Why Some Might Consider Sitting Out Today's Women's March

Yeah, I know that the government has shut down....I'll deal with that in the coming days depending on how long it lasts...but there is another Women's March today and I found this editorial by S. T. Holloway particulary interesting....She brings up some very good points..

"Please do not misunderstand. My disappointment had little to do with my sign and chants themselves. It had to do with what white women’s intentional decision to ignore them represented. It represented the continued neglect, dismissal and disregard of the issues affecting black women and other women of color. 

It is the type of disregard evidenced by the scene at another protest held in the same exact location a couple of years earlier. In 2014, I, along with several hundred other people, marched in protest against the shooting of Ezell Ford, an unarmed black man killed by the Los Angeles police just days after the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And whereas the Women’s March felt like a mosh pit, the Ford protest felt more like an empty parking lot, with protesters walking freely down open streets alongside normal traffic, their movements unrestricted by a voluminous crowd."

"While there were certainly some white allies present joining their voices in solidarity, noticeably absent from the Ford protest were the throngs of white women I saw at the Women’s March: the soccer moms, the college students, the housewives with their children in tow, the grandmothers, the career women, the retirees and so on."

"Instead, the majority of those present were the regulars, black and brown folks, and in particular, women. On that day, as we have before and have since, we found ourselves alone in our pain. We found ourselves alone in our pleas and cries for justice, for the end to the killing of our children and husbands and fathers and brothers, for the cessation of the systematic dismantling of our families, and for recognition that our lives and the lives of the ones we love do matter.

This willful blind eye, this deliberate ignorance, fosters a culture where millions protest when white women’s access to health care is threatened, but when black maternal death rates in the United States are on par with women in countries like Mexico and Uzbekistan, there is no national outrage or call for reform or worldwide protest."

"It is these issues affecting women of color, along with the effects of mass incarceration on our communities, the rate at which our children are disproportionately punished in schools, the lack of access to quality and affordable health care, the threat of destroying families as a result of deportation, the disproportionately high number of black trans women that are murdered, and so on, that are often met by deafening silence by our white sisters."

My Frat brother Kwame Jackson said it better-

 “Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, yet here we all are at a march, protesting the person you put in office, and we can’t even get you to affirm that yes, black lives do matter. It’s indicative of an overall trend of black women showing up for this nation, while continuously having their own issues and concerns summarily dismissed.”

It is these lingering issues that have not...but must be addressed seriously if we are to build serious coalations on the left and beat back this current right wing takeover in our government!