I am the 1%. The 1 percent of individuals who just doesn’t feel right jumping on the Chris Brown and Rihanna controversy bandwagon *gasp*. I get this metallic taste in my mouth every time I read articles or see twitter rants about the horrors of Chris Brown.

It’s not because I don’t think his actions, or intimate partner violence at large, aren’t wrong. It’s just that something about it all feels…hypocritical.

That familiar taste worked it’s way into my mouth as I read countless articles about Chris Brown and Rihanna’s most recent collaboration(s). One in particular, “Cake Remix,” has caused controversy because the public largely perceives Rihanna as weak for “goingback to her abuser.” And with lyrics like:

“Sweeter than a rice cake, cake worth sippin

Kill it, tip it

Cake, fill it

If you sexy and you know it And you ain’t afraid to show it

Put a candle on my motherf**ng back baby blow it”

There’s definitely cause for concern. But the concern shouldn’t (just) be about Rihanna. What’s cause for concern is that we as a society are outraged by these violently sexual lyrics, but will scream out “that’s my jam!” to Trey Songz music (“Beat It Up”, anyone?) or Kelly Rowland’s “Lay It On Me” (umm, let’s talk about Big Sean’s verse: Put your skirt on, turn you to my school girl. Smack you with my ruler girl”). We are a generation that increasingly ties our sexuality to violence. As Yolo Akili says in his article for the Crunk Feminist Collective

“from “cut”, “hit”, “beat it up” “kill it” and “smash,” pop songs about love [and intimacy] sound more like war every day. And that should be frightening to us all.”

It was in reading this article that I discovered the root of that feeling of hypocrisy. We are the ultimate example of “clubbing on Saturday and going to church on Sunday.” We cry out against sinners and wrong-doers, while we secretly glorify and do those same things in our everyday lives 6 days out of the week. We are what I call the “fad diet generation”. We’ll all jump up and boycott the latest high-profile controversy that we can scrutinize, villify, and “fix”- short-sighted in both our attention span  and approach. Countless numbers of my friends and colleagues have proudly proclaimed that they “don’t support Chris Brown’s music” as a sign of solidarity in the fight against domestic violence.

They are the same people who tweeted #toomuchdoubt for Troy Davis and jumped on the 99 percent fad on Tumblr and the #OWS movement. Yet few of these people will be seen tweeting everyday cases of injustice. What about the millions of voiceless women (and men) who suffer from intimate partner violence? The millions of black men inside and outside of prison who face a system that paves a pathway from cradle to prison? Where are our discussions about poverty now that the Occupy movements have been largely ousted?

Our advocacy work as young people will be doomed to fail if we do not perform an honest re-assessment of ourselves. We are willing to jump on the latest national craze, but are largely stuck in neutral (or even reverse) when it comes to sustained organizing. We want results and we want them now. We are fad dieters and closet “cake” eaters. We’ll latch on to the latest craze, until the media (and we alongside it) find something more interesting and sensational.

We have internalized our own oppression by failing to investigate the myriad ways we prop up systems of injustice. We need a Weight Watchers plan- a sustainable road map for organizing and advocacy that focuses on the day-to-day struggles that come with weening ourselves off of things that are bad for us.  A plan that tallies our everyday intake of poison and requires that we do a daily, weekly, and monthly assessment of how closely our actions are fitting into our larger goals. 

We want the easy route. The route that circumvents the nuances that come with social justice. I believe we’re so tied to Chris Brown and Rihanna because we want so badly to believe that intimate partner violence is a simple “get hit and quit” equation. But as Akili points out:

“many women do not not always want their male partner to leave, so much as they want the abuse to stop. That is in of itself a tough pill to swallow, especially to those who purport to believe that an act of physical violence in a partnership commands departure and is irredeemable.

However in the real world, a lot of heterosexual women in this country are abused by their male partners and not leaving for a variety of nuanced and complicated reasons, perhaps most obvious among them a legal system and community that will not protect or support them.

So while it’s easy for many to say,  ’If he hits me I’ll leave’ the conditions that intimate partner violence creates are often a lot more complicated. It would seem our overly simplistic and condemning attitudes towards this phenomena may truly reflect how little we understand about the psychological and emotional nature of physical violence and the complexities of how humans conceptualize love.”

Instead of focusing merely on how horrible Chris Brown’s actions were and how important it is that Rihanna stay away from him at all costs, we as a society should be thinking of ways that we can provide a support system for her safety, even if she decides to continue to affiliate with Brown. Instead of (solely) vilifying Brown, we should be investigating the root of his anger and violence and the ways in which we can support his growth. We could even take a page out of Rihanna’s book and work on collective forgiveness, not only for Brown, but in all aspects of our lives. Most importantly, we should be thinking of the  ways we can help ALL victims of domestic violence achieve safety and a sense of security.

I hope that we all can move beyond the 90 second news cycle, the flashy, and the sensational, so the real work can be done.  Let’s move beyond the “Cake” and clear out the cupboards. 

From Colorlines.com: 

1. We demand free quality education as a right guaranteed by the US Constitution.
2. We demand the dismantling of Bloomberg’s Panel for Educational Policy. We demand a new 13 member community board to run our public schools (comprised of parents, educators, education experts, community members, and a minimum of 5 student representatives).
3. We demand quality instruction. Teachers should ethnically, culturally, and racially reflect the student body. We demand experienced teachers who have a history of teaching students well. Teacher training should be intensive and include an apprenticeship with master teachers as well as experiences with the communities where the school is located.
4. We demand stronger extra-curricular activities to help stimulate and spark interest in students. Students should have options, opportunities, and choice in their education.
5. We demand a healthy, safe environment that does not expect our failure or anticipate our criminality. We demand a school culture that acknowledges our humanity (free of metal detectors, untrained and underpaid security guards, and abusive tactics).
6. We demand that all NYC public school communities foster structured and programmatic community building so that students, teachers, and staff learn in an environment that is respectful and safe for all.
7. We demand small classes. Class sizes should be humane and productive. We demand that the student to teacher ratio for a mainstream classroom should be no more than 15:1.
8. We demand student assessments and evaluations that reflect the variety of ways that we learn and think (portfolio assessments, thesis defenses, anecdotal evaluations, written exams). Student success should not depend solely on high stakes testing.
9. We demand a stop to the attack on our schools. If a school is deemed “failing”, we demand a team of qualified and diverse experts to assess how such schools can improve and the resources to improve them.
10. We demand fiscal equity for NYC public schools: as stated in the Education Budget and Reform Act of 2007 by the NYS Legislature, NYC public schools have been inadequately and inequitably funded. We demand the legislatively mandated $7 billion dollars in increased annual state education aid to be delivered to our schools now!

A Video of the students available is at: http://youtu.be/hXUtIFrmn18

Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com by Barbara Ehrenrich

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided — to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues — arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome — should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities — “as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist,” travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed.  And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A report entitled “Criminalizing Crisis,” to be released later this month by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the following story from Wenatchee, Washington:

Toward the end of 2010, a family of two parents and three children that had been experiencing homelessness for a year and a half applied for a 2-bedroom apartment. The day before a scheduled meeting with the apartment manager during the final stages of acquiring the lease, the father of the family was arrested for public urination. The arrest occurred at an hour when no public restrooms were available for use. Due to the arrest, the father was unable to make the appointment with the apartment manager and the property was rented out to another person. As of March 2011, the family was still homeless and searching for housing.

What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets — not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in digging or earth-breaking activities” — that is, to build a latrine — cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she has no other place to live.”

It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens.

The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart.

As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy” — the stock brokers and investment bankers — were highly sensitive, one might say finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows” or “quality of life” ordinances making it dangerous for the homeless to loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces.

No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown — the deaths from cold and exposure — but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina: 

During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day because she would be ‘squatting.’ In early 2011, about six months into her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a hospital, and delivered a stillborn child.

Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be distributed, latrines dug, rules — such as no drugs, weapons, or violence — enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement.

There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless — no signs denouncing greed or visits from leftwing luminaries — but they have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.

All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”

What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine, their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn.

But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks that slope downwards — from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure — leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’ couches or parents’ folding beds.

In Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed — the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher, and impoverished senior — unless this revolution succeeds.