Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 16.1 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
There’s a library. Free food, always, around the clock. Hand sanitizer, toiletries, voter registration, art-making stations, a community garden. A mic and a DJ setup.
What could that be? A college campus, a community center, a conference, some kind of resort, even. It’s Occupy City Hall.
My new favorite chant, taking up its position next to ‘who do you serve, who do you protect?’ is: ‘who keeps us safe?’ answered with ‘we keep us safe.’
Occupy City Hall, located in lower Manhattan, in a park next to City Hall, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, surrounded by courthouses and federal buildings, which I had the pleasure of spending some time at this weekend, is an embodiment of this chant.
There’s been a little coverage in the NY Times, by AP, and a few others. It is mostly tepid and fine. In person, Occupy City Hall reminds me a lot of Occupy Wall Street—but there is some intention to structure the space and activities that occur in it, and it is explicitly led by Black organizers with the purpose of pressuring NYC’s disappointing dingbat of a mayor to defund the $6 billion NYPD.
I found out about Occupy in 2011 from a friend. She had been down there, said this enormous encampment had been set up. I looked in the news (something I rarely did in high school!), found nothing. So I went, and was similarly struck by how resources had been collected and shared. As a teenager, it wasn’t really clear to me what was going on at Occupy or why it was such a big deal. I think a lot of people, even though Occupy became a global movement that lasted for many months, didn’t quite realize what impact it would have.
But as I got older, everyone I met who was organizing had met the people they were organizing with at Occupy. New groups with new intentions were rising to challenges identified at Occupy. New vocabulary—namely, the language of the one percent—bolstered the appeal and success of Bernie Sanders, who brought countless young people into the worlds of socialism and electoral politics in the US.
So 2011’s Occupy was much like a packet of wildflower seeds you sprinkle in a vacant lot. As soon as you start to pour them out, the wind picks up. Soon, those flowers come up in your lot, and the next one, and the next.
(cw: violence)
Last week, I was concerned. The news was shifting, protests (in Boston, which is a different kind of place entirely) were dwindling, some unfavorable budget votes were rolling in. This week, obviously, there is still plenty of cause for concern. Brayla Stone, a Black trans woman, was murdered in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her parents refused to refer to her as a woman, and she seems to have been murdered by a transphobic man who was paid $5,000 to kill her. There is a lot of work left to do.
So while there can never really be justice for people murdered by police, by transphobic armed civilians, by racist fathers-and-sons, there can be transformation of the systems that allowed their lives to be taken so easily, in their honor.
Occupy City Hall is a part of that, I believe. It’s not perfect, but it, and the queer liberation march that stepped off from it yesterday, in place of cancelled Corporate Pride, both center the leadership of Black trans and queer people. When our movements follow those whose existence and survival is most in defiance of the oppressive systems that govern this world, those movements do not leave anyone behind.
On Saturday night, a friend and I stayed overnight at the occupation; numbers had dwindled due to a rainstorm earlier that day and fatigue on the part of folks who had been there since the occupation’s start (Thursday of last week, I believe). Speakers were on the mic until well after 2am. The sky brightened before 5. A little after 6, we spotted riot cops and identified an undercover officer within the bounds of the occupation. At 6:30, everyone was awake, blockading entrances to the park, responding to one short whistle that we magically all new indicated a police-related threat. In moments, we had gathered, arms linked. Goggles were distributed. We sang. The riot cops went away.
At 9am, there was a community buy-in: a re-hashing of community agreements (if you are here to party, leave; if you do not respect the mission and leaders of the space, leave; we are here to demand our demands and care for each other), a discussion about strategy and questions that had arisen.
My friend and I had struck up a conversation with an older man who was helping out at the voter registration group. He wondered aloud what the point was of allowing everyone to air all their concerns. I agreed that it would be messy, but it was necessary. We are still learning how to make decisons, take care of each other, meet our needs, and build the world we want to live in, out from the heavy weights of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. It will take awhile. This community discussion was just one of many that have and will happen. We need all the practice we can get.
(image via)
*Hot Goss*
Back tomorrow from the superb Latifah Azlan.