The Public Intellectual has been for us a fascinating experiment in bringing academic work to a general audience. We are very proud of the writing that has appeared on the site. We have been heartened by the support of our readers and the generosity of the writers who have worked with us since our launch last year.

However, we have decided that the project should end. Editing the site with a staff of three people with fulltime work commitments elsewhere has proved too difficult. We considered moving to periodical publication, but decided that model was not appropriate for a web-based publication. While we appreciate the submissions we have received, we’ve decided that the best course is to suspend publication indefinitely.

We will leave the site live as an archive. Please continue to use it in your classes. We hope that the articles will continue to reach general audiences in this way as well. Thanks for reading The Public Intellectual.

Best,

Heather, Nikki and Jane

Photo Credit: Brad K. http://bit.ly/eSLyE2

The number of incarcerated people in the United States decreased slightly in 2010. Does that reflect a decreasing desire to lock people up? A drop in crime? Philip Cohen considers these questions and takes a look at the 2010 numbers in two great graphs. Philip is a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. He blogs at Family Inequality, where this post first appeared.

By Philip Cohen

I can’t teach my course on family sociology without these graphs, which show the rise of the unfree population, and the incredible race/ethnic and gender disparities behind them.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released Correctional Population in the United States, 2010, which updates my standard figures. First, the total trend toward unfreedom in the population — from less than 2 million in 1980 to more than 7 million 30 years later:

And second, to understand the disparate impact of this change on Black men in young adulthood primarily — and secondarily, Latino men — here are the rates of incarceration for men by age and race/ethnicity (Blacks here exclude Latinos; Asians and American Indians are not included in the statistics):

Just to make sure you read the scale right, that incarceration rate for Black men in their early 30s is 9,892 per 100,000, or 9.9%, or one-in-ten — more than five-times the rate for White men.

I come at this largely from its effects on families. In a nutshell: The overall trend is largely a consequence of how the U.S. has waged its drug war over this period; these policies fit into a web of practices that deny families to millions of people in the U.S. (only a minority of whom have been convicted of crimes), including by simply removing men from communities and increasing the number of single-parent families.

All that said, you may notice the little decline at the end of that long upward trend in the first figure. In fact, for the first time since 1980, there has been a decline in the incarcerated population for two years running. There has been a long-term decline in crime, but I don’t know whether that is more important than the budget crises facing so many states, or the diminished lust for locking people up. In New York, for example, seven incarceration facilities were closed in the last year, after the number of prisoners dropped about one-fifth in the past decade:

The inmate decline followed a 25 percent statewide drop in crime over the past decade and revisions in sentencing laws that allowed earlier releases and alternative programs for nonviolent drug offenders. The number of prisoners in medium-security prisons declined almost 20 percent from 2001 to 2010 while those in minimum-security facilities dropped 57 percent.

The numbers on the charts are still off the charts, meanwhile — and remember these are just those in the system now. Many more people (and their families) live lives permanently hampered by criminal records and the experience of imprisonment.

Photo: Viqi French/flickr

By Mignon Moore

One snowy night in January, I went to visit Elizabeth Bennett and Tracy Douglas. Elizabeth is an administrative assistant and Tracy is a dental assistant. This working-class couple and their two children (from Tracy’s prior heterosexual relationship) share an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. They invited me to a card party, and when I arrived there were about 10 other black and Latina lesbians there. In one of the bedrooms, several children were playing games and watching television. I left their home with a better knowledge of how to play spades, but also with a realization that I knew very little about their lives and experiences as lesbian women. As a group they were particularly invisible, both to larger LGBT groups and activists and to the larger African-American and Latino communities they lived in as well.

I wrote Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood Among Black Women as a corrective to the focus of the media, LGBT activists and scholars of LGBT life on white, middle-class groups, and the persistent lack of information on gay women of color. I followed more than 100 middle-class and working-class black lesbians for three years and found that the structure of their family lives is grounded in African-American culture. The women in my book grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in large cities, small Southern towns and the Caribbean. One of my principal findings is that these women live in black communities, not “gay ghettos,” and that social location shapes their identities, family formation, and other understandings in ways that differ from some white LGBT people. Reports by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law confirm that like the women I interviewed, LGBT people of color in general tend to live in areas where there are significant concentrations of other racial/ethnic minorities. This is different from the general patterns of white gay couples, who are more likely to live in areas with significant concentrations of other LGBT people.

For the women I interviewed, their experiences and the larger histories of black women in the labor market, in families, and in religious and other cultural institutions shape their lives as gay women. For example, I found that black lesbians are likely to have developed their same-sex desire within black social spaces and black neighborhoods, outside the ideologies of lesbian-feminism, and are more likely than some white lesbians to use gender presentation as a way to construct their relationships, with one partner consistently dressing in ways that are distinctly more feminine than the other.

Not surprisingly, relative to white women, black lesbians more purposefully consider racial identity and racial group membership in their creation of a lesbian sexuality. For example, while some white women may form a lesbian identity that rejects participation with elder family members or the community church, many of the women I interviewed shaped their lesbian identities to either preserve or recreate those relationships that are important to racial group membership. While Williams Institute analyses have revealed that black women in same-sex couples are more than twice as likely as white women to be raising children under 18, I also found that children in black lesbian households tend not to track mainstream stories of lesbians having children through (often expensive) alternative insemination methods. Instead, they’re doing it the old-fashioned way: the most frequent route to motherhood among the women I interviewed is through a prior heterosexual relationship before accepting a gay sexuality.

This difference in conception can also impact the power dynamics between two mothers. The biological mother of the children often ends up having more of a say in the household, not just about the needs of the children but also about household organization, money management and other areas of home life. The partner’s lack of a legal tie to the family further reduces her power in the relationship. This finding has important consequences for the stability of lesbian couples who have children in this way.

Reports by the Williams Institute further reveal important economic differences among same-sex couples by race. Relative to white couples, black couples are less likely to own their own homes, less likely to be employed, and more likely to live in poverty. In terms of socio-economic characteristics, they have more in common with the black communities in which they live than with the LGBT community overall. For these women, like other LGBT people of color, their sexual orientation does not provide them with a magic pass to the mythical world of rich, white gay affluence.

The women I interviewed are the types of lesbian families that are “invisible” to many LGBT scholars, activists and organization leaders, and one consequence of this invisibility is a failure to understand how they differ from more visible members of the LGBT community and determine which issues are important for their happiness and success. By ignoring LGBT people of color and their families, the movement stifles its own growth and leaves behind significant populations that are very much in need of visibility, advocacy and equal treatment.

Many public policy implications emerge from these data. Because black same-sex couples are more economically disadvantaged on average than are white same-sex couples, at the same time that they are more likely to be raising children, they are disproportionately harmed by laws that limit access of sexual minorities to certain rights, like the ability to foster and adopt children or to include children they co-parent with a same-sex partner on their health insurance plans. Such laws are most prevalent in Southern states with the largest black populations and the highest rates of parenting among black same-sex couples. When we do not understand the totality of who our families are and the needs they have, we reduce the effectiveness of the larger strategies we promote for LGBT empowerment.

A 2009 report by the Human Rights Campaign on LGBT people of color concluded that “diversity is a reality but inclusion is the real challenge.” LGBT people of color are simultaneously present and excluded in the neighborhoods where they live and in mainstream LGBT organizations. They might be more active in promoting LGBT advocacy efforts if they felt those efforts included their voices and incorporated more of the issues that are important to them. My hope is that this work will encourage LGBT organizations to reach out more to people of color, and in collaboration find the best way to integrate the diverse representations of LGBT people in our portraits of the community and better address the multiple and diverse needs that exist.

Mignon Moore is a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women.

Mike O’Malley is a historian at George Mason University and an early innovator in digital media and history. He started experimenting with digital technology in the classroom in 1994, and is starting a grant-funded, open access journal called American History Now. Will this digital model upend the traditional peer review model? And would such a disruption necessarily be negative? Mike tackles those questions here. He blogs at theaporetic.com, where this post originally appeared.

By Mike O’Malley

The Rosen­zweig Cen­ter for His­tory and New Media recently got a grant from Alfred Sloan Foun­da­tion. The “Press For­ward” ini­tia­tive is described here. Part of the grant will estab­lish Amer­i­can His­tory Now, a new kind of pro­fes­sional jour­nal. Yours truly is to be the man­ag­ing editor.

Man­ag­ing edi­tor of what? What do we want a new kind of jour­nal to look like? For a thought­ful detailed exam­i­na­tion of the ques­tions, check out the report of the Schol­arly Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Insti­tute ear­lier this year. Draw­ing on my own dia­logues with other schol­ars and that report, I think Amer­i­can His­tory Now should:

A: make pub­li­ca­tion faster and eas­ier, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing stan­dards of argu­ment and evidence.

B: pro­mote and enable dis­cus­sion of the sub­ject among inter­ested par­ties of all sorts.

To do this we need to rethink what aca­d­e­mic writ­ing and read­ing looks like, and that starts, in my opin­ion, with the awful dis­junc­tion between the way we read and the way we write. In grad school, with lit­tle time and a lot to cover, we learn to read quickly and ruth­lessly. Work life rein­forces this: time is scarce, and lit­er­a­ture is long. Most aca­d­e­mics do a lot of what looks like “skim­ming:” the jaun­diced appraisal of the trained, expe­ri­enced eye.

But per­versely grad school also teaches us to write as if your reader was a per­son of leisure, savor­ing every word, a “lit­er­ary” model rooted in the upper class ori­gins of the pro­fes­sion and bear­ing lit­tle rela­tion to life as we live it. When was the last time you read an arti­cle that “worked” as a piece of lit­er­a­ture? When was the first time?

That’s not the fault of aca­d­e­mics per se–most of us love the writ­ten word. It’s the fault of the mis­match between our expec­ta­tions and expe­ri­ences of read­ing and writ­ing. It’s not unlike “women’s mag­a­zines” that put fab­u­lous recipes next to rig­or­ous diets: con­tra­dic­tory demands pre­sented as nor­mal and inevitable.

Recently I had lunch with an absolutely first rate local his­to­rian. He men­tioned that he had four arti­cle ideas, and the research to sup­port them, but no time, between fam­ily life and other pro­fes­sional oblig­a­tions, to get the work done. Sound famil­iar? Can we make it eas­ier to get that work out?

It’s worth look­ing at what makes pub­lish­ing a jour­nal arti­cle hard.

A lot of it has to do with the form of the arti­cle. A typ­i­cal arti­cle in a major jour­nal has to include a great deal of throat clear­ing and feather-smoothing: it has to sooth both your imme­di­ate peers, the peo­ple who work on the same stuff, but also the outer cir­cle, experts from other areas or other fields. They have to be eased into it: the nature of the his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal ques­tion laid out, the dif­fer­ent schools of thought described. It’s a famil­iar form.

The arti­cle has to present long chains of evi­dence in prose, merged smoothly in a “lit­er­ary” style. This is hard to do and worth doing, but at the same time, a major arti­cle is typ­i­cally 40 pages long because of the evi­dence, which is pre­sented within the arti­cle as prose because at the time the form of the arti­cle was estab­lished, there was no other way to present it. Do we need to have all the evi­dence in the body of the article?

So too the feather-smoothing: it had to be included because jour­nals and jour­nal space were lim­ited com­modi­ties. They had to appeal rel­a­tively broadly across a wide com­mu­nity of scholars. Could we drop it, or rel­e­gate it to a sep­a­rate page?

There is surely room in aca­d­e­mic life for shorter articles. Good aca­d­e­mic writ­ing does not have to be wordy, or long or pompous. Entire aca­d­e­mic rep­u­ta­tions rest on sin­gle para­graphs or pithy sen­tences excerpted from longer works again and again. The stan­dard forms of
aca­d­emic expres­sion were admirably suited to serve the con­text of about 1900, when tele­phones were rare. We should look to estab­lish a form of writ­ing that lessens the gap between the lit­er­ary and the practical.

Imag­ine an arti­cle “nested,” so that it begins with an acces­si­ble syn­op­sis and con­clu­sion, and offers a few exam­ples, but makes the rest of the schol­arly apparatus – the
his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal forced march, the long chain of evidence – available to experts at a
sep­a­rate page. And imag­ine that arti­cle appears with com­ments by peers.

Schol­arly work tends to be soli­tary work and that may always be the case. But at the same time, most of us rel­ish those moments when real schol­arly inter­change takes place. The print jour­nal is very a poor venue for schol­arly inter­change. How long does it take for book reviews to appear? How many let­ters to the edi­tor can it print? Even more, the process of peer review, the most sub­stan­tive intel­lec­tual exchange most of us ever have, is grind­ingly slow and uni­di­rec­tional. It ought to be pos­si­ble to make peer review faster, more effec­tive, and more rewarding.

One model for this might be termed the crowd source model: col­lect all the dig­i­tal work done by human­i­ties schol­ars, and allow so-called rank­ing in use to emerge on its own. For exam­ple, Prof. X writes a blog post, and Amer­i­can His­tory Now notes the post, adds a link, and sends the infor­ma­tion about the post out to its reader. Inter­ested read­ers respond: in very lit­tle time, blog posts that attract a great deal of inter­est would rise to the top of rank­ings at Amer­i­can His­tory Now. No edi­tors, no des­ig­nated for­mal peers, no boards of review.

Because peer review as is doesn’t work all that well. In an ear­lier blog post I suggested:

an inverse rela­tion­ship between peer review and endur­ing intel­lec­tual value. Good work is gen­er­ally good because it has some­thing valu­able to say, not because it has appeased other pro­fes­sors. Work that is good because of peer review is prob­a­bly not very good.

Aban­don­ing our cur­rent model of peer review may seem fright­en­ing, but it’s basi­cally what Google does. What gets you want you are look­ing for more quickly and effectively: Google or the back issues of that jour­nal col­lect­ing dust on your shelf? It’s the model of what
web­sites like The Atlantic do. Blog­ger X posts an arti­cle, and if the arti­cle gen­er­ates a great deal of traf­fic and com­ments, it moves up in the page hier­ar­chy. It’s effec­tively real time peer review. I think this is what the future of work in the human­i­ties will come to look like, but prob­a­bly not for a long time. Human­i­ties schol­ars are highly “dis­ci­plined” peo­ple, in the Fou­cault­ian sense, and it’s very hard to rethink the dis­ci­pli­nary appa­ra­tus that brought us into being.

So Amer­i­can His­tory Now will com­bine sev­eral mod­els. It will include a review digest, culled from com­mer­cial sites like Ama­zon and news­pa­pers as well as blogs and arti­cles on the web. Read­ers can in turn com­ment on these reviews, tak­ing issue with their claims and con­clu­sions, or draw­ing con­nec­tions. It will include shorter arti­cles posted at the editor’s dis­cre­tion, with com­men­tary on the arti­cles by peers. It will include a vet­ted col­lec­tion of blog posts per­tain­ing to US his­tory from around the web, and a sec­tion called “Past Meets Present,” for instances in which politi­cians, celebri­ties and pol­icy wonks invoke his­tory to make their clams: read­ers can respond, com­ment, and critique.

People looking at posters in front of Oakland's city hall. Photo: Rosa Ramirez

By Heather Tirado Giligan

The general strike in Oakland yesterday had the feeling of a street party. The ebullience didn’t seem to suggest that people took the problems facing the 99 percent lightly -  the many people who showed up appeared relieved to have a venue for their frustration. The crowd was genuinely diverse and peaceful. There were many reported incidents of self-policing, where protestors bent on destruction were stopped by people determined to keep the gathering peaceful. Union members showed up in force, as did parents, and the elderly and disabled gathered for a time in break-off protest in front of the state building, just behind City Hall. Crowd estimates for the march to the Port of Oakland vary, as these kinds of guesses do – I saw the numbers put at anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000. I’m not much of a crowd counter myself, but the low range seems unlikely to me. The wave of people flooding into the port were literally jaw-dropping, as the photos here suggest.

The general strikers arrive at the Oakland port. Photo by Callie Shanafelt.

Special thanks to journalists Rosa Ramirez and Callie Shanafelt for permission to use their photos.

Poster by Ronrico via occupytogether.org

Emily Hauser is ambivalent about the OWS movement – but are the police’s actions in Oakland enough to make anyone a convert to the cause? Emily is a freelance writer and social activist. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic online, The Hairpin and Feministe, and in a variety of print outlets, including the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News. She blogs at emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com, crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles, and can be followed on Twitter @emilylhauser.

By Emily L. Hauser

I’m on record as being of at least two minds, if not six or seven, regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I remain ambivalent – confident in my support of many of the individual goals, rather less confident in many of the tactics the movement employs.

And as I’ve said in various places: Nonviolent civil disobedience is disobedience. Complaining about arrest (let’s be honest: whining about arrest) when you’ve been breaking city ordinances for days or weeks on end in order to make a socio-political point is not only disingenuous, it’s self-defeating. Arrests are, in no small part, the point of civil disobedience.

And yet, having said that: the Oakland Police Department came down like a fist on Occupy Oakland, greeting the nonviolent protesters in riot gear (translation: spoiling for a fight), ultimately unleashing tear gas, projectiles euphemistically known as “bean bags” and flash grenades (also known as “flash-bangs,” if I understand correctly).

Photo via buzzfeed

The rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech are enshrined in our Constitution; the right to endlessly “occupy” public property, thus rendering it useless to other members of the public and/or creating health and sanitation issues, is not. The latter does not negate the former, however. Arrests are reasonable when people refuse to leave public property. Creating mayhem is not.

I cannot conceive of a better way for the Oakland Police Department to increase support for the Occupy movement.

I’m the first to say that this movement shouldn’t be compared to the revolutions in the Middle East or the Palestinian resistance, not least because the Occupy folks have the right to vote, haven’t been tortured, aren’t facing live fire, and need not fear that having their picture taken might result in summary execution. These differences matter, and the problems America faces are big enough without having to engage in blatant disrespect for the struggles of others.

Photo via buzzfeed.

But another reason that Occupy Oakland (or Wall Street, or Atlanta, or Chicago, or wherever) isn’t Tahrir Square is because Americans have every right in the world to feel genuine shock at being met with tear gas and “bean bags” on their streets.

If the Oakland Police Department’s goal was “not as bad as the Middle East,” well then, I guess they succeeded. Well done and kudos! But I was rather of the opinion that the goal was something more along the lines of “maintain American norms and values and act in concert, however imperfectly, to perfect our union.”

I’m on record as saying that I probably won’t join the protests for a variety of reasons, at least one of which is very personal.

But you know what? If I lived in Oakland, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be blogging right now. I have a feeling I’d be making a sign, and packing a few onions in my bag.

The Palestinians say that when you get hit with tear gas, you should hold an onion to your nose.

Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer and social activist. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic online, The Hairpin and Feministe, and in a variety of print outlets, including the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News. She blogs at emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com, crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles, and can be followed on Twitter @emilylhauser.

By Emily Hauser

Many years ago, a friend of my brother’s sat in a tiny Washington DC living room and said “I’m perfectly capable of contradicting myself. I have a bicameral mind” — the reference, of course, being to our bicameral (two chambers) national legislature. The name of the friend is now lost in the sands of time, but the exquisite level of geeky self-mockery has stuck with me through the years. Because my mind is at least bicameral. It might be pentacameral, or octacameral.

It certainly is (decacameral?) with regards to the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which is why I haven’t written about it up to now. I am of far too many minds about the whole thing to come up with anything really coherent.

On the one hand, I certainly agree with the fury that has brought people out onto the streets across the nation — I, too, am furious (click here for just a few reasons why). I am a firm and involved supporter of grassroots activism, and of nonviolent civil disobedience. I believe that the issues involved go to the very heart of the American Idea and, indeed, simple human ethics. I am a person who is greatly moved by courage and passion, and the willingness to stand still in the face of injustice and simply say “Enough.”

At the same time, after years of grassroots activism, I am weary and beyond weary of the watering down of crucial messages by sideshow antics — and yes, I am being judgmental. Perceptions really do matter and if you look like or behave like a bunch of unwashed hippies with nothing better to do, you will not move the masses in the numbers that you need to. Plain and simple. Men need to put on a tie or at least a shirt with a collar, women need to dress in a way that wouldn’t make their grandmas blush, and everyone needs to pull their hair back. If you want people to respect you, you have to look respectable, even though that totally sucks and isn’t fair. (And for the love of God, get more people of color at the front of the crowd!)

I’m further — and more deeply — weary of fucking nonsense. Such as (but one example): There has been some resistance to using the Occupy protests as a gathering point to register new voters, because a lot of people across the Occupy spectrum are ideological non-voters.

Okee-dokee then. A) Thanks for eight years of Bush-Cheney and the current bicameral clusterfuck, and B) It is your constitutional right to make that choice, and I will fight to the death for your right to do so. But there are forces working very hard to deprive you of that right. There is absolutely zero risk that you will be forced to vote or even to register — please, for the love of God, get out of the way of the people who want to try to make our democracy work.

Moreover, some of the nonsense is plainly self-defeating: Occupy Atlanta not giving the mic to civil rights giant John Lewis — a man who survived the Freedom Rides even as friends and fellow travelers were murdered — because his schedule clashed with that of the consensus process, for one.

For two: Acting like if you camp out in a public park, contrary to city ordinances, you will not eventually be told to leave — and, more to the point, not training your people to be prepared for just that eventuality and the inevitable arrests.

Do you think that Rosa Parks was literally, as the Neville Brothers sang, “tired one day/ after a hard day on her job/ When all she wanted was a well deserved rest/ Not a scene from an angry mob”? Dude — Rosa Parks trained for a scene from an angry mob! Like everyone deeply involved in the civil rights movement, Parks had in fact trained to be arrested, and she was chosen to perform that heroic task — in no small part because perceptions matter, and she was deemed a highly sympathetic figure.

And then there’s a personal issue.

Bluntly put: If a group of New York-living Israelis were to show up to join the spirit of Israel’s J14 social protests to that of Occupy Wall Street, they would be met with vociferous, and likely ugly, rejection. Them’s just facts. There have been several remarkable and worthy Jewish-specific contributions to the protests, but should someone decide to self-identify as a Zionist? God help that someone. And that makes me sad and angry, and will likely keep me away, bottom line. I am a pro-Palestinian Zionist with a desire to cross the miles and cultural differences between my two countries’ social movements — but just like I know that my Palestinian flag would get me hounded out of an AIPAC meeting, my Israeli flag would get me hounded out of Occupy Wall Street.

And so: I will watch from the side, and support specific efforts, possibly with direct action. I’m thinking of getting involved with voter registration anyway, whether at a protest or not, as that strikes me as going to the very heart of the Occupy matter: Elections have consequences. I would like to see the next few elections swing a more socially just direction.

But having said all that, there is still much that inspires and moves me coming out of the Occupy movement, such as the shouts of “We Are! The 99%!”, and not least this new Tumblr: “We are the 1%. We Stand with the 99%.”

The above image comes from that Tumblr account, and I highly recommend that you click here to check out the other entries — it’s an exercise in remembering that humanity’s better angels reside at all socio-economic levels.

Poster by Raina Dayne via occupytogether.org.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the occupiers don’t have a nicely polished plan of action, says Mary Keck. In fact, the openness to evolving platforms and solutions may be its greatest asset. Mary Keck is an instructor of English and Gender Studies as well as an associate editor of Southern Indiana Review. As a freelance journalist and fiction writer, she explores issues of class, labor, and gender in contemporary American life. Read her Open Salon blog, where this piece originally appeared.

By Mary Keck

Bill Maher whined about pronouncing “Occupy Wall Street” recently on Real Time. For him, five syllables across three words are a mouthful with too much substance and not enough sound bite.

His jibes reflect the anxiety pundits experience trying to categorize OWS. Some say it is like the response to the Vietnam War, while others draw similarities to the Tea Party. The occupation spreading across the United States has been equated to many other protests, but its amorphous structure and methodology defy easy comparisons.

With a closer look, one can see that the occupation’s agenda does not emphasize individualism like the Tea Party. Rather, it insists on compassion for one’s fellow citizens. According to the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, they speak “as one people, united,” and they believe “the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members.”

The unity expressed in this declaration resists categorical analysis in part because this organization’s demands can’t be satisfied by outdated methods of representative governance. It is important to remember that our democracy’s founders didn’t have a draft of the Constitution written when they began their campaign, nor could they refer to civil disobedience exemplars like Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that the occupiers do not have a nicely polished plan of action. In fact, the openness to evolving platforms and solutions may be its greatest asset.

OWS’s resistance to definition demonstrates a 21st century mindset. Our founders’ overthrow of monarchial rule was an advanced notion at the time. Likewise, this occupation may mean a true revolution that posits a contemporary alternative to democracies modeled on ancient Rome, and so a resort to an upsetting and untried structure shouldn’t surprise us.

The existing rule of the land does not appeal to OWS citizens who are fed up with the failure of both Republicans and Democrats to represent majority interests. Glenn Greenwald explains, “efforts to exploit these protests into some re-branded Obama 2012 crusade” will meet with little success because alleged “progressives” have betrayed the American people. The occupation does not have goals easily divided along profit-driven, two-party lines. Even its methods do not reflect a business as usual mentality. As Andrea Schmidt’s recent blog post points out, the use of a “human mic” shows a desire for a more “direct democratic process.”

Like some women’s movements, Occupy Wall Street’s fluid composition has resisted the traditional hierarchical schema. Members are treated with fairness, varying perspectives are readily heard, and no single leader has emerged. This structural alternative to patriarchy would truly be different from our current phallically-shaped governing body, which places our president at the top of the pyramid as “commander-in-chief.” The citizen’s voices are far below, removed from him by the bickering and posturing of the House and the Senate made up of representatives who do not reflect or symbolize the diverse majority for whom they purport to speak.

Unlike the documents of our founders, this occupation’s declaration incorporates the views of individuals who are not rich, white, or male. For example, the protesters feel that corporations have “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.” Voices of many disenfranchised groups are heard in the sentiments of OWS, and in fact, the movement embodies traits of many who have been oppressed by a privately funded democracy.

Their environmental interests show qualities classically labeled as feminine, for instance. The occupiers believe corporations have “poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.” This perspective comes from a collective epiphany that recognizes homo sapiens’ connection with nature and stresses the significance of relationships, a characteristic also often associated with women.

Interconnectivity is advocated by eco-feminists like Vandana Shiva of the Earth Democracy movement, “which provides an alternative worldview in which humans are embedded in the Earth Family.” OWS extends Shiva’s ideas to argue that Wall Street is not only connected to Main Street but also to the rural routes and all of the earth surrounding the roadsides.

The activists see a deliberate affront to that connectivity when the government “continue[s] to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.” Reforms packaged in Tar Sands exploration, so-called clean coal technology, and XL Pipeline landscapes are not acceptable. Instead, the way of the Occupy Wall Street crowd is to redesign our use, creation, and storage of energy through truly innovative means such as efficient technologies, bio-mimicry, and self-sustainability.

These activists are also thinking of connections beyond our national borders, arguing that the government has “perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad [and has] participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.” These declarations of international peace were birthed by an organization that shows a dedication to nonviolence not only in their statements but also through their methods of protest. This platform against aggression and violence is another example of this movement’s break from typically masculine notions.

On the other hand, there are also traits associated with men to be found in our occupiers. Mainly, in their stereotypical desire for power. Not the power of one, but of many who are unified around a common concern: mass injustice.

Due to its androgynous structure and methods, it seems that OWS desires something new, something “radically democratic,” Paul Rosenberg says. Therefore, it is no surprise when pundits struggle with the complexity of this movement, for it is not typical of the simple, black and white world in which they thrive. Instead this occupation reflects a multicolored, multidimensional, and multifaceted reality.

As Paul Krugman noted recently, the plutocrats are panicking as a citizenry previously fast asleep has awakened and will no longer consume, work, and keep quiet. But the occupiers of Wall Street may have more planned than fixing a system rigged in favor of the wealthy. The specter of a democracy that does not operate on binaries and see gender, race, and age as flexible may also haunt supporters of the status quo.

While a movement in resistance to patriarchy strikes fear into Wall Street, the protesters have allies like Cornel West who encourages us, “Don’t be afraid to say revolution.”

These modern activists don’t seem at all frightened, and they shouldn’t be. If the pundits and politicians want to disrupt this movement, they’ll have to first catch up to OWS’s nuanced worldview.

Photo: herzogbr/Flickr

Poor people have air-conditioning and X-Boxes. Some even have the internet. What more could they want? A lot more, says sociologist Phillip Cohen, who offers a Google-assisted glimpse into the lives of poor mothers in the great recession. Philip is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He blogs at Family Inequality.

By Philip Cohen

In light of the mean-spirited Obama-wants-everyone-on-food-stamps meme, and the Heritage Foundation’s mocking attack on poor people as air-conditioned, Xbox-loving couch potatoes, let’s consider something else about poor single parents — especially poor mothers: their Google searches.

That’s right, in addition to refrigerators, apparently almost everyone in America today has Internet access — often at their local public libraries.

And yet they still complain about their little problems. They type searches into Google like, “help paying electric bill,” “hair falling out,” and even — presumably so they can laugh at the poor suckers who actually work for a living — “walmart jobs.”

The old “misery index” was just unemployment plus inflation. Maybe the new index to watch is Google searches for “help for single mothers.” Here is the trend for that search, along with one of the searches that most closely follows its trend, “walmart jobs.” The temporal correlation between these two — the amount they rise and fall together over time — is .96 on a scale of 0 to 1.

You can see the full list of 100 searches most correlated with “help for single mothers” here.

After the poverty report came out last month, comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, “One in six Americans is living in poverty, but the other five are more concerned about the changes to Facebook.” Whether you’re in the first group or the latter one — or neither — it’s worth pausing for a minute to think about the lives of people Googling things like, “help with rent,” “iud side effects,” “cheap dinner ideas” and “get a credit card with bad credit.” (The searches all correlate with “help for single mothers” at .94 or higher.)

A similar list comes up in the correlations with searches for “food stamps.” Here it is graphed with “housekeeping jobs,” correlated at .97:

The list of correlated searches is similar, including a preponderance of women’s health terms (“clots during period”) economic crises (“light bill”), and ideas for climbing out of an economic hole (“medical assistant jobs,” “dispatcher jobs”).

On the plus side, both of these trends peaked in mid-2010, for now. So maybe things have stopped getting worse quite so fast. Or maybe they just lost their Internet access at the library due to budget cuts.

Am I being selective, not reporting the searches like “loving this cool TV,” and “food stamps rule”? Not intentionally, but you never know. The links to the searches are above, and the data is free.