"Swing Low, White Women"

"An attempt to vest a nineteenth-century radical black woman with the accoutrement of twenty-first century mainstream white feminism misses the mark by evoking a false comparison. The statue of Tubman depicts her in the act of one of her several emancipatory journeys. In her dress we see embedded the faces of enslaved people she helped to free, at personal risk to herself. Behind her are the “roots of slavery” attempting to drag her back. Women’s March attendees generally occupy a place that is safe enough that they voluntarily bring their children with them. The vast majority of participants (myself included) are privileged in one or more ways, and extremely so by comparison. While not explicit, the image brings up the comparison of white women’s oppression to slavery – an argument resurrected from white liberalism’s antislavery past. Then and now, the too-easy comparison of Tubman’s struggle to that of free white women elides black women’s presence and activism... 

those shortcomings range from de-centering, omitting, and silencing women of color’s voices to the prioritization of biological sex and subsequent exclusion of transgender women to individual accounts of microaggression like the one I encountered last year. And they are utterly, utterly unsurprising to women of color in 2018."

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2018/01/22/swing-low-white-women/

FB: "When one 2018 attendee claims in her sign, “If Hilary was president we would all be at brunch right now,” women of color know who the “we” here is and wonder how deliberate that “we” is in imagining that a white woman president would miraculously leave nothing left to protest."