Occupy Wall Street 10 Years Later: Lessons Learned on Inclusion and Intersectionality

In the months after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial and banking system in 2008 that triggered the most serious global economic meltdown since the Great Depression, America witnessed an uneasy silence suggesting either trauma or stunned acquiescence among the general populace. But on Sept. 17, 2011, the near silence was broken when several hundred mostly young activists executed a long-planned peaceful “occupation” by setting up an encampment near the New York Stock Exchange in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza Park. Despite mass arrests, the activists continued their occupation.  Their focus was on economic inequality in the U.S. not seen since the Gilded Age and what they described as a broken political system.

The Wall Street protest that popularized the slogan “We are the 99%,” inspired support nationwide with some estimates that nearly 1,000 Occupy encampments being organized across the U.S. and around the world. In November, police departments nationwide colluded to take down the Occupy camps, but over the next decade, the spirit and passion of Occupy lived on in the continuing fight for social justice on a host of issues.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Heather McKee Hurwitz, a feminist scholar and a visiting researcher at the Cleveland Clinic. Here she talks about her new book, “Are We the 99%? The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality” and the lessons learned by progressive organizers over the past 10 years.

HEATHER MCKEE HURWITZ: I celebrate this movement, of course on its 10 year anniversary. But I celebrate it so much that we should really learn from it and look back with a real studied lens to see what happened here and what were some of the faulterings of the movement. And while the 99% message was so catching — I mean, it is one of the messages that has stayed with us in this country — it has been a rallying cry even for the Bernie Sanders campaigns that came after the Occupy movement. And that idea of the 99% versus the 1% has brought a conversation about economic inequality to the country that we didn’t have before the Occupy movement. So I have to celebrate those parts of the movement as being very important and opening.

At the same time, when I talked with people — the women, queer people, longtime racial justice activists who were excited for this viral new movement, they shared with me that they really questioned, “Are we the 99%? Am I part of that 99% that this movement is envisioning as the group coming together? How can I be a part of that when this movement doesn’t prioritize an analysis about racism? When it doesn’t highlight the specific challenges that women are enduring during the Great Recession? How can this just be an economic message when my activism — I’m speaking as these people I interviewed — my activism has centered around issues of sexuality and the oppressions that I feel in my particular socioeconomic position — are shaped by my sexual orientation as well?” Many of the activists I spoke with felt that their particular concerns were not only on an economic level, but these other race, class, gender, disability levels were not central enough to the main movement. And that that idea of the 99% actually was exclusive.

SCOTT HARRIS: Do you think there were lessons learned here that have been applied since the fall of Occupy in November of 2011?

HEATHER MCKEE HURWITZ: I think that we saw the lessons from Occupy come out a little bit later in early 2013 in the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. So one of the key lessons that we should learn from Occupy is that a movement about addressing one form of inequality in the Occupy’s case, economic inequality is limiting. And we need an analysis that really takes in the complexity of inequality in our country. This would be more of an intersectional message. This is a term that professor and lawyer Kimberly Crenshaw created in the late 1980s to describe the particular experiences of black women workers at that time who were encountering discrimination on the job — but not just due to their racial identity and not only to their gender identity, but a particular intersection between those two. The Occupy movement was so focused and many of the activists in it on that economic place, even some of the feminists I talked to said, you know, it’s like women of color feminism never even happened.

They were telling us we have to deal with the economics and capitalism first, and everything else can come later. That is not the right way to go forward here. And we’re erasing a whole history of racial justice and feminist activism in the process. I think we saw a really different movement emerge with Black Lives Matter. That was about the economic, racial gendered and sexual dimensions and more of black persons’ experiences. It was much more an intersectional movement, and that’s a really key takeaway from the Occupy movement that progressive movements going forward need to have — that intersectional analysis for people to really feel included.