January 21
GUEST: Heather Hurwitz, Activist, lecturer of Sociology and feminist scholar at Case Western Reserve University and author of Are We the 99%? The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality, talks about what happened to Occupy and why the movement is still so important.
Heather Hurwitz on the lessons of Occupy
Heather Hurwitz explores diversity and activism in new book
Talking to Heather and reading her book helped me view Occupy with a different prospective. While it is true that leadership in Occupy sometimes mirrored the inequalities of our broader society, the gains in social justice far outweighed these drawbacks.
In fact, women's rights, Black Lives, and LGBTQ justice have made immeasurable gains in the years that have followed. One could argue that Trump and his band of Brown Shirt goons were directly related to the new society that Occupy was so successful in envisioning. Like Nixon after the Hippie and African American rebellions of the 1960s, Trump came to office ready to fly the flag of hared and white nationalism. Trump was the more dangerous fascist, willing to risk instigating a violent coup to overturn a presidential election.
Reading Heather Hurwitz's new book will help the left do it even better next time. Our revolution has to be nonviolent, and it has to appeal to the nation's disempowered whites, who are now being used as the Brown Shirt enforcers of the new Republican Party.
