The future of the left is female

If there was an over-representation of “nice white ladies” marching, it’s important to note that those white women were showing up for a march led by nonwhite women, in support of a radical and intersectional set of policy principles laid out by nonwhite women, carrying signs and marching in solidarity with plenty of women’s issues that do not center on white women. No, we shouldn’t give them too much credit for showing up where they should have been for years. And yes, the next steps must include white women (and men) showing up for women of color in other ways, at other demonstrations and with other actions (including not voting with an eye to their own privilege).

But even if the necessary power realignment within feminism takes time, this historic event will have been a tremendous step toward the reimagining of a women’s movement as a web of varied but interconnected interests and missions. In the past, strategic tensions over intersectional aims have stemmed from an anxiety that diffusing the focus on gender inequity to also tackle racial injustice, environmental injustice, minimum wage, and LGBTQ issues would just serve as an example of women subjugating their uniquely gendered concerns to other kinds of needs, as they have been conditioned to do. The fear — and yes, it is often a fear of white feminists who do not experience as many additional biases or roadblocks to equality aside from their gender — has been that overlapping identities and injustices could somehow work to pull women who might otherwise be united apart from each other.

But there was a new metaphysical approach at work on Saturday, largely thanks to the organizing and leadership of nonwhite women: the revolutionary sense that the new women’s movement will be about pulling in issues of criminal justice, environmental activism, immigration reform, and systemic racism. Women, with women of color at front and center, can be the engines of new progressive activism in all arenas. It’s a rebuke to the theory floated by some on the left that there is a disjunction between “identity politics” and politics, a rebuke to those who suggested in the wake of Trump’s electoral win that the future lies in moving away from divisive “social issues” and identity-framed movements and back to economic policies.