It should come as no surprise that the act of gathering together in an albeit remarkable gesture of solidarity is not enough for us to suddenly shed our social baggage. In fact privilege was raised as a topic which urgently needed to be addressed in the first few days of #OWS, yet this conversation was displaced by the constant state of emergency into which the NYPD was able to throw us. I write this now from Oakland, California, having spent an inspiring night at Oscar Grant Plaza.
New York has always been a place for people who wish to be discovered to flock. I should have expected that some would come to Liberty Plaza for that reason as well. In the month that I spent there, I heard such statements as "I'm pretty big on youtube," "Yeah, [I made this thing] ... it's pretty viral," and "I'm blowing up on twitter" at least 3 times an hour. (Of course I never saw any of the people making such claims in the kitchen, cleaning up, or doing security rounds.)
Oscar Grant Plaza has no lack of poets, musicians, writers, and myriad other talent but this out-pouring of creative voices is not so laden with self-advertising. It's true that I haven't been here as long, but were I at Liberty Plaza I would already have seen plentiful evidence of rampant, exploitive narcissism and so I can at least say that it does not permeate the atmosphere in Oakland so severely.
But what does this have to do with privilege? The expectation that one ought to be able to arrive on scene at a space where citizens converge to cry out for social justice and equality and receive special attention and applause for clever shticks betrays a certain amount of entitlement. It shows that listening is not what you came here to do. It shows that listening is not something you have had to consider doing much at all, perhaps. It shows that listening is what you need to learn.
There is privilege amongst the people, and it needs to be addressed. I haven't even mentioned occurences of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech & behavior at #OWS yet. I'll save that for another diary.