers had about the occupy movement.  I knew it was bad when my mother told me, just don’t go to Occupy Oakland.

But when, three weeks ago, the call went out to support the encampment against a possible eviction, I felt that I needed to go: Occupy Oakland had given me so much that the least I could do was support their very existence.  We arrived at about 2 a.m., and parked a few blocks away from the plaza, where a line of ambulences were waiting.  I asked one of the paramedics if he had any advice for staying safe: he responded that I should go as far away as possible.  I asked him if he thought anyone was going to die tonight: he said he wasn’t sure.  “That encampment’s a shithole, man.  It’s got to go”, he explained.

I have to admit that when I reached the plaza, I could see what he meant.  Some combination of rain, negative publicity, and news of the impending eviction meant that the camp had fallen into disrepair.  Most of the tents were deserted, save a few strung-out looking individuals, and there was trash everywhere.  In contrast to a few weeks earlier, when thousands had thronged to the street to defend the encampment, this time only a scant few responded.  Those that weren’t frantically packing up their belongings were standing in a nearby intersection, half-heartedly participating in an all-night dance party that had been labeled, appropriately, the “Occupocalypse.”

Few in my generation will experience warfare in the way our grandparents did, even if the response to occupations around the country has turned our inner cities into veritable battlefields.  Tenuous though the military analogy is, I nonetheless bet that night was the closest I will ever come to experiencing what it is like to be in a city right before the arrival of an enemy army.  Anonymous Medics wearing all-black spandex suits and Guy Fawkes-masks came in with reports of police encircling us from all directions, but the information was never put to use.  Rumors swirled, and the mechanisms of decision-making that have defined our movement—the people’s mic and consensus—broke down.  A few black bloc anarchists donned vinegar-soaked bandanas, in preparation for a street fight.  Some local union members marched in a picket line, chanting lines of strength and empowerment that, for the moment, seemed to have lost their meaning.  Confusion, panic, and above all, despair permeated the crowd.

When the police came, the hopelessness of the situation was immediately evident.  There were hundreds of them, coming from all sides, armed with batons, rubber bullets, and assault rifles.  We didn’t come to an open decision, but everyone at this point realized we were there to bear witness, not to resist.  My best-case scenario rapidly shifted: just let no one get hurt.  I left when I could see that it would not be a massacre, and that most of those who were arrested would be given the chance to do so peacefully.  There’s no such thing as “non-violence” when hundreds of police are involved, but I was grateful not to see a repeat of the bloody mess they caused a few weeks prior.

I’m uncomfortable with some of the comparisons between police repression in the U.S. and the Middle East; although the linkages in police tactics and weaponry are important to note, we should not forget our fortune that Americans are not actually being killed yet.  But as I saw that night, you don’t need to harm our bodies to kill our sense of hope and possibility.  Occupy Oakland has not disappeared—indeed, tomorrow they will most likely manage to shut down the port of Oakland, once again, in solidarity with ILWU workers struggling for their right to be unionized.  They will find ways to keep fighting, as will the evicted occupiers in LA, Boston, New York, and Portland.

But without our encampments—our sites of radical, almost playful experimentation in utopia—I fear our movement has lost its innocence.  We spent two months pretending to live in the world we sought to create; now we have no choice but to confront the ugly reality of the world we live in.  They did not let us make our own power: now we must take it.  They refused to let us occupy public space: so we will seize their private buildings.  There can be no denying that this struggle is now zero sum.  But they were the ones who made it that way.

Apathetic Apologetic

A few Mondays ago, I saw my future.  No, not a vision of being arrested and thrown in jail—this was a more long-term vision.  It was a premonition of my future as a college professor: standing in the front of a lecture hall filled with bored-looking undergraduates, their tired faces half hidden by laptops (open to facebook, I’m sure—it wasn’t that long ago that I was an undergrad, after all).

It seems fitting that my first experience teaching undergraduates was a lesson in activism, not sociology.  As part of our mobilization for Wednesday’s peaceful civil disobedience violent police riots, the union organized classroom presentations to educate the campus body about the extent of the impending cuts to public education.  When an e-mail went over our listserve asking for someone to present to a 250 person Introduction to Sociology lecture, another graduate student and I stepped forward, thinking that with ten minutes crammed full of ghastly statistics and compelling arguments, we could turn out a veritable horde for our upcoming rally.

The professor warned us that his students were “greener than green”, nearly all of them freshmen and almost none of them well-informed about the intricacies of neo-liberal retrenchment of government services.  This in mind, though, I thought we had a pretty good schtick: I roped them in by quizzing them about what tuition was five years ago (no one came even close to guessing that it was less than half its current amount) and comparing it to what it would be in five years under the regent’s proposal (double the current figure).  My friend then wove these numbers into a broader narrative of how they, as students, were being asked to pay for a crisis caused by the misdeeds of others.  I closed with a rousing description of the effectiveness of public protest, ranging from Tahrir Square to Berkeley’s own demonstrations in the 1960s.  “Who’s with us?” my friend asked.

You could practically hear crickets chirping at the end.

As a general rule, apathy makes me angry.  I’m hardwired to think that injustice demands a response, so I struggle to empathize with those who will not stand up for others (or even themselves).  Yes, I know enough sociology to understand that most people face deep, structural barriers to political action.  But over the past week, riding through Berkeley on my way to events in Oakland, I cannot help to think that at least some of these people going about their business have the time and resources to stand up for what is right.  After all, as scores of us were being beaten on November 9^th, hundreds of our peers were walking by on their way to the library or Wednesday night frat parties.  I don’t expect them to pull the cops off of us, but it is almost impossible for me to forgive a mentality that leads someone to just walk by without even stopping to inquire about what is going on.  There is only so much indifference that sociology can excuse

Yet, even given the events of the last few weeks, I still couldn’t be angry at these kids.  I wonder how I would have responded had, ten weeks into Princeton, someone come to my class and told me that, despite having worked for years just to get to college, I would now have to fight tooth-and-nail to get any education at all.  Added on to the stresses of adjusting to college and coping with my academic work, would I really have heeded the call?  I’ve heard so many times from people who don’t want to protest, “I’m just here to get an education.”  As if I’m not.  The last few days, I’ve thought over and over again how I’d really rather just read Marx and Durkheim, just be a student, have time for reflection and cooking and drinking and soaking up the bliss of my mid-twenties.  I get it.

But this is not the world we live in.  We are at a historical juncture in which we must take sides.  Eventually, those wide-eyed undergraduates will learn that.  They’ll find out that, in America’s second gilded age, they will have to fight for everything—for public education, for a decent job, for health care and a pension, for access to the criminal justice system.  Or perhaps they can ignore it, buy into the American dream, and get screwed anyway.  But it seems cruel to tell them now.  Jesus, they’re just kids, and the world is a scary place.

Gentle / Strong

I didn’t really sleep the first few nights after my arrest.  Exhausted as I was by a night spent in jail—coming on the heels of several nights where academic work and organizing meetings had kept me up late—I felt a profound sense of disquiet, and returned to that most familiar and comforting of behaiors for any graduate student: reading.  Indeed, with so many extra hours spent not-sleeping, I was finally able to crack open that book of non-sociology on my bedstand, Cry, the Beloved Country.  And what did I find, but this passage:

 “I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.  I shall do this…because I cannot find it in me to do anything else.  I am lost when I balance this against that, I am lost when I ask if this is safe, I am lost when I ask if men, white men or black men, Englishmen or Afrikaners, Gentiles or Jews, will approve.  Therefore I shall try to do what is right, and to speak what is true.

I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul.  I do it because I am no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself, and to deny it with another.  I do not wish to live like that, I would rather die than live like that.  I understand better those who have died for their convictions, and have not thought it was wonderful or brave or noble to die.  They died rather than live, that was all.”

When I started writing this post, the ambivalent, resigned martyrdom of the above quote seemed to capture exactly how I felt about my own activism after watching two weeks of violent repression of the Occupy movement and contemplating my own part in it.  But then, on further reflection, it doesn’t, and neither do any of the other boxes into which I have tried to fit my political life post-November 9^th—a question which, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, is still weighing heavily on my mind.  After all, can I really say that getting beat up makes me a hero—as many kind posters on this blog have suggeste?  And can I even call myself a victim when an extraordinary trauma for me is no more than routine for many people of color?

My initial impulse after the 9^th was to withdraw: to take some time to sit in my office, read sociology, clear my mind, and heal.  Yet even when I stayed physically away from the ongoing protests on campus and across the country, I couldn’t avoid them, compulsively checking the news and twitter.  Even when I shut myself off electronically, I couldn’t stop obsessing about the violence being visited on the occupy movement.  So I came up with an alternative strategy: to “put all my chips on the table” in a single-minded pursuit of seeing the wrongs committed on the 9^th righted.  I was going to thrown down all the social and financial resources of a rich white kid who went to Princeton towards the all-consuming quest to see Chancellor Birgeneau resign and a few riot cops join the ranks of the unemployed.  If a narrow focus on a single issue was what it took to achieve justice, so be it.

But justice for whom, exactly?  I am a child of liberal universalism, and have always subscribed to the idea that an injustice to one is supposed to be an injustice to all.  Indeed, before this month I would probably have noted with pride that every cause I have ever been involved with has been against injustice committed against others.  I have mobilized for immigrants without fear of deportation, spoken for public education knowing I will not pay higher tuition, and protested for animal rights with certainty I will not be eaten.  The result is a sort of detachment that has given me space to reflect on my activism, but also to distance myself from it, putting politics in a segmented space that I could leave behind when I left a protest and return to at my leisure.

Perhaps that is a good model for activism, but for me, it is no longer a tenable one.  As I have discovered, the truth is that an injustice to me is a lot different than an injustice to you.  Try as I might to put what has happened in context, trauma to my body and my soul has had a qualitatively different impact on me that no awareness of external suffering can quite equal.  I have often lamented the inability of activists with whom I have worked to reach pragmatic compromises and frame their concerns about injustice in broadly appealing ways, yet now I fully understand.  Rationality and detachment in a world full of wrongs—the ability to lead a balanced life while aware of how fucked-up things are—is its own form of privilege.

The other day, I saw the cop who on November 9^th beat me and later told me I had no rights.  She was standing outside Occupy Cal, casually chatting with a few other officers and keeping an eye on our newly reconstituted encampment.  I walked up to her and asked her if she could look me in the eye and tell me that I deserved to have my ribs broken.  She looked past me, not abashedly but indifferently, and told me that she had never broken anyone’s ribs.  I don’t know what response I was expecting, but I had certainly hoped for a glimmer of empathy (if not contrition).  I broke into tears as I walked away.  Suddenly the most inflammatory rhetoric of our movement—that cops are inhuman pigs, that their violence against us justifies violence in response, and that those that do not join in our denuciations are complicit in their injustice—made sense to me.

And that is why I have to admit that, although my heart wanted to be with my brothers and sisters in Cal and Davis this last week, I am grateful for the enforced separation from the movement that 3,000 miles of distance has brought me.  We activists must walk a delicate line, filling ourselves with rage at the system while not hating those within it, dedicating ourselves to justice while not being consumed by injustice, and believing in the inherent goodness of humanity in the face of at times overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  We must, in the words of a wise comrade, be both gentle and strong.

I thought I had largely struck that balance, but now that this has become personal, I am no longer so sure.  As Alan Paton writes of apartheid South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country:

“I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

In Between Protests, I Also Do Some Sociology

At long last, my first peer-reviewed academic publication is available online in the journal Ethnography, at least to those with access to an academic database.

I wrote this as my Junior Paper at Princeton, and I have to confess that my thinking on some of these issues has evolved and matured a bit.  Still, given the theme of this article – the meaning and power of dramatic, unconventional, non-institutional protest – now seems like a rather appropriate time to see it published.

Arrested

Yesterday, I was beaten, arrested, and jailed for participating in an act of civil disobedience against the privatization of education and criminalization of dissent in California.

I’ve spent the last day trying to process what happened, and writing this is an attempt to get it out of my mind and on to paper (having spent last night on a cement floor, I could use some mental solace).  There’s nothing exceptional about my experience, and yet, even knowing that, I write this grappling with a feeling of voicelessness and powerlessness that I have never before experienced.  I know that, once you start talking about “police brutality” and “police states”, you enter into a group of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists that most Americans dismiss out of hand.  I can’t control that portrayal, but for whatever reason, I need to talk about what happened, even if I can’t figure out why it has affected me so much.

We set up “Occupy Cal” in an attempt to open up our university to groups that had been excluded from it, to create a safe space to debate and discuss the future of public education, and to exercise our first amendment right to free assembly. We all knew that what we were doing was in violation of university policy—which views encampments as, somehow, on par with graffiti and building occupations insofar as they disrupt classes and harm university property—and that in doing so we risked arrest.  But, having passed a resolution explicitly declaring our encampment peaceful and non-violent, we expected those arrests to follow the rules of engagement that have defined civil disobedience since the Civil Rights era.  Cal has had occupations before – protesting against apartheid, for example – and while the university didn’t like them, it ultimately tolerated them as a means of democratic dissent.

We were wrong to think the same would happen for us.  Our encampment was torn down at 4:00 p.m., but we set up again.  At 9:30 p.m., the police issued an order to disperse.  We stayed, linking arms and chanting “Peaceful protest!”  The police advanced up to the crowd and started stabbing and beating people with batons.  Most of them were riot cops from other jurisdictions; a professor who has been here thirty years assures me that this level of militarization of police (there were officers with shotguns and rubber-bullet guns) is unprecedented.  Although the labels “violent” and “non-violent” get bandied around to the extent that they have virtually lost any meaning in public discourse, I have never seen protesters remain so defiantly peaceful in the face of such brutality.  Reasonable people can disagree about whether privatizing Cal is a good thing; no one should disagree that what this video shows is unconscionable.  I trust you to make your own decisions about who here was “violent” and who was not.

I was in front, near the side of the encampment.  A female officer walked up to me and started stabbing me in the ribs with her baton as I screamed at her that I was peaceful and not resisting her in any way.  She ordered me to back up.  This was impossible since there were lines of people behind me, and, perceiving me as refusing to comply with her orders, she continued stabbing me.  I buckled over, letting go of the people around me, because at this point I realized that only by being arrested would the beating stop.  I threw my hands up into peace signs and shouted that I wanted to be arrested non-violently.  I was not afforded that option.  I was dragged through the officers despite my attempts to comply with the officers out of my own volition.  I put my hands behind my back, but they threw me to the ground anyway.  I turned to ask what the charges were and an officer punched me back to the ground.  (If you think I’m pulling this out of my ass, watch this video at 1:40)

They cuffed me and dragged me into Sproul Hall, where they were holding around thirty of us.  An officer came and asked me my name, and I told it to her.  She then started firing off questions, and I politely told her that before I did that, I wanted to know my rights at this point in the process and when I would be able to speak to a lawyer.  She responded, “You have no rights”, to which I responded “That’s impossible.”  In one of many disturbing moments of the night, she informed me that I was wrong – and wrote me down as a non-cooperative arrestee.   That simple request will earn me extra harsh treatment in the student disciplinary process, she assured me.  Throughout the night, we were referred to as “bodies” not “people.”  I was never Mirandized.

In a sense, at this point, the worst was over.  The thirty of us supported one another, comforted one another, and inspired one another.  We were driven to a county jail in Oakland, where they booked us—threatening that because our crimes were “violent” we could not be released until an Arraignment on Monday.  In a holding cell that reeked of urine, we swapped stories, sang songs ranging from Buffalo Springfield to the Backstreet Boys, and shared a sense of camaraderie that could never be imagined in another setting.  If we were afraid, we weren’t showing it: indeed, I would love to have had the defiant moral clarity of some of my eighteen-year-old comrades.

In the end, the entire process was a sham.  I called my parents collect at 3 a.m. ($4.85 a minute—just to screw the poor a little bit more) telling them they needed to put together $20,000 in bail.  And then, right afterward, a kind officer told me that they were sure that our charges of “resisting arrest” and “participating in a riot” had no chance in court, and so they were going to cite and release us.  They took their sweet time in getting us out, but when we were again free, some of our union brothers and sisters were waiting for us with food, hugs, and their own first arrest stories.  It’s strange to have experienced such wild oscillation between human decency and human cruelty, to interact both with officers who were thoughtful and considerate and those who were mindlessly violent.

On the grand spectrum of police encounters, I’ve gotten off easy.  My injuries are confined to a cracked rib and bruised psyche.  I am an enormously privileged person in that I can get arrested and know that it will not ruin my life or manifestly affect my academic career.  I have received solidarity and comfort from friends all over the country and professors in the department I barely know.  I have not for one moment doubted that my actions were in the right, and that I have nothing to be ashamed of; this is a source of strength that holds me together.  And yet I have spent all day on the verge of crying.

I feel profoundly disempowered by what happened yesterday, in a way that has only become apparent once I left the solidarity of my fellow arrestees.  I feel violated because I no longer am safe in my own body, knowing that I can be stabbed and manhandled and the individuals responsible will face no consequences.  I feel humiliated because some of the people I have talked to seem to think that what happened last night demands no response, which suggests the worthlessness of my suffering and my cause.  I feel small because I see myself arrayed against the implacable forces of an administration bent on spinning my actions into the framework of violent, radicals seeking to disrupt life for good, law-abiding students.  I feel stupid because many of the illusions I grew up with about the rules of engagement in our political system are crumbling before me, leaving me no avenue through which to channel my anger about what has happened to me.

- – - – -

I’d rather end on a practical note.  I hope anyone reading this will consider writing Chancellor Birgeneau, who ordered the attacks, to tell him that you—as a citizen of Berkeley / California / Earth—do not approve.  We always chant “The whole world is watching” when police start attacking us.  It’d be nice to know that it’s true.