Armen-Gurgen Movsesyan

November 3, 2012
3:30 Section
The Occupy Movement: How Racism Stifles Socio-Economic Progress and Infects Liberal
Ideals
Watch out for the dirty hippies on the corner of Wall Street and 11th they crowd
corporate parking lots and holler leftist conspiracies. The Occupy movement, which began as
Occupy Wall Street in New York Citys Zuccotti Park in September 2011 soon spread its
message across the globe, becoming the largest national effort to address socio-economic
disparities in the United States. The message penetrated the hearts of a countless number of
people affected by the global financial system. The movement met some small goals including
changing the political debate in regards to the power struggle between the political elite and the
broader citizenry. But its hasty dwindling suggests inherent flaws in the system by which it
operated and opens the question of why it did not have a more immediate influence on todays
political atmosphere. By dissecting Occupys inner structure and analyzing its modus operandi,
its errors become extremely apparent. Although the 99% discourse boosted attention towards
the financial crises of 2008, it did not touch on the core causes of socio-political inequality in the
United States. The focus of Occupys discourse eventually shifted towards the ways in which the
financial system disproportionately affects middle-class laborers, rather than the ways in which
the system paints the socio-political canvas in general. More importantly, rhetoric on
institutionalized racial practices by corporate and political systems virtually never surfaced.
Finally, it became obvious after a considerable number of demonstrations that the Occupy
movement was largely white the most underprivileged minorities that have suffered systemic
suppression garnered little if any attention. The Occupy movement failed because it did not
consolidate its efforts across racial lines, nurturing the image of a white, middle-class movement

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that led to fragmentation and disorganization. Furthermore, the conservative criticism of Occupy
revealed that the American Dream ethos and hard-work ethic still typifies the national zeitgeist.
Elements of whiteness affected the movements construct and operation much the same
way as they shaped the United States economy. In an essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich
featured in the Occupy Handbook, the authors point out that all sorts of class, racial, and
cultural divisions persist within the 99 percent, including distrust between members of the former
liberal elite and those less privileged (2011: 300-306). Racism appeared in the movement in two
main forms: uninformed or unintentional racism and explicit racism, the former of which
occurred more commonly in the movement (thus, the focus of this essay.) A journal by Jean
Moule, associate professor at Oregon state University and President of the Oregon Chapter of the
National Association for Multicultural Education reveals that unintentional racism rises from the
subconscious, hardened by personal bias and perpetuated by the self-enforced justification of
those biases (2009). The rationalization of ones racism occurs both as a defense mechanism and
as a result of conditioned prejudices that are learned as a part of normal socialization
(2009:322). Additionally, misinformation and unwarranted knowledge claims in regards to racial
stereotypes and, more specifically, the history of racism and ways in which it persists in
contemporary era act as an essential part of unintentional racism.
Events within inner circles of the Occupy movement provide endless examples of
unintentional racism, especially incognizance of the racialized and misinformed claims that
members made. Publicized footage shows people in drum circles or waving the We are the
99% signs, but lesser-known videos reveal rampant racism and distrust. In a clip featured by
News Busters, a mixed-race activist yells if youre white, then shut the fuck up about race,
because you dont know shit other than how to rape and kill, in response to a Caucasian male

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questioning the validity of institutionalized racism in the United States (2011). The scene
occurred on September 17, 2011, the day of the first Occupy Wall Street rally in Zuccotti Park.
From the beginning of the movement, racial tensions put members at odds. White members did
not formally acknowledge the part that racism shares in the state of inequality and colored
members struggled to make racism a more major focus of the Occupy movement. Prudence L.
Carter, associate professor of sociology at Stanford University questions whether the Occupy
movement truly tackles the issues of race-based inequality in the United States (2011). Is there
sufficient discussion in the Occupy movement about race? Class-centered debates tend to be
more palatable... Carter explains that the movement naturally fixed itself towards a classcentered debate because of the conflict that the topic of racism brings, especially in rally groups
and protests. She further expresses that inequality will not be reduced by changes in economic
practices alone if we ignore the effects of racism. Occupy lacked racial solidarity from its
inception, and it continued on a fragmented and disjointed path despite outrage from colored
protesters and criticisms from scholars. It appears as though the movement refused to admit the
inconsistencies in their message, allowing the obvious racial tensions to slip by unacknowledged.
Ultimately, the Occupy movement never reconciled its opposition towards corporate
greed with the fact that it largely overlooks the deliberate and structural reinforcement of racism.
Indeed, the lack of discussion regarding structural inequality makes the movements anticapitalist message incomplete. In Leland Saitos The Politics of Exclusion: The Failure of Race
Neutral Policies in American, Saito exposes the history of institutionalized racism in the United
States, from redlining policies enforced by the Housing Act of 1949 to the later race-neutral
policies that have similar racialized outcomes because of their inability to cancel out their racist
legacies and the way in which racism slowly creeps into the policy-making process (2009:13-14,

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33). Despite the evidence and the history, Occupy never formally ignited the race debate the way
it should have in order to solidify its efforts and complete its anti-corporate message. Of course,
the Occupy movement does not seem blatantly racist. In Eduardo Bonilla-Silvas Racism without
Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Bonilla-Silva
explains that individuals often fail to take racism into account in matters such as the economy
because of the framework through which they analyze and interpret information (2009). BonillaSilva describes one framework, the minimization of racism, in which individuals disregard
discrimination as a central factor in peoples lives, assuming it to have faded in time. This
framework explains why most Occupy participants never came to the realization that the
movement preached an incomplete message or that it under-represented the larger extent of the
poor minority-laborer population because those ideas do not exist in their inherent way of
thinking, resulting in a movement comprised of a largely white demographic supporting a
middle-class grievance. To fragment the movements focus and distance it farther from the race
debate, highly specific terminology regarding the economic state of the country and the financial
crisis of 2008 began permeating every public discussion of the Occupy effort.
Economic jargon saturated the movements discourse. With a little boost from news
media and the story that they created about the movement, Occupy eventually turned into a
middle-class debate, verging on a pseudo-intellectual race to find the most convincing
explanation of the nations financial downturn. Coverage included talks of loan-derivatives,
credit default swaps and excess reserves, never going the extra step passed the boundaries of the
middle-class debate into the race realm which includes more robust and less recent tactics of
financial institutions such as racial steering. While liberal economists scolded big banks for
handing out sub-prime mortgages, they ignored how housing and public development

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legislations have displaced millions of low-income and working class residents out of their
homes breeding ghettos across the country. Even credible spokes-people for Occupy like Noam
Chomsky excluded the history of race-based policies and their contemporary forms from their
analyses of the movement. In Chomskys Occupy, he describes Occupy as another middle-class
movement. Despite acknowledging that inequalities in the country have risen to historically
unprecedented heights, he does not offer any significant examination of race and its part in the
movement. The history chapter of the book vaguely refers to the groups affected by United
States economic policies as unemployed working people and the working class that he
essentially equates to the middle-class (2012:20). Ultimately, it appears that the best evidence for
the lack of a legitimate race-based debate is no evidence. Omission of the race debate aside, the
demographic statistics on Occupy really tell it all.
Based on a survey released on OccupyWallSt.org, responses revealed that protesters
identified themselves as 81.2% White, 6.8% Hispanic, 2.8% Asian, 1.6% Black, and 7.6%
other (2011). The People of Color Working Group, considered a major Caucus on the New
York City General Assembly and Occupy Wall Street Spokes-council amassed a total following
of 595 people on Facebook, a number that when put into perspective in terms of over 410
thousand followers on the general Occupy page, seems insignificant. Sharon Cromwell, one of
the founders of the group reported that After four months of commitment to the Occupy
movement, I was disappointed to find that in general it was not a safe space for advancing the
struggle of communities of color or even addressing the ways in which racism prevails in
American society (2012). Cromwell continued to explain that although Occupy was important
on shifting public discourse ... it wasn't the best venue for organizing around issues that affect
communities of color. A line from the official draft of the Declaration of the Occupation

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document written by Occupy spokes-persons identified the Occupy movement as being one
race, the human race, formally divided by race, class (2011.) In an article written by Manissa
McCleave Maharawal released by Racialicious, a notable website which primarily covers race
stories in Occupy, Maharawal expressed that that portion of the declaration was a weird line,
one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated (2011).
Maharawal goes on further to describe how the writing of the declaration felt overwhelmingly
white and without input from a diverse, racial perspective, forcing her and the South East Asian
contingency that she joined in the movement to stand and fight to alter the line before the general
assembly formally released it. Stories such as these provide an extraordinary insight into the
ignorance that exists in the movement, proving the obliviousness of the overwhelmingly white
demographic to the inherent privileges that they possessed and the luxury of living a single
dimensional truth a truth that does not strike a chord with the reality of structural inequality.
Yet, another, even more explicit reality exists that snubs both the race debate and middle-class
rhetoric altogether.
On the conservative side of the spectrum, analysis of the Occupy movement attributes
entirely different reasons to its failure. The movement contradicted the generic conservative
rhetoric on free market competition and the hard-work ethic that coincides with the American
Dream ethos, a key element in American culture. Political ideals cultivated during the
Progressive Era support the American Dream ethos and have long since permeated debates
regarding the governments relationship to business and the nations economic health. The words
of notable economists such as Robert Park continue to echo in modern literature and summarize
the general American attitude towards free-market enterprise. In his Urban Ecology theory, Park
drew his influences from the study of ecology and the relationships among organisms within an

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environment (Palen 1977). The heart of his theory involved Charles Darwins theory of
evolution. Park claimed that society functioned in a free market driven by competition with
individual players fighting for prime space. He described segregation and the formation of class
hierarchies as a result of human nature and the tendency for population trends to segregate itself
based on vocational and economic interests. Although this theory no longer dominates the
contemporary school of thought, many of if its attributes persist in the conservative portrayal of
the United States economy.
From the perspective of the American idealist and free-market purist, the Occupy
movement opposes traditional American principles that have led to the market systems present
today and threatens to destroy the nations socio-economic foundations. In other words, the socalled inequality caused by the financial system is a natural result of capitalism and the failure of
individual players in the economy, not the influence of Wall Street. The conservative opposition
towards the Occupy movement proved that many Americans do not support Occupys battle
against corporate elitism or believe that the message of the movement reflected their own
struggles in the economy, despite empirical evidence of corruption and malpractice in the
financial sector. The popular conservative blogs created by Red State founder and CNN
contributor Erick Erickson soon after the movement gained noticeable momentum called We
are the 53% reveal that many working-class Americans often regard Occupy activists as lazy,
ungrateful and uneducated (2011). A caption on the We are the 53% tumblr defines the group
as those of us who pay for those of you who whine about all of that (2011). The underlying
theme of hard-work and the American Dream ethos resonate among all these criticisms, but they
do not seem to support Parks theory and the set of ideals that the conservative rhetoric umbrellas
the nation under. On the contrary, the criticisms indicate that the supposed free-market system

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does not encourage fair competition at all but rather a desperate struggle for most players to
simply make ends-meet. Ultimately, the 99% and the 53% struggle with the exact same financial
issues, but neither group have a proper solution.
Both groups lack an analysis of race in their discourse. Since conservatives do not
acknowledge that the acts of corporations contribute to inequality, it follows that they would not
acknowledge the notion of systemic inequality and institutionalized racism. This strongly differs
from how liberal minded activists unintentionally fail to recognize institutionalized racism,
despite challenging Wall Street. How can the Occupy movement stare at the face of their
oppressors and overlook such an integral aspect of the corporate stratagem? In Barbara
Applebaums journal Good Liberal Intentions are Not Enough! Racism, Intentions and Moral
Responsibility, Applebaum distinguishes the criticisms of cultural values, norms and assumptions
of the dominant group (in the case of Occupy, the white protesters,) from the dominance of these
values, norms and assumptions (1997). While the former type of criticism focuses on the values
of different cultures as if all things were equal, the latter type of criticism focuses on the fact that
the values, ideals and beliefs of a particular culture (the dominant one) are considered the norm,
the standard, by which all others are measured. The second type of criticism that Applebaum
examines supports why the demands of the Occupy movement reflected the values of the
dominant white working-class. In comparison to the damaging effects that the mass ignorance of
this type of white privilege had on the movement, the conservative disapproval of Occupy
remains inconsequential.
Both sides of the debate have come to the same basic conclusion: life is unfair. And while
Occupy may have come close to determining the source of economic inequality in the country,
they do not have a clear grasp of what to battle against. The Occupy movement failed on three

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main levels. First, Occupy did not acknowledge the widespread racism within the movement,
forcing colored members to form separate committees that eventually had to break away entirely,
segregating the movement. Divisions increased as colored members realized that Occupy did not
include battling institutionalized racism in its formal agenda, which leads to Occupys second
failure; incorporating the race-debate in the 99% rhetoric. The movement never reconciled its
opposition towards corporate greed with the fact that it left out the race-debate. The movement
eventually aligned itself with the demands of a white, working middle-class rather than
accounting for the broader citizenry including underprivileged minority groups which nurtured
the image of a white movement. The United States history of racism in politics and the economy
never entered the discussion and the contemporary status of structural inequality in the country
remained overlooked. Lastly, Occupy demographics reveal that more than 81 percent of its
members identified themselves as white. Descriptions of Occupys MO and its organization
reveal that a white contingency dominated not only the general membership but also the
committee membership responsible for overseeing major group activities and drafting the
groups platforms. For these reasons, the movement could not overcome its racial bias and
solidify its cause.
Conservative criticisms of the movement revealed that many Americans do not support
the Occupy movement on any level, calling themselves the 53%. Regarding the movement as a
collective of un-American and lazy liberals, the 53% believe that Occupy members forsook their
personal responsibilities by blaming Wall Street for their financial turmoil. But despite these
differences between the two groups, both shared absent-mindedness towards institutionalized
racism in the United States proving that a white majority dominates the inequality debate and
whiteness has powerful, unspoken advantages unperceivable even to liberal progressives.

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References
Applebaum, Barbara. 1997. Good Liberal Intentions are Not Enough! Racism, Intentions and
Moral Responsibility. Journal of Moral Education 26(4):409-421.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. November 16, 2009. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and
the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers
Captain, Sean. November 2, 2011 Infographic: Who is Occupy Wall Street? Visualizing the
results of 5,006 completed surveys at occupywallst.org, data shared exclusively with Fast
Company.

Fast

Compnay.

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4,

2012.

(http://www.fastcompany.com/1792056/infographic-who-occupy-wall-street).
Chomsky, Noam. 2012. Occupy. Brooklyn, NY: Occupy Media Pamphlet Series, Zuccotti
Park Press
Erickson, Erick 2011 We Are the 53%. Retrieved November 3, 2012
(http://the53.tumblr.com/).
Janet Byrne. 2011. The Occupy Handbook. New York, NY: Back Bay Books
L. Carter, Prudence. December 3, 2011. The Double Binds of Economic and Racial Inequality.
Occupy the Future
McCleave Maharawal, Manissa. 2011. So Real it Hurts: Notes on Occupy Wall Street.
Racialicious. Retrieved November 3, 2011 (http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/03/soreal-it-hurts-notes-on-occupy-wall-street/).
Moule, Jean. January, 2009. Understanding Uncouncious Bias and Unintentional Racism.
Acknowledging our possible biases and working together openly is essential for
developing community in our schools.

Phi Delta Kappa International 1:321-326

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Palen, J. John. 2008. The Urban World. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Paye, Amity. 2012. One Year Later: People of Color Leave Occupy Wall Street But Continue
Work. Chicago Defender. Retrieved November 4, 2012 (
http://www.chicagodefender.com/index.php/business/14660-one-year-later-people-ofcolor-leave-occupy-wall-street-but-continue-work ).
Saito, Leland. February 9, 2009. The Politics of Exclusion: The Failure of Race Neutral Policies
in American. Mill Road Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
Sheppard, Noel. October 16, 2011. Will Media Report Racism and Anti-Semitism at Occupy
Wall

Street

Protests?

Retrieved

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(http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/10/16/will-media-report-racism-andanti-semitism-occupy-wall-street-protest).

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