Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you’ve almost definitely heard about the Women’s March that took place the day after the Presidential Inauguration. Sister marches sprung up in solidarity across all seven continents; this was the biggest inaugural protest in American history.
That does not, however, automatically make it the most inclusive. I personally elected not to go, and I know many other women who chose to do the same. Not because we don’t believe in protesting. And not because we don’t believe in feminism. Because this protest was profoundly flawed in a way that made a lot of us feel too uncomfortable, too conflicted, or too unsafe to attend.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of activism in its various forms. I love protests. I’m planning on building my entire career around social justice. I knew this moment would be in my future children’s history books, and I would have loved to be a part of it. But quite frankly, this movement didn’t feel like it was meant for me, and as much as I wish I could have gone, I also understand that not going was the right decision for me.
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge that my decision not to go is a testament to privileges that I have been granted in this society. There are a great many individuals who would not have been able to attend this event whether or not they would have wanted to, for various reasons. For instance, as an able-bodied person, a march is a physically accessible form of protest for me, but that is not the case for everyone. The status of my mental health and comfort is not adversely affected by being present at a protest. The march was more easily accessible for middle to upper class women because of the financial choices that may have gone into attending, e.g., missing work, travel expenses, childcare, etc. None of these factors hindered me from attending, but they posed problems for many others, and those are major issues that could have been more carefully heeded by this movement.
Furthermore, the pussyhats and other symbols of that nature ultimately took up too much space in the movement. While I do agree that the reproductive systems of people with uteruses and vaginas have a valid and necessary place in the conversation, much of the narrative around the march conflated childbearing with womanhood in a way that is neither inclusive nor fair. For one thing, not all women are capable of having children. Not all women have vaginas. Not all people with vaginas are women. Yet this critically important nuance was erased from the mainstream notion of womanhood that was so aggressively championed by the movement. I do not know a single trans or nonbinary individual who attended the march and did not say that they felt erased or excluded.
The same is true for the women of color I’ve spoken to. As a black and native woman, I did not feel comfortable attending this march for a number of reasons. I know the history of black women in protest, and it is often a dangerous one. The fact that the police presence was as nonthreatening as it was at this march is largely because the movement was geared overwhelmingly toward white, middle class (predominantly cis and predominantly straight) women. That’s why it’s so frustrating to a lot of women of color when we hear people bragging about how there were no arrests. Had that march been predominantly made up of women of color, there is not a doubt in my mind that the police presence would have been decked out in riot gear instead of cute little pink hats with cat ears. In the event that there had been some sort of property damage or violence at the march and it had gotten out of hand, I was apprehensive about whether the whiteness of this event would present me with a force field or a larger problem. I didn’t know whether my blackness would make me easier to single out and target among the sea of white bodies, or whether the event would be inherently safer because the police would not be as concerned by the demographic most present. I also had to wonder about whether or not it was safe for me to be present in such an overwhelmingly white event, because white spaces are not always safe for me. I had a very real fear of attending this event — and posts that I saw on social media after the fact, recounting cases of harassment and assault inflicted upon black and indigenous women by other protests, confirmed that these apprehensions were not unfounded.
One of the biggest reasons I heard from women of color who did not attend was a collective sentiment of pain, frustration, and anger that it took while women feeling personally affected for a movement of this scale to take place. Women of color have been protesting, fighting, and struggling for hard-won rights for decades upon decades in this country, without nearly this level of support. In short, the most succinct way to convey this sentiment can be expressed in three words: “Where were you?” Where were you when we were fighting, where were you when we were being brutally attacked for protesting peacefully, where were you when your privilege would have made it safer for you to be out here than it was for us? Where have you been?
That said, my personal outrage at the exclusive nature of this event does not mean that I do not want people to get on board and continue making progressive change. I have no doubt that there are people outside my personal circle who attended the march and didn’t feel the way I or my trans and POC friends did. That’s completely valid. My objective is not to undermine the positive sentiments surrounding the march, but to draw attention to the nuanced and diverse perspectives that are out there. There’s room for everyone’s responses in this conversation, and I think it’s necessary to make sure as many voices as possible are being heard. And furthermore, recognizing that many of these individuals are late in joining the struggle does not mean that I am not willing to work with them simply because they haven’t been here from day one. This march was objectively iconic, and I am hopeful that this momentum will continue well into the future.