The biggest problem for people who DO care about the occupations (which I do) is that as Naomi Wolf breathlessly recycles a single source (which is by the way a super rightwing hack site with zero credibility), her article reframes #ows and the occupations as an exceptional struggle unconnected with the continuing struggles in this country and internationally around displacement and police violence.

This article amplifies the blistering ignorance of her claims about the unique/unprecedented nature of police brutality towards #ows.In this article she says they are “unparalleled” while in her previous tweet she claimed the miscarriage in Seattle as “our first death from police brutality.”

This is dangerous as well as offensive.

Letting the words “police brutality” come out your mouth without acknowledging its daily reality for communities of color and poor communities in this country is beyond ignorant. It is racist. Who does she mean by “our” and why would she assume they haven’t started counting deaths from police before now?

She should be embarrassed to say such things. In the same way you don’t say “I got raped at Macy’s” when they charge you too much money for your new couch. Because the word has a MEANING that comes from its history up to now, and that meaning is based in people’s bodily experience. But instead of being embarrassed, she repeats the framing in her Guardian article, lent the credibility of a byline of a reasonably respected newspaper. And people called her out on that, but apparently it didn’t sink in.

So too, Wolf’s framing of #ows as exceptional erases the way that all aspects of government, including DHS (and ICE for example) are coordinated already, in the interest of repressing the majority who have so little power. This includes immigrants, pacifists, people of arab descent, other people of color, environmental activists, you name it. It’s not new. As many have pointed out, it’s entirely believable that various state and local entities would have phone calls, and coordinate, in order to respond to people resisting state authority. (Interestingly, Josh Holland’s article points out that the specifc so-called “shadowy entity” —so shadowy they were on DEmocracy Now recently- the Police Executive Research Forum also hosted a conference call coordinating a response that one might find to be in the opposite direction, on how Arizona’s racist SB10170 law could prevent police from ‘protecting’ immigrant communities. Whatever you think about the police’s ability to do that, such a phone call appears pretty different from this one.)

Anyway, the point is, the main revolutionary (or at least seriously resistant) potential that #ows has, is in its possiblity to coordinate with these pre-existing communities and movements. In fact, I think the main reason it is threatening at all to the powers that be is in the ways it is making connections with those communities. the more it finds common cause (through actually participating in common struggle through shared goals) with existing marginalized communities, the more of a threat it is. Instead, Wolf’s framing is that it is uniquely a threat because it is different from other struggles. It faces “unparalleled” brutality, and the like.

Ignoring these connections actively damages the potential for #ows to foster positive changing. Such an argument makes it harder for communities rightfully concerned that #ows will not include them to believe that it can include them

To put it another way, her model of what’s wrong, by being hierarchical and ahistorical, mis-identifies the cause of the crackdown as something unique to #ows, rather than because #ows may be approaching a common struggle with others. As my scientist friend @debcha put it on twitter: “a real test of a model is not its explanatory power but its predictive power. a non-conspiracy model is more fruitful” or as I put it: “for actually building a movement (not armchair quarterbacking), identifying the cause shapes allies, tactics &thus outcomes.” In slightly less-twitterfied form, if you don’t identify these common causes at the outset, then your solutions and your tactics will not serve the people broadly defined. Solving the problem for a few means you have not identified the problem. The problem is not evil masterminds coordinating everything, but that there are mechanisms that frame how we see the world so that we unknowingly consent to (or knowingly have to put up with) inequality within it. By identifying the problem as the first, the article actually does the second.

*edited because I misquoted her as saying unprecedented instead of unparalleled, but actually unparalleled is even worse..