The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Did we? Speaking for myself, I knew I was grateful that I’d been able to make a choice, that I hadn’t had to drive thirty-six hours across state lines or feel a wire inside my body. I couldn’t speak for the thousands of women around me who had also gotten abortions. Perhaps some regretted them. They still had the right to get them. I could see one poster showing a crude clothes hanger drawn next to the scrawled words never again.

  I saw more uteruses that Saturday than I had ever seen before, more than I’ll ever see again. I saw them painted on cardboard and scribbled on paper. I saw them in handcuffs. I saw them made of snakes. I realized I had never known whether the plural of “uterus” was “uteruses” or “uteri”—and the question had never felt more urgent. One sign said there’s an elephant in the womb and featured a little GOP mascot lurking at the top of a fallopian tube. Our mascots were the ovaries, the Statue of Liberty, and the pussy cat.

  I’d always thought signs were for external eyes: for the media, or for the president I imagined peering down at us from the Truman Balcony. During the march, I realized that the posters were also for us, a way to keep from getting bored. When you’re standing on concrete with no cell reception and thousands of bodies packed all around you, and the crowd hasn’t moved for hours and you’re not sure if it’s ever going to move again, the signs are a saving grace: a live-action Twitter feed with its own endless taxonomy.

  There were the anatomy signs, internal organs made external and external organs on parade. pussy grabs back was its own genre, its own little zoo: vagina dentata, fluffy kitten, big cat baring its teeth. There were the grandma signs, like ninety, nasty, and not giving up. Or the elderly Japanese woman with a sign sticking up from the back of her wheelchair: locked up by us prez 1942–1946 never again. One woman’s cross-stitch read i’m so angry i stitched this just so i could stab something 3,000 times. The Trump signs were endless. One showed the president grabbing the Statue of Liberty between her legs, creasing the folds of her robe. Another told the straight truth: you ruined home alone 2. I thought of the public service performed by that sign, how many people it must have made smile over the course of an hour, a morning, a day.

  Our signs were joyous. We were united. We were glorious. We were uteri. We were a crowd-sourced poem! A scrolling song!

  A group of men standing outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture held up a sign that asked who else will you march for?

  At the Women’s March, our “we” was not uncomplicated. I never wanted to pretend it was. “Community must not mean a shedding of our differences,” said the writer and activist Audre Lorde in 1984, “nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” Her belief in difference as a creative force felt like the right kind of optimism for this moment, full of faith that did not depend on naïveté.

  Feminism, after all, had evolved by way of self-critique. There were the first-wave suffragists, who abandoned the prospect of cross-racial solidarity when it threatened their campaign, followed by the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, who fought internalized patriarchy in consciousness-raising groups and crusaded for reproductive rights and economic equality. They were followed in turn by the third wave, who criticized the second as myopically attuned to the struggles of privileged white women. From its inception, the Women’s March offered itself as a vexed and imperfect manifestation of the third wave—not its resolution or consummation, but a continuation of its necessary reckonings.

  By now its creation myth has become familiar: two women posting on Facebook just after Trump’s election. In New York City, Bob Bland proposed a Million Pussy March. In Hawaii, Teresa Shook put out a call to organize a women’s march just after the inauguration. She went to bed with forty replies, and woke up to ten thousand.

  By the end of that week, Bland had responded to the criticism leveled at the prospect of a women’s march led by two white women. She invited three women of color to take the helm, all prominent organizers: Tamika Mallory, a civil-rights gun-violence activist; Carmen Perez, a prison-reform advocate focused on incarcerated youth; and Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American racial-justice advocate and mother of three, who had successfully campaigned for New York City’s public schools to designate two of Islam’s holy days as holidays. In their official platform, released a week before the march, these organizers purposefully highlighted certain issues—racial injustice, mass incarceration, police accountability, the persecution of undocumented migrants—that moved pointedly beyond the standard second-wave fare of reproductive rights and equal pay.

  Nearly two weeks before the march, the New York Times ran a front-page story quoting a white woman from South Carolina who had decided to cancel her trip to DC because she had been offended by a Facebook post from a black volunteer advising “white allies” to listen more and talk less. She said it made her feel unwelcome. “This is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?”

  Feminism has always been about white women not understanding black women. But at its best, it has also been about women recognizing the shifting contours of their own ignorance, and trying to listen harder. That awareness of limited knowledge and past mistakes can be a source of strength, rather than the movement’s shameful underbelly.

  Decades ago, Audre Lorde told white feminists who were offended by her outrage: “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings.” She wanted shared oppression to enable vision rather than obstruct it. She wanted women to recognize what wasn’t shared, to fight the perils of conflation, to acknowledge their own complicity. “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression,” she wondered, “that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?” This felt just as relevant three decades later. The trick was seeing the patriarchal footprints everywhere, even under our own feet. Intersectional feminism wasn’t just an abstraction, and it wasn’t about getting paralyzed by the shame of privilege. It was about owning it. When my mom led the olive pickers on strike, she was aware that she could afford to lose her job more easily than most of them, that she could afford the risk.

  I wanted to send every white woman offended by the Women’s March a copy of Sister Outsider, with a bookmark tucked into Lorde’s observations about the role of guilt in the feminist community. “All too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness,” she wrote. But this guilt, if it led to change, could become useful as the “beginning of knowledge.”

  At the Women’s March, a black woman carried a sign that said white women voted for trump. A white woman carried a sign that said white women voted for trump. When Jasiri X, a rapper I’d never heard of, came onstage, he said, “My mother raised me all by herself . . . As a man, I can never understand how she felt.” He said: “Fuck white supremacy, white privilege, and white wealth.” I could not see the woman in the pussy hat beside him, translating his message into sign language, but I could hear his words through the speakers. I felt implicated. I was implicated. My discomfort was the point: my discomfort and everyone’s. There was something useful in gathering to feel powerfully uncomfortable together, rather than simply celebrating our numbers. Humility was as important as solidarity. Jasiri X admitted that too: “I can never understand how she felt.”

  When I attended my first Black Lives Matter march, in Portland, I felt uncomfortable. Was I wanted? Was I intruding? I stayed quiet and followed in the footsteps of others. But I’m glad I was there. My discomfort wasn’t particularly profound. It was just a small down payment against the kind of collectivity I believed in—a collectivity in which we weren’t cloistered by the silos of our backgrounds, but still didn’t assume that solidarity would be easy, that its declaration would mean it had been fully realized.

  At the Women’s March, the leadership was largely women of color, but the attendance wasn’t diverse. I could see this for myself, and during the weeks that
followed, other women testified to it as well. “Simply put,” a woman named Brittany Martinez told me, “the march was very white.”* Brittany explicitly identifies herself as a queer feminist of color, to distinguish herself from the “pervasive and popular brand of default white feminism.” At the Women’s March, certain celebratory totems—like the vaginas everywhere—made her uneasy. “First,” she told me, “all the ‘pussies’ were pink, which doesn’t reflect what many vaginas look like for women of color.” Because “women of color are hypersexualized by popular culture in ways that white women are not,” she found that “putting so much emphasis on ‘pussies’ felt uncomfortable.” Her observations made me aware of my own blind spots, which felt less like an argument against the possibility of solidarity and more like another argument for trying to understand how much I didn’t understand.

  When we chanted “Black Lives Matter!” on Constitution Avenue, I could feel our whiteness so acutely, the pale average of our collected bodies. I thought of the Suffrage Parade of 1913, our inspiring but deeply tainted lineage: a march led by a white woman on a white horse, with columns of black women in the back. white silence is violence, said one sign, twenty signs, a thousand signs. But a thousand white people holding signs saying white silence is violence didn’t mean the violence was over.

  We hit the central vein, the jugular of the rally, at Seventh Street. Catching sight of a Jumbotron felt like arrival. The National Mall was a sea of bodies with the Smithsonian Castle rising behind them, all red brick and turrets, iconic and occupied. Our crowd was articulated by dabs of pink, not homogeneous but shaded into hues—rose, salmon, watermelon, lemonade, bubblegum, fuchsia—and broken by rainbows and parkas.

  We found a spot where we could see the screen but couldn’t hear anything. Then we found a spot where we could hear the speeches but couldn’t see anything. It felt so right to have the event blocked by the other bodies watching the event: they were the event. Somewhere out there, on a stage I’d never see, Gloria Steinem uttered the words I would read online the next day: “I wish you could see yourselves. It’s like an ocean.”

  From the middle of the ocean, we couldn’t see the ocean. But we could see one another’s faces, squinting and hungry. My friend Heather had written to me beforehand, “I’ll be somewhere in that sea of women, looking for a bathroom.” I thought of her frequently, and it became a kind of mantra: Heather was out there somewhere, looking for a bathroom. It was a reminder that our collectivity was powerfully visceral: we were bodies that needed to eat and pee.

  A union leader stood in front of our endless columns and addressed Trump directly. “I don’t know what kind of president you’ll be,” he said, “but you’re a hell of an organizer.”

  As I looked over that sea of bodies, I kept feeling the urge to specify them. I wanted them not in their plenitude but in their particularity, their fine-grained humanity. So I spent the weeks following the march talking to other women who had been there. Almost every woman described the sheer mass of the crowds as the defining part of her experience. Monica Melton found herself moved by the blunt force of accumulated body heat. “In the thickest part of the crowd,” she said, “it was literally hot.”

  Anika Rahman, who had fled the Bangladeshi War of Independence and was marching with Amani, her thirteen-year-old daughter, realized at a certain point that there was “no correct route.” Which meant that every route was the correct route. She told me she was marching to resist an administration that threatened every part of her identity, every part of her life’s work: “I’m brown, I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman, I’m a Muslim.” After coming to the United States at the age of eighteen, she obtained a law degree, devoted herself to fighting for human rights and social justice, and watched the rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in her adopted country. She also raised Amani, who wanted to be president and was carrying a banner that said rise against the predator in chief, her arms aching from its weight.

  Nadia Hussain was also deeply moved by all those bodies in the streets. She was brought to tears when Michael Moore called on the crowds to fill the George Washington Bridge if that was what it took to stop the deportations. Nadia had grown up the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, spending much of her childhood in public housing, one of the only kids of color in her high school. She married a Salvadoran man whose mother had brought him across the border at the age of five; he became a US Marine, and they were raising a twenty-two-month-old Muslim Latino son. Nadia knew it was important not just to show up for the march but also for the work that would need to be done every day after it. She wanted to keep putting her body on the line. “That’s why we remember the civil rights movement,” she told me. “They put their bodies on the line.”

  Amy Lewis, a mother of two and therapist from Pittsburgh, wanted to put her body on the line as well. “I wanted to break through the paralysis of racial shame I’ve grown up with,” she told me, which came from “the privilege of our white skin.” She still remembers the thrill of her first protest, taking the bus with her mother to a feminist rally in downtown Pittsburgh. “I was small and exhilarated,” she recalled, “looking up past the faces of the adults surrounding me, to the tops of the office buildings I thought of as skyscrapers, and beyond to the night sky, feeling strangely safe in the loud crowd.”

  When Amy brought her own twelve-year-old daughter to DC, she felt protective. The most extreme bodily sensations she remembered were sensations of vigilance: “The strain of constantly watching for exit points, assessing the danger when we were on a bridge or in a contained space, amplified enormously by my concern for my kid.” She described her initial response to the sheer volume of the crowd as one of panic: thoughts sluggish, limbs heavy, words slow and disorganized. She was supposed to meet her mother but started to panic when she realized that it might not be possible. Cell phones weren’t working. The route on the map was jammed with thousands of strangers. When Amy finally made her way to their meeting point, via side streets and force of will, and found her mother waiting there, she felt “strong” and “complete.” She said, “The sludge in my veins turned liquid, I felt cheerful, and we looked around with excitement and wonder as we walked into the thick of the crowd.”

  The physical act of marching wasn’t simple. The plain truth was this: the Mall was packed all the way back to the Washington Monument. The march couldn’t happen because the route was already occupied by half a million bodies. “When the word moved through the crowd that we had filled the entire route, we roared,” Amy told me. “The irony of such numbers equaling physical paralysis struck us. We were many, we were powerful, we were unable to move.” At one point, a rumor spread that the march was being canceled, a victim of its own success, but Tamika Mallory came over the speakers to assure us that it wasn’t so. We were going to take Constitution Avenue all the way to the Ellipse.

  Of course I didn’t end up on the correct route. As Anika pointed out, there was no correct route. I ended up somewhere else—on Independence, I think, up to Fourteenth Street, then left on Constitution up to Seventeenth. The truth is, I can only tell you where I marched because I looked it up afterward. While I was marching, it was more like a dream, with no street signs or Google Maps. I was just following the flow of bodies. I was noticing how little trash there was on the streets, and how much glitter. I was listening to an old black man shout, “Mike Pence has got to go!” as he sold photographs of the Obama family to weeping white people.

  Each time the march was stopped, which was often, I imagined the traffic had gotten clogged because of courteous marchers ceding the intersection to one another, manners manifest as gridlock: “You first!” “No, you!”

  In the shadow of the Washington Monument, my friend Joe said that for the first time since the election, he was excited to read the news. We were helping to write the story we wanted to live. But we would need to read about it afterward, to understand what we had been part of.

  Leaving the march, we passed hundreds of signs pile
d against a fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. They didn’t look discarded. They looked defiant. Joe and Rachel changed Luke’s diaper on a cold marble bench at the Ellipse Visitor Pavilion. We passed weary protesters resting on the bleachers that had been empty for Trump’s inauguration parade. It felt good to think of them serving this purpose. We needed to rest, because we weren’t done. It wasn’t just Washington, and it wasn’t over. It was everywhere. It was ongoing. It was people singing with candles in the Budapest night, spilling through the streets of Atlanta, Oakland, Jackson, and Macau. It was people in Calcutta wearing sandals in the sunlight and holding a banner that said resistance is fertile. It was people in Fairbanks marching in full winter parkas under tree branches covered in snow, with the temperature nearly twenty degrees below zero, a girl in red ski pants, maybe eleven or twelve, holding up her own sign: i survived cancer. trump made me uninsurable.

  My husband spent two and a half years fighting insurance companies while his first wife battled a complicated form of leukemia—the disease she died of. When she was diagnosed, their baby was six months old. Eight years later, that baby held a love trumps hate sign on a cold afternoon in Prospect Park. Which is all to say that this election is personal for everyone. Day One of the new administration was personal for everyone. Also true: It’s been personal for years. It’s been personal for centuries.

  A woman named Aditi Khorana later told me about crying jags after the election, feeling her lifelong sense of marginalization—as a woman of color, as the daughter of Indian immigrants—sharpening into almost unbearable acuity. Why did this country hate her so much?