Marching Steps: An Ever Evolving Journey in Showing Up for Change

A year ago, I tentatively stepped out of the yoga studio where I work in downtown Asheville and walked into a sea of pink hats (including mine), signs, and cheers. That morning, my mother expressed fear that I would be walking into some melee out of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

But the march was peaceful, positive, and felt full of purpose. So did I.

What a difference a year makes.

Not in the way that you might expect: I went to the march, wore my pussy hat, even made a sign this time, and everything was peaceful and positive. But I write these words after a year of more activism than in my first almost-four decades combined, and I therefore arrived at this anniversary march more deliberate, nuanced, and experienced when it comes to showing up.

I had a lot of time to reflect during the march, mainly because the speakers couldn’t be heard by a majority of us due to the poor PA system. I was also near the rear of the line, so I had a lot of time standing still as we waited to funnel through gates and onto the sidewalk, having been denied the use of the road this year.

I thought back to everything I’ve participated in since January of last year. Galvanized — or shamed — into action after the shock of the election, I started attending weekly Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) meetings, eventually joining the core organizing team in March. Simultaneously, I started volunteering once a week at the center that houses our local sexual and domestic violence organizations. More recently, I have joined the fundraising team for our local sanctuary movement helping those members of our community affected by our current draconian and predatory immigration policies.

Compared to what I used to do, these steps are massive. Compared to what I could be doing, they are middling. (I originally wrote “minimal,” but to my relief, that’s not accurate.) I have learned so much through this past year, including how much more I’m capable of in certain areas than I had ever imagined. I have also whiffed on so many opportunities to show up.

In fact, you could say I whiffed just by showing up today in the way I did. A good friend of mine, an abundance coach and committed activist, posted on Facebook urging us to leave our pussy hats at home, since many women felt excluded by what the hats implicitly and even unintentionally stand for: a cis-gendered, white way of being a woman. (You can read a different perspective here.) I felt bummed; I really wanted to wear my pussy hat! I added my Black Lives Matter pin, and I chose a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. for my sign, but I tried to interrogate why I wanted it on my head so badly as I walked from the studio to the gathering place.

I think it was so that I could feel included; my heart soared at the sight of many other women and men walking to the marching field, signs held and hats donned. I wanted to feel included in the community circumscribed by our hats, just as I wanted to be a part of the broader symbolism these hats convey — or, at least, the inclusive parts. It would have been so easy to take it off once I got at the march, but I didn’t. I guess part of me would have felt dumb for doing so, as if anyone cared what I did with a knitted bowl of pink acrylic on my head.

It was a good reminder, though, that it’s hard to get this showing up stuff right. We’re always potentially doing something that excludes others. I considered this from another angle during one of the few speakers I managed to hear: a progressive woman running for Congress — as a Republican.

As you might imagine, there were less applause and more confusion — specifically because everything she said she supported sat fully within a progressive platform. (Having looked at her website, she’s conservative on gun control and is concerned about any taxes that penalize marriage.) I also wondered what she was doing there.

Had we had no women of color speaking, I would have been intensely critical. I’m still not sure we needed to give her much time compared to other voices that aren’t heard often, but there are few examples as close to Daniel in the lion’s den as a Republican — no matter how progressive he, she, or they claims to be — at a progressive march in a blue city. If the march organizers had tolerant inclusivity in mind, then a Republican running for Congress is about as “they go low, we go high” as you can get.

On the way down from the stadium at which we gathered to the sidewalk march route, I thought again of my pussy hat as I saw an African-American man selling them. At the time, I had found myself next to an African-American woman whose pussy hat was black. I was tempted to ask her how she felt about the pink pussy hats, but I felt like I would be imposing. On the other hand, I would have given her a voice and taken the opportunity to listen.

This brief moment, when class, race, and feminism imperfectly intersected, showed me how complicated the negotiations of activism can be. Learning how to show up means putting people first, and people are difficult. Or, rather, relating to and with people are difficult, because relationships are beautiful and intense and a ball of knots and painful and downright toxic and bewildering and bewitching. Which is to say that they’re not is easy, and we’re always screwing them up and letting people down. Even and especially those people we care about, those whom we love the most but sometimes understand the least.

I saw this in a more concrete way when a few older white women and men around me half-seriously advocated that we move from our allotted place on the sidewalk and spill into the street. After all, what could the cops and cars do?

My immediate, unspoken rebuttal was to imagine exactly who would be at risk of getting arrested if we did such a thing; it almost certainly wouldn’t be the older white women in the pussy hats. In a moment of wanting to show up (and, to be fair, to keep moving), they didn’t recognize the privilege in being able to think about doing such a thing without fearing serious, even harmful reprisal from the authorities.

My second thought was to wonder if the sidewalk rule stemmed from Heather Heyer’s murder in Charlottesville and was in part a desire to protect us marchers at best or, at the very least, to escape notoriety and liability.

I do not know the reasons we could only march on the sidewalk, so I don’t know if I agree with them or not. Yet, there was something inspiring about the two lines of pink-wearing, sign-waving people shuffling at museum-going speed: two parallel lines like a giant equal sign (the symbol of the Human Rights Campaign), or two binaries that ultimately converged into a fluid mass at the end of the march, symbolizing the ways in which we can dismantle the black-or-white dichotomies so loved by the patriarchy and instead come together as a multi-faceted and misshapen (in the best of ways) community. Stronger together, indeed.

All this is to say that I’m glad I went not only because of the ways in which I felt re-galvanized and heartened by a community who, for the most part, share my values and beliefs about the world but also because of the ways in which I felt challenged, the ways in which I stumbled, the ways in which showing up here made me question exactly how much good I was doing by showing up.

I ultimately chose to go because I felt it was important to send the message that we’re not going away, and we’re actually showing up more than ever before. Rather than an MLK, Jr. quote, my sign probably should have read: “I acknowledge how problematic this march is even as I show up, because I am someone who recognizes the imperfections in everything I do to try and make the world a better place.” Or, more succinctly, to borrow from a SURJ core value: “Take Risks, Make Mistakes, and Keep Going.” I took a risk in showing up last January; I might have made a mistake by showing up today; but above all, I keep going.

Featured

Hello, I’m Sara!

Words are the writer’s fabric that weave bridges across cultures, countries, and centuries. I’m happy you’re here to read them! Grab a cup of tea and enjoy. You can relax here.