I received no shortage of assistance to hold up my Palestinian flag on Saturday’s rallies, though I also received no shortage of inquiries as to what that flag actually was. News reels after the event mirrored the speaker line-up that had headlined Scarlett Johannsen and Madonna, leaving Angela Davis as an afterthought. America’s reputedly largest march in history was also amongst its tamest. No arrests were made, no riots were disintegrated, and not one window was broken.
This was interpreted, through numerous articles and bits of amateur political and social commentary, as unassailable evidence of the inherent alabaster peacefulness of women. Unfortunately, this elitist assessment ignored the social and racial realities that separated the ladies parade from “riots”.
“At one point,” writes an Indian-American woman on PopSugar, “Madonna confessed to fantasizing blowing up the white house.” Reporting that the cops just “swayed their feet and looked bored,” she asks, “What if she had been Black or Muslim and saying these things?”
The series of marches constituted a transcontinental pussy-hatted and postered parade, where, on multiple aloof silences were punctuated by cliched chants appropriately summarizing the modus operandi of the white liberal woman, the scores of which, nationwide, avoided the fates, collectively, that the likes of Sandra Bland suffered alone.
“I can’t keep quiet,” they chanted in unison–unaware that, rather, the relative homogeneity of the congregation unintentionally silenced voices that failed to confirm to the neo-liberal echo-chamber.
While I was happy to stand in unison with others equally as disdainful that an overly theatric, inarticulate sex offender now holds the most powerful office in the world (a microcosm of the unassailable grip toxic masculinity has upon our global society), I wish there was the same resistance directed at the left-of-center architects whose corporate subservience and equally irresponsible austerity policies catalyzed the outcomes.
Of course, even Hillary Clinton, a cunning, calculated Thatcherite Kissinger of our times, begrudgingly earned my vote. Next to Trump, I suddenly became concerned for the status-quo welfare of this nation and rushed to cast my vote for an opportunist shill I inundated my wall with articles and posts exposing and criticizing just months earlier.
Yet the post-election reality check-which involved a much needed conversation on the restructuring of the Democratic party that was so needed-and actually articulated by Michael Moore during DC’s rally- was, for the most part, from the marches. Not only was the systemic corruption of the DNC ignored, but rather, Clinton continued to be canonized as the de-facto mascot of the marches and bastion for feminism and civil liberties.
Yet it is undeniable that, before we allow ourselves to reprise cold-war era hostilities, that we also criticize, rather than galvanize, the party platform that operated the most overtly corrupt campaign in the past decade.
Us colored women, for a change, should stand together front and center in that struggle.
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