It means something if you look at a Facebook page and every administrator on there is white. We have a lot of black women marching but I think what we have to be very careful about is the imagery that we send. Well who do I reach out to and how do I go to the churches–you wouldn’t have to have this conversation at all if you had the right people at the table. So it’s not “their neighborhood.” Sometimes we use language and we don’t even know it’s divisive.
“Well, we wanna get in their neighborhoods and show that we care about them.” Their neighborhoods? There are white people in Ward 7 and Ward 8 now, newsflash. So you need somebody like me in the room to say that’s code.
One of the hard things is saying things like “You know, we really want to reach out to Ward 7 and Ward 8,” which is code for where black people live. That’s not good, in Washington, DC–you throw a rock you hit a black person. So, one of wonderful things in having diverse people in the room, in having me in the room we have a couple women of color there–around the table is about 15 people. I think some of the trouble that the local women’s march having is reaching Wards that they don’t frequent. What have been the challenges the DC team has faced? We want women at the table shaping global and domestic policy and we want them at the table in the same number in which they are proportionate in society. It’s a show of strength in numbers and unity, we’re very clear about what we want. It’s very important that you guys know what our agenda is, and I can’t say it enough: THIS IS NOT A PROTEST MARCH. They’ve done very well, they’ve brought a lot of things to the attention of national like security, to the fact that they’re gonna have people infiltrating the march pretending that they’re marchers. I have to tell you, DC is very, very organized. You have your leadership group which is about five and you probably have a good 50-60 on different teams working like a well oiled machine. So I said let’s remove all the language, let’s stop talking about the ugly things someone might have said and let’s start talking about women pooling together to get women elected.Ĭan you tell me a bit about the Women’s March team in DC? How many organizers are there? But what they can do, is when things don’t turn out like you want it can catalyze you into doing something bigger and better. Elections don’t always turn out like you want. Let’s make it bigger than either candidate. So I contacted the national office to ask, “How could I be involved at either a national or regional level?” And it took them a while to work it out but I ended up going to one of the local meetings “Look, we need to pull all of the language off of the website that says anything about protesting Donald Trump.” Let’s make this bigger than this election. I looked at the march and initially I said, “I don’t want to protest anything.” To me, just protesting is not productive. You can’t focus on “I’m an African American” and not focus on “I’m a woman.” It’s very important for women to pull together and empower one another, and I’m not sure we’re always programmed to do that. I’m very active in the community, so I wanted to mobilize women for it, particularly in my group, African American women, to say “Hey, are you guys gonna march?” Because, you know, I believe that racism and sexism and all your “-isms” run in packs. And I noticed that they had, you know, they had Maryland and they had Virginia but they didn’t have DC. I knew there was gonna be a Women’s March so I went on to the national page to learn more about it. How did you get involved with the Women’s March? Mercy Morganfield, one of the organizers for DC, has been leading local efforts to mobilize women and improve the march’s inclusiveness. Only a few days before this huge march, she sat down with Washingtonian to encourage everyone to join. With New York organizers rallying participants from around the country, the Washington contingent has been working around the clock to get the word out. Like many DC residents, the Women’s March on Washington is a transplant.
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