We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights. We must create a society in which women - including Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian queer and trans women - are free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments.
Other important issues on their platform include:
- ENDING VIOLENCE.
Support increased accountability for perpetrators of police brutality and racial profiling. Also calls for the demilitarization of American law enforcement and an end to mass incarceration.
- REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS.
Support access to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health care to demand the right to abortion for women of all incomes.
- LGBTQIA RIGHTS.
Gender-affirming identity documents for LGBTQ people.
- WORKER’S RIGHTS.
Calls unions “critical to a healthy and thriving economy” and aligns the march with movements for the rights of sex workers, farmworkers, and domestic workers.
- CIVIL RIGHTS.
- DISABILITY RIGHTS.
- IMMIGRANT RIGHTS.
“We believe migration is a human right and that no human being is illegal.”
- ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE.
All these issues are important for the vast majority of generic public – I mean, with women being 50+% of population and civil and workers rights affecting virtually anyone, that’s how I see it. Organizers have laid out an unapologetically radical, progressive vision for justice in America, placing the march in the context of other past and ongoing movements for equality.
Unfortunately, the March is facing real dangers even before it’s start. And I’m not talking about threats and stuff coming from supporters of Which Should Not Be Named here. No. Sadly, the danger comes from within the feminist movement itself.
The march started out as a general pro-women event that seemed to want to be everything to everyone, and in the process, set itself up to disappoint everyone: both apolitical women who just like marching and people who wanted to make a stronger statement.
When Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, the NAACP, and other organizations with explicitly political agendas started coming aboard last month, it became clear that the march was planning on sacrificing mass appeal for the chance to use its hypervisibility in support of critical, if controversial, issues. Some white women have even decided not to attend the march because they were uncomfortable with discussions about race and privilege that arose on the march’s official Facebook page.
That’s just fine. And if some women decide they can’t get behind Medicaid-covered abortions, a humane immigration system, and police who answer for their crimes against people of color, the march won’t miss them. The leaders of the Women’s March should be applauded for taking an uncompromising stance on the most urgent political matters of our time, even if it means internal conflict among march participants or a diminished turnout. Now is not the time for uncritical mass appeal, and marches are terrible vehicles for equivocation.
Here are relevant parts from the NY Times article highlighting the controversy:
In Louisiana, the first state coordinator gave up her volunteer role in part because there were no minority women in leadership positions at that time.
“I got a lot of flak locally when I stepped down, from white women who said that I’m alienating a lot of white women,” said Candice Huber, a bookstore owner in New Orleans, who is white. “They said, ‘Why do you have to be so divisive?’”
In some ways, the discord is by design. Even as they are working to ensure a smooth and unified march next week, the national organizers said they made a deliberate decision to highlight the plight of minority and undocumented immigrant women and provoke uncomfortable discussions about race.
“This was an opportunity to take the conversation to the deep places,” said Linda Sarsour, a Muslim who heads the Arab American Association of New York and is one of four co-chairwomen of the national march. “Sometimes you are going to upset people.”
And at a time when a presidential candidate ran against political correctness and won — with half of white female voters supporting him — is this the time to tone down talk about race or to double down?
So, I ask you – what’s better? A broad platform plus vide inclusiveness or the laser like powerful forcefulness with voices ignored before brought in the fore for a change?
I'm really grateful to see they've firmed up the message and don't seem interested in watering it down. That'll go a long way to being helpful. I don't care if they talk about privileged white women or not; I care that, as far as human rights go, if it's acceptable to treat all women as true human beings with indelible rights, the white women of privilege will benefit by default. The reverse has not, historically, held true. Granted, the more intersectional the movements get, the better off they'll be for the future, but now is the time for a tight focus on the important issues.
