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Women’s March Conference in Detroit (Day 2)
This morning the conference began with an opening panel discussion about an important buzz word, intersectionality. Essentially, this means all groups and interests coming together to do their own thing, but do it while acknowledging all others who are doing other things. No one person has only one interest, so we may certainly be involved in more than one interest or activist group. There is value in all of them and we need to support each other.
I’m summarizing an entire session, but this is what I heard and I agree with the sentiment. I am struggling a bit with how this seems to be playing out in action at the conference. I’m troubled by what feels like a co-opting or marginalizing of white women’s place in this resistance movement.
I understand that communities of color, and women of color particularly, have been fighting their own resistance movement separate from (actually excluded from, in fact) the white women’s resistance. There’s some feeling that white women have mostly just joined the fight since the election of Donald Trump. But that narrative discounts the individual and collective fights white women have been fighting for an equal seat at the table during our entire country’s existence. This isn’t something new!
This attitude that we should not only appreciate, but agree to follow where persons of color lead this fight is actually discounting what a huge segment of society has accomplished. And it feels like my experience in dealing with sexism in my own life is being discounted, too. I think this attitude doesn’t walk the walk of intersectionality and is divisive.
I’ll be thinking more about this over time, but for now, that’s the best I can articulate what I’m feeling.
That said, there are some great things going on here! After the opening session (sorry, no pictures), Adair and I went to a fundraising breakout. This was helpful and provided some online tools to look at for facilitating this essential task. Legal/tax structures for managing/reporting the money weren’t addressed, though.
Next was the Sojourner Truth lunch, honoring Congresswoman Maxine Waters. We picked up sandwiches and such on the way into the hall. The lead-ins that went on while we were eating were good: a performance by “Mama Soul” and her musical accompaniment, then a young woman reciting the “Ain’t I a woman” speech by Sojourner Truth.
After a few other speakers, Maxine Waters was introduced and the crowd responded! The hall was much more full than yesterday and it felt good to be part of such a great gathering.
Maxine Waters is not afraid to tell it like it is. She’s been around long enough to have seen and know she doesn’t have to put up with the indignities and just plain craziness that yes, men, put forth. As they said, she’s not afraid to speak truth to power, and she gave a powerful speech. The media will certainly key in on the chant she led to “Impeach 45!” (I admit, I joined in! 😉 ), but before that, she brought up a litany of some of the crazy things that have been happening since Trump’s been in office, and by laying them out all together, shows just how crazy it’s all really been.
After this, Adair and I headed for a session about engaging new voters in 2018. Leah Greenburg from Indivisible was on the panel, along with a couple of elected officials and a couple of other folks. This session wasn’t very focused. While some good points were made, it devolved at times into personal political preferences and disagreements.
By this time it was about 3 PM and Adair and I agreed we were ready for a break. We headed back to the hotel and then on to walk around the area a little bit.
I know it’s Saturday, but this area of town just seems deserted. I guess that’s not an illusion, based on all I know has been going on with Detroit losing population so drastically, but it’s kind of eerie to see.
Anyway, we walked a few blocks and found a good restaurant where we had an early dinner.Neither one of us felt like going back to the conference, so we just ended up staying in for the night. I did a lot of catching up on emails and reading news stories, so I won’t have so much to catch up on once I get home. I’ve done some packing and will finish in the morning because we’ll need to check out before heading to the conference.
I’m thinking we probably won’t stay for all the events, as we’d like to do a bit of a survey of the town, but we’ll see. In any case, we’ll be heading to the airport at about 2 PM and then will be back home tomorrow night! Apparently we missed a sleet storm there and will be heading back as the weather warms up again. Nice!
