Okay, let’s get to some of your recent mail. At least your mail that was recent about a month or so ago when i started listing and discussing my various biases and assumptions. So there were a bunch of women’s marches held across the country, the exact point of which remained unclear even after having heard numerous explanations proffered by potential participants. One particularly honest explanation, and the one that makes the most sense to me, was, “It just makes us feel better, and ______ really wants to do it, because we’re trying to be supportive of her…” Et cetera. Which is fine for those who need that sort of thing. But you know what I think of marches, so there’s that.
The problem here started when a week before the march, the organizers cancelled the march. Because too many white people were going to show up. Yeah. Of course, the organizers attempted to dance around the blatant racism of their behavior being trying to hide behind the “inclusive” language of the politically inept: “Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community. Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.” What a load of shit. They cancelled the event because too many white people were going to show up. Well, fuuuuuuuck you, ya racist beezies. Which is my reworded summary of much of the immediate push-back the organizers received when the cancellation made the national news, so they felt compelled to further explain their racist actions: “The organizers of the Eureka Women’s March in Humboldt County, California, are moving the focus towards an event date on March 9th, in conjunction with International Women’s Day, to ensure that the people most impacted by systems of oppression have an opportunity to participate in planning. We failed to have the type of collaboration needed to be inclusive of some of the most underrepresented voices in our community, namely, women of color and people who are gender non-conforming.”
How can you expect whomever you’re expecting to take your march seriously when the organizers themselves clearly don’t take it very seriously at all.
This particular march was planned in Humboldt County, which is a few hours north of Anhedonia. I’ve been there several times. They grow good shit up there. And according to the Census Bureau, is 74% non-Hispanic white, so I’m not sure exactly whom you were expecting to show up to your bullshitty march in the first place, but if you weren’t looking for white people, you probably should have done some better research and planning. But the egregious racism and poor planning abilities are not the real issue here: those things can usually be expected by the sorts of people and organizations that plan (and then cancel) marches. Here are some thoughts in random order:
These people have obviously never been in the military, a street fight, or lived in a country where an actually oppressive and corrupt government is actively making life so unbelievably intolerable for its people that those people decide to take to the streets to fight the government because they cannot bear the thought of the sun rising on another day of this wretched oppression, et cetera. In those circumstances, the demographics of who shows up to help you fight is so completely unimportant that it doesn’t even register. If your “cause” is the sort of thing that can be postponed until the optics more properly serve a not-so-hidden agenda, then it is obviously not a very important cause. And it is a very clear signal that the organizers place a great many petty and irrelevant things higher on the importance list than women’s rights. They are not there to help you, they are there for a photo op that serves their own agenda(s), and if they can’t get that photo, then you’re on your own, sister.
If the causes cited for the march were legitimate, if there was actual intolerable government oppression going on, if actual rights were being denied, the organizers would never have cancelled it because they were worried about the optics not matching the fictional narrative they are trying to put forth as truth. And if they had, all the white people who had participated up to that point and whom were planning on showing up to the march would have said, “Fuck these bigoted assholes…they don’t even live here…we’re marching, as planned, only now we have another oppressive group to protest: the racist organizers of the old march.” But instead they just got sad and enrolled in poetry classes at the community college.
Anyway, you wanted to know what I thought, that’s it. I think if you feel compelled to take to the streets for whatever reason, then do it. But don’t show up to someone else’s photo op because it makes you feel like you’re doing something. If you actually want to start to affect real change, address only your own agenda. Lose the group. And don’t plan on wasting much time marching around with strongly worded signs.
N.P.: “You Haven’t Done Nothin'” – Stevie Wonder
