thegrio | Tubman was a true freedom fighter. Her objective was to get Black
people free and she dedicated her life and her own liberty to that
singular goal. The pink pussy hat brigade is a feminist lite reaction to
real problems. Donning a stupid hat, retweeting a clever quip, and
marching once a year does not make one a freedom fighter.
To put that piece of zeitgeist garbage on the head of a legend is
profoundly disrespectful and shows a lack of understanding about
intersectionality. Putting a hat on Tubman does not link these
movements. It does not bring Black women into this fight.
Black women have always been our own best advocates and everyone
benefits from our work because we are consistently at the bottom when it
comes to wages, civil /human rights, and a litany of other topics. So
when Black women’s conditions improve, there is a “trickle up” effect that everyone can enjoy.
So, pink pussy hatters, instead of making an empty and disrespectful
statement/gesture, find a womanist in your life who is willing to
tolerate your level of ignorance and learn a few things. If you’re
lucky, she’ll tell you what you can do to be a true advocate for all
women. Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards echoed this sentiment when she urged white women to “do better” at the Women’s March.
In the meantime, keep your hands off of Sister Tubman.
NewYorker | It’s unlikely that the adornment was meant to project any message
besides optimism and frenetic cheek. Nonetheless, the image acutely
captures the schisms of the contemporary women’s movement. The Women’s
March on Washington originated as a Facebook event, posted in the
shell-shocked days following Trump’s election. At the time, it was named
the Million Woman March, after a 1997 march in Philadelphia organized by
the black women activists Phile Chionesu and Asia Coney. The organizers
were roundly criticized for what registered as a white-feminist appropriation of black intellectual labor. Quickly, the event’s title was changed, and the Women’s March
established a national board primarily composed of women of color. But
the sense of ideological mistrust—the suspicion that the March promotes
an agenda that diminishes the work of nonwhite people, and that it is an
uncritical extension of support for Hillary Clinton—persists. Last week,
a call to boycott the Women’s March in Philadelphia went viral after
many L.G.B.T. activists objected to the organization’s insistence that
attendees be screened by the police. The pussyhat, too, has been
ridiculed: for its origin in a repellent Trump slur, for its possible
exclusion of transgender women, for its flippant embrace of the racial
connotations of pink.The branding of the Women’s March has unified millions and, as would any
phenomenon of its size, has also left many feeling disaffected.
“Harriet Tubman with Pink Pussyhat” feels like an accidental effigy
that has bred that skepticism. It’s a question of politics and of taste.
The recruitment of historical figures into contemporary mores and
fashions is a tic of the movement, a yearning not just for a better
future but for a neater past. The dissonance has flared up before: on
Election Day in 2016, hundreds of people, mostly women, made a
pilgrimage
to Mount Hope Cemetery, in Rochester, to decorate the gravestone of the
suffragist Susan B. Anthony with “I Voted” stickers. (Anthony
collaborated with Tubman, who fought, toward the end of her life for the
enfranchisement of black women and men, but Anthony also once said, “I
will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand
the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”) On seeing the photo of
Tubman in a pussyhat on Instagram, some commenters wondered, drolly, if
a gentrifier had been trying to spruce up the statue. When the
photograph migrated to Twitter, someone who manages the account of Ralph
R. McKee Career & Technical Education High School, on Staten Island,
chimed in with “solidarity.”
The hat does not belong on Tubman. Or, depending on who’s looking, it does.
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