Archive for category: BITCH MEDIA

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Immigrant woman and children walk across a field as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Enforcement and Removal Operations hosts a media tour at the South Texas Family Residential Center, which houses families who are pending disposition of their immigration cases on Friday, Aug 23, 2019 in Dilley, Texas. (Photo credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Reproductive violence is constitutive of rather than an exception to the values of the United States of America. For those of us whose communities are deliberately targeted by the eugenicist American state, Dawn Wooten’s charges of mass sterilizations at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia come as a reminder that our reproductive lives have always been a threat to this country’s very foundations. Indigenous, Black, and Brown people pose a problem for a nation invested in white racial purity. These ICE abuses are only the latest and most visible in an ongoing U.S. project of genocidal extermination. Wooten, a licensed practical nurse who worked at the ICE facility until she was abruptly demoted in July, recently filed a complaint detailing forced hysterectomies of detained migrant women.

In the complaint published by Project South, an Atlanta-based advocacy organization, Wooten identifies a gynecologist she calls “the uterus collector,” who removes the uterus or fallopian tubes of practically “everybody he sees.” In her statement, the nurse details the confusion and dread experienced by detained women, who neither consented to hysterectomies nor understood what was happening to their bodies due to intentional, violent language barriers. A migrant woman confessed to Project South, “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.” She’s not alone in identifying the conditions inside migrant detention centers as concentration camps, which by definition are a form of population control—a practice that extends to the origins of the settler colonial U.S. state.

Indigenous women in particular have long been targeted for genocidal violence, including experimentation and extermination. As climate disaster and civil conflict ravages Central American countries, more and more Indigenous people are migrating North (anthropologist Shannon Speed’s 2019 book, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State, is a helpful introduction to the unique violences faced by Indigenous women in migrant detention centers). Their mobility poses a threat to the eugenicist state now, as it did in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so they are policed, surveilled, sterilized, and imprisoned—all techniques of reprocide. Loretta Ross—a Black feminist activist and survivor of sterilization abuse—coined the term “reprocide” to specifically describe genocide as primarily committed through reproductive control.

In the 2017 anthology Radical Reproductive Justice, Ross insists that reprocide extends to the political origins of the United States and that it happens not only through sterilization abuse, but also through mass incarceration, environmental racism, and the promotion of long-term contraceptives that providers refuse to remove or that carry prohibitive removal costs. The current forced sterilization of migrant women is not an aberration or anomaly in the history of this country; it’s an extension of the reprocide that created it. Indigenous scholars like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson teach us that Indigenous women are especially threatening because they have the potential to reproduce the next generation of people who can resist colonization. Brianna Theobald’s standout 2019 book Reproduction on the Reservation explains how the U.S. government has historically attempted to control and contain Indigenous women’s reproductive lives: Through assimilationist residential schools, the forced removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system, and government efforts to move childbirth from the home to hospitals, the federal government surveilled where women gave birth, with whom they gave birth, and how their children were raised.

While Theobald highlights how Indigenous people lied to field nurses and concealed their pregnancies to practice reproductive self-determination, doctors in the United States began formally sterilizing Indigenous women in the 1930s. This practice ballooned in the 1970s when Congress passed the Family Planning Services Act, which subsidized sterilizations for Medicaid and Indian Health Service patients. As a result, an estimated 25 percent of Indigenous women of childbearing age underwent hysterectomies. The enslavement of Africans and their descendants was also undeniably marked by reprocide: Chattel slavery relied on enslaved Black women to produce as many children as possible; many were sold as breeders and routinely sexually assaulted to produce more enslaved people, but as scholars note, enslaved women used birth control and abortion as a means to resist this reproductive control.

Yet, enslaved women were still routinely subject to medical experimentation. James Marion Sims, also known as the “father of modern gynecology,” performed many reproductive surgeries on enslaved Black women and elected to do so without anesthesia. He also invented the modern speculum by experimenting on enslaved women. Other doctors perfected c-sections by performing surgeries on Black women without consent. During Jim Crow, some Black women were denied medical care or termination of welfare benefits if they didn’t submit to sterilization and others—including civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer—underwent “Mississippi appendectomies” as practice for medical students at teaching hospitals in the South. Today’s immigration detention centers are designed as reprocide machines—controlling who enters and is born into the country.

As a system of population control, detention centers confine and contain unwanted, undesirable populations. And while this long history of reprocide spans various—if not all—administrations, it’s clear that Trump is using migrant women’s bodies as a battleground in the struggle for white racial purity. In 2018, the Trump administration ended a previous policy mandating that ICE release pregnant women from detention—placing women outside the reach of adequate medical care and even ripping their children away at birth, as Tina Vasquez (who has contributed to Bitch) reported for Rewire. Women in detention centers are denied control over their bodies and their reproductive choices, refused access to abortion care, and the government has gone as far as to track incarcerated women’s periods to refuse abortion access.

When their children are born, many are sent to Bethany Christian Services, an organization that has received substantial donations from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. And, most recently, Trump granted visa officers the power to deny entry to pregnant women, calling their migration “birth tourism.” This rhetoric is an extension of eugenicist anxieties about “anchor babies” and poor, third world “over breeders” who take advantage of loose borders to invade the United States and interrupt the nation’s racial purity. Immigration enforcement is a mode of population control—period. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first immigration law to banned an entire racial group—to the creation of Border Patrol in 1924, which drew on racist ideas of health and cleanliness to exclude “diseased” Brown migrants, borders and immigration bans are a way of keeping out the unwanted. Today, ICE commits reprocide when they separate families and divide them along an arbitrary border. The agency commits reprocide when it deports people to countries facing climate disaster—a phenomenon that increases poverty, threatens quality of life, and limits food supply.

Mass sterilizations are one aspect of a state-sponsored project of controlling women of color’s reproductive lives and eliminating unwanted populations. In this way, the call to abolish ICE is a call for reproductive justice because ICE agents and guards are trained and empowered to violate the reproductive agency of migrant women. In 1994, a caucus of Black feminists at a pro-choice conference coined the term “reproductive justice” to signal not only a woman’s right not to have a child, but also their right to have children and to raise them with dignity in safe and healthy environments. This framework repositions reproductive rights in an intersectional context that centers race, gender, and class oppressions. Abolishing ICE is a practice of reproductive justice and is ultimately a move toward creating safer communities where children and families are free from surveillance and immigration enforcement.

Wooten refused to stay quiet, and even as nuanced reporting from Vasquez complicates an earlier romanticized image we had of the nurse, it’s undeniable that she has helped pave the way for a more abolitionist future. Wooten refused to reproduce a system that controls women’s bodily autonomy. In denouncing “the uterus collector,” Wooten extends a legacy of Black feminists like Loretta Ross who understand that reproductive justice is not only about abortion rights but also about having and raising children with dignity. In calling out reprocidal conditions at Irwin County Detention Center, she continues the advocacy of Hamer and others who understood the bodies of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women as sacred and worthy of protection. ICE is committing reprocide, but like Wooten, we can refuse to be complicit.

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Arresting and deporting undocumented people has become lucrative because their biological, biometric data can be mined, harvested, and used to generate profit.

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People participate in an abortion rights rally outside of the Supreme Court as the justices hear oral arguments in the June Medical Services v. Russo case on March 4, 2020 in Washington, D.C. The Louisiana abortion case is the first major abortion case to make it to the Supreme Court since Donald Trump became president. (Photo credit: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

This morning, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that mandated abortion providers in the state to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Though many of the most recent restrictive measures passed by states including Ohio, Kentucky, and Georgia have been crafted in the name of fetal personhood, the Louisiana Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, passed in 2014, was ostensibly passed to “protect” women’s health and safety by making abortion providers jump through medically unnecessary hoops—and sharply curtailing patient access to abortion providers. Much like the 2016 Supreme Court case Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, today’s June Medical Services v. Russo decision was a rejection of the disingenuous antichoice dialogue that has long disguised hostile attitudes toward abortion with a paternalistic concern for patient health—what the judge who struck down the original law in 2017 called “a solution in search of a problem.”

Notably, June is the first SCOTUS ruling on abortion since conservative, Trump-appointed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were confirmed to the court. Both were chosen from the Federalist Society’s famed short list of conservative judges in an effort to build a court that could continue to control abortion access and bodily autonomy, if not outright overturn Roe v. Wade. Today’s decision was a 5-4 ruling that once again found Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the so-called liberal wing of the court. (He was among the dissenters in the 5-3 ruling in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.)

There’s no question that this is good news, but we shouldn’t assume that today’s decision amounts to a wholesale fuck-you to abortion opponents. The main thing June had going for it was its similarity to Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt; the SCOTUS decision was less about abortion access as a right than about affirming the precedent set in the 2016 case. If we know anything about the anti-choice movement, it’s that it plays the long game; and as Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights pointed out after the ruling came down, “With this win, the clinics in Louisiana can stay open to serve the one million women of reproductive age in the state. But the Court’s decision could embolden states to pass even more restrictive laws when clarity is needed if abortion rights are to be protected.”

MEDIA ROUNDUP

June Medical Services v. Russo centered around Louisiana’s restrictive 2014 law, which required doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at hospitals. [New York Times]
It was similar to a Texas law that SCOTUS struck down in 2016. In a five-three decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority that “The surgical center requirement, like the admitting-privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.” [Washington Post]
There was a lot riding on this Supreme Court decision, including the ability for abortion clinics in Louisiana and across the United States to remain open. Though 61 percent of people in the United States believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, there was no guarantee that the Supreme Court would uphold the undue burden standard. [Vox, Pew Research Center]
This was the first Supreme Court abortion case since Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two right-leaning justices who both agreed with Louisiana’s position that clinics must have admitting privileges. [New York Times]
Surprising us once again, SCOTUS ruled in favor of abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts aligned with the more liberal justices and wrote the majority opinion: “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.” [NBC News]
Don’t be fooled by Roberts’s recent leanings: He’s essentially telling the Trump administration to lie better and try their hardest not to buck legal precedence. In other words, you can’t present the same case—as Louisiana did—and expect Roberts to rule differently. [Atlantic, Vox]
Though clinics in Louisiana and other states will remain open for now, the fight isn’t over to protect abortion access in the United States. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Associated Press that the Supreme Court’s decision “could embolden states to pass even more restrictive laws when clarity is needed if abortion rights are to be protected.” [Associated Press]

WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Read about and support the #MyRightMyDecision campaign, which is made up of reproductive justice organizations around the United States that are fighting to protect and expand abortion access. [My Right My Decision]
Learn more about abortion restrictions and the current restrictions in place in your state. Follow a state-specific reproductive rights group for more information on upcoming abortion restriction laws and how to fight back. [Amnesty International]
Learn about how the Hyde Amendment restricts access to abortion to those who are low-income and take action if you’re in a state working to repeal the Hyde Amendment. [Planned Parenthood Action Fund, All Above All]
Learn about the global gag rule and the federal law that would repeal it. Call your U.S. representative and tell them to vote on the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act, which would repeal the global gag rule. [Open Society Foundations, Advocates for Youth]
Continue donating to abortion funds, which cover a portion of the costs for those seeking abortions. The National Network of Abortion Funds breaks down abortion funds by state and how to donate to each individual fund. [National Network of Abortion Funds]

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The amendment was the successful opening salvo in the U.S. anti-abortion movement.

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A group of Black women, under a Women’s Liberation banner, march in support of the Black Panther Party in New Haven, Connecticut, in November 1969. (Photo credit: David Fenton/Getty Images)

The recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade have sparked outrage across the United States and left many wondering how we can rise to meet this political moment. Police, however, aren’t the sole perpetrators of violence against Black people: Nina Pop, a Black trans woman, was fatally stabbed outside her Sikeston, Missouri, apartment on May 3, 2020. On June 1, a group of men in Minneapolis that included cisgender Black men brutally attacked Iyanna Dior, a Black trans woman. Two other Black trans women, Dominique Fells and Riah Milton, were killed on June 8 and June 9, respectively. And 19-year-old activist Oluwatoyin Salau was sexually assaulted and found dead on June 13 in Tallahassee, Florida.

Given the ongoing uprisings, we’re facing a moment of political possibility: Local governments and activists are working to incorporate and envision alternative forms of justice outside of policing and prison systems. Yet, we must also recognize the persistence of gender-based violence toward Black cisgender and trans women. We can’t rely on the prison-industrial complex to address these problems, since these systems are often responsible for ignoring or further inflicting violence on Black women. However, we can look to Black feminist politics and abolitionist organizing for more inclusive pathways to a world rooted in safety, mutual aid, and restorative justice. Black feminists and abolitionists teach us to demand more, even in a moment when it seems like we’re already fighting for so much.

The State Fails Black Women and Black Gender Nonconforming People

According to the National Organization for Women, more than 18 percent of Black women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. Four in 10 Black women report experiencing intimate partner violence, more than 20 percent are raped, and Black women are more than 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a man than white women. In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender-nonconforming people were violently killed, at least 19 of whom were Black trans women. Furthermore, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 20 percent of Black trans people reported being unemployed and 38 percent reported living in poverty. Fifty-one percent of Black trans people reported experiencing housing insecurity in their lifetimes.

The state consistently fails Black women and Black trans people by failing to redress these issues as well as inflicting more violence. Intersectionality, first introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, names the unique struggle of Black women as both racialized and gendered beings when facing a legal system prepared to address discrimination on the basis of race or gender, but poorly equipped to handle both at the same time. Due to this illegibility of Black women before the law, calling on the police to address gender-based violence might put survivors in further danger due to, as scholar Beth Richie describes in her book Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (2012), either state agencies’ lack of response to violence against Black women or the violence Black women and girls experience directly at the hands of state agencies—including police and prisons.

When Bresha Meadows was 14, she was arrested and jailed for 18 months for killing her abusive father. While incarcerated, she was denied adequate care for her post-traumatic stress disorder, she says. Marissa Alexander was convicted of aggravated assault after firing a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband and subsequently spent nearly six years under state supervision. Bettie Jones and her neighbor Quintonio LeGrier were shot by Chicago police arriving to address a domestic disturbance at LeGrier’s apartment. Seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was asleep on her couch when police broke into her home and shot her. The 2015 Say Her Name report from Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum discusses the sexual violence Black women, trans, and queer people experience at the hands of police.

Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw sexually assaulted at least a dozen Black women and girls, and police officer Ernest Marsalis raped a 19-year-old Black woman during an arrest. Black trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people are profiled, harassed, and misgendered by police and unprotected in prisons. In 2008, a booking officer repeatedly called Duanna Johnson a number of slurs before restraining, beating, and pepper spraying her. Seventy percent of Black transgender people who interacted with police from 2014 to 2015 said that they are never or only sometimes treated with respect from law enforcement. Trans women face high rates of sexual assault when incarcerated, with 20 percent reporting being sexually assaulted by fellow inmates or staff from 2014 to 2015.

Bringing these groups to the forefront of the struggle against police violence creates a fuller picture of the ways police abuse their power against Black people. To address violence, then, we can look to Black feminist politics and activism to seek a more expansive politics and visions of justice that do not rely on the police and prison-industrial complex.

Four Black women march in protest holding up a large sign that reads: “3RD WORLD WOMEN WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT OUR LIVES”

Margin-to-Center Politics and Organizing

The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists and lesbians, released a statement in 1977 calling for an anti-capitalist solidarity politics that accounts for race, gender, sexuality, and class. When we consider the complexities of a person’s identity, we can take into account the specific risks they face and recognize how society could be better equipped to address those risks. As Black lesbian feminist socialist poet Audre Lorde declares in her 1980 essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” “Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women,” and that without attending to difference in race, class, gender, and sexuality, we can’t “develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives.”

Black feminist bell hooks’s seminal 1984 book, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, emphasizes that marginality gives a “special vantage point” from which we can critique sexist, racist, and classist social structures as well as “envision and create a counter-hegemony.” Naming differences helps specify the forms of oppression we face, or for which some of us are uniquely at risk. It helps recognize the true depth of social problems and devise better solutions. Black feminist and queer politics are an important political antecedents for the Movement for Black Lives, which serves as an example of margin-to-center activism. Though it may seem that the broader Black Lives Matter movement is primarily animated by the police killings of Black men, its leaders have long called for a politics that centers the most marginal among us. In the Black Lives Matter “herstory,” founders Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors lift up the need for Black movements to center Black queer and trans people in both advocacy and leadership.

Furthermore, in her book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018), the Black Youth Project 100’s founding national director, Charlene Carruthers, lays out the Black Queer Feminist lens as an organizing praxis wherein folks “bring their full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression.” Queerness, as Carruthers refers to it, isn’t solely about sexuality, but also the “continuum of possibilities outside of what are considered to be normal sexual or gender identities and behaviors.” Carruthers writes that the Black Queer Feminist lens is rooted in collectivity and reminds us that “none of us will be free unless all of us are free.” In the context of this movement and this moment, we must understand abolition as meaning not only the end of police, but also the beginning of a society and a solidarity that recognizes differences so that we may address all sites of harm.

In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Angela Davis challenges us to “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions” to replace the function of the prison in our society, focusing on decarceration as a societal goal. Decarceration would require doing away with imprisonment as a penalty and shrinking the incarcerated population. To accomplish this goal, Davis recommends a justice system specifically focused on “reparation and reconciliation.” However, Davis calls for a fuller solution beyond eliminating police and prisons. She writes that we must work for the “radical transformations of many aspects of our society,” including “racism, male dominance, homophobia, and class bias.” This means creating and expanding institutions that focus on promoting violence prevention, health, and safety and committing deeper state investment in schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, social workers, housing, and a living wage. Importantly, Davis asks us to question the very relationship between crime and punishment and recognize the constructed links between race, gender, class, and crime.

To address gender-based violence, Richie cites the joint statement by the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance and the feminist of color collective, INCITE!. The statement calls for community-based responses to violence that promote accountability for survivors, political education, funding to social justice organizations, and mobilization against sexism and homophobia. Abolition is a tall order. But to meet this moment and end state violence in all its forms, we must recognize the multiple modes of vulnerability the most marginalized among us face. Abolition means the very restructuring of our society, of what and who we value, and how we conceptualize crime and punishment. This will require addressing violence holistically and taking into account its root causes, including white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and social and economic exclusion. This will require us to get involved with one another, to help our neighbors address and repair harm in our communities. A future without violence, police, or prisons demands an embrace of political collectivity and showing up together for all our people.

The police are not a feminist institution.

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(Photo credit: Maria Oswalt on Unsplash)

While weeks of protest sparked by racist police killings continue to rock all 50 states, police violence in the United States has come under international criticism. The incessant murder of Black and Indigenous people by so-called “public servants” has forced a conversation about whether the police force is a necessary service at all, and conversations about prison abolition have made their way from viral Twitter threads to the New York Times. After decades of work by revolutionary Black women like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba—who recently authored an op-ed in the NYT titled, simply, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”—it seems like the case for an end to the prison-industrial complex has finally made its way into the cultural mainstream.

As may be expected with an issue as controversial as an end to the justice system as we know it, there’s been no shortage of criticism. However, one especially infuriating argument has dominated liberal circles: “What will sexual assault victims do without the police?” The question, posited almost exclusively by white women (or those whose version of progressivism centers them), is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a microcosm of the white liberal tendency to masquerade anti-Black sentiment behind blandly feminist, purposefully inoffensive whataboutisms that are just progressive enough to shield themselves from criticism. The white liberal mindset has learned that no measure of anti-Blackness is unjustifiable if one can only figure out how to wrap it up in a pink, pro-woman package—but it’s time to pull the wool from over our eyes.

Looking at the evidence, the answer to the question, “What will sexual assault victims do without the police?” is easily answerable: Sans police, their chances of obtaining justice would be much higher than they are right now. The criminal justice system has a long and well-documented history of failing survivors and victims of sexual violence at literally every turn; often retraumatizing them in the process. A 2019 New York Times article detailed horrific police misconduct in rape cases, with officers’ behavior ranging from shaming the victims for “flirting” and “partying,” to a blatant mishandling of evidence. There’s substantial evidence that shows several precincts across the country falsely inflating their conviction rates on rape cases. Perhaps most shocking of all is a 2018 study that found hundreds of police officers have been charged with rape and sexual assault (if not thousands—the study notes that the numbers may be much larger than what has been officially reported).

Despite the mountain of evidence pointing toward the fact that the police exacerbate harm to women and femmes, the sexual-assault argument has a way of persisting. At first glance, it can seem like a valid concern—especially to feminists and progressives who may otherwise support abolition—but upon further investigation, it’s part of a much larger (and far more dangerous) trend. For decades, white supremacy has found shelter behind the aesthetics of feminism, and the argument that sexual violence necessitates the existence of the police is just another example of anti-Black ideology commodifying feminist language to Trojan-horse its way into progressive discourse. White feminism has bastardized the women’s rights movement to justify racist and oppressive institutions for as long as there’s been a women’s rights movement, and it’s time to call it out for what it is: racism.

The theory behind abolition is clear: Not only are police not necessary for justice or peace, but they actively limit our ability to effectively reach either on an individual or structural level. There’s no logical reason why this principle should apply to sexual assault cases any differently than it applies to theft or white-collar crime. So why do people insist on arguing as though it does? The answer to that question hinges upon the well-documented historical weaponization of white femininity. White women, while oppressed in some ways, function as oppressors in many others—especially when it comes to the ways they benefit and profit from white supremacy. While the principles of abolition state that the existence of the police harms all of us, many people in positions of racial or socioeconomic privilege never really realize this. They grow up in “nice” communities, with a skin color that doesn’t brand them as a threat, therefore the police treat them decently. However, because of the insular nature of both richness and whiteness, that can sometimes lead these people to believe that the police are inherently good.

Even if there was some part of the white elite that recognized how the carceral police state treats people of color, there may be a larger part of them—conscious or unconscious—that’s comfortable in a system that puts them on top. So they resist the abolition of the police, and they resist the destruction of racism as a whole. Feminism doesn’t exempt white women from this mode of thought, and it never has. Throughout history, white women have successfully weaponized their femininity both to oppress people of color and to defend themselves from the responsibility of doing so. The sexual-violence argument, which seeks to uphold the racist criminal justice machine under the guise of pro-woman progressivism, is no different. But victims of sexual violence have always had a place in the transformative justice movement.

“[Victims] aren’t finding justice through the state, and carcerality hasn’t really provided them with safety or accountability for the people who’ve hurt them. Abolition is a framework by which we can understand a different way to hold people accountable, especially for sexual harm,” journalist and abolitionist organizer Reina Sultan, who has contributed to Bitch, says. In fact, many of the leading sexual violence response centers across the country and beyond haven’t relied on the criminal justice system in decades. The Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, a groundbreaking women’s aid center founded in part by Audre Lorde, has relied on transformative justice since 1981. More recent institutions like the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and INCITE! have trauma-informed, grassroots, and transformative approaches to sexual violence prevention that not only help to heal survivors, but prevent perpetrators from causing more harm. As Sultan told Bitch, “With transformative justice, we’re able to use the community to get to the root of the problem. Abolition is feminism…You can’t have an abolitionist movement that isn’t feminist.”

No two transformative justice practices are the same, because no two cases of violence are the same, but the processes are often similar. “A common structure for a [transformative justice] process is you have a survivor and three or four people supporting them. Then you have the person who caused harm and three or four people supporting them in their accountability,” prominent abolitionist Mia Mingus told Colorlines in 2017. “Then you’ll have the survivor think of what their demands are. What would it look like for a person who caused harm to be accountable to you?…[Transformative justice] processes are not just about the person who caused harm, it’s about things that support the survivor, too.” Supporting and validating survivors of sexual violence is worthy of more thought and energy than a knee-jerk reaction that punishes marginalized people.

Black men, for example, are by far the most incarcerated population in the United States and are the most frequent victims of police violence, so when you use the language of feminism to justify the existence of the police, you’re using it to justify the oppression of Black men. This is nothing new: The practice of using unfounded sexual violence allegations to further oppress Black men is a particularly time-honored white feminist tradition. Take the famous case of Emmett Till, who was murdered by two white men after being falsely accused of harassment by a white woman in 1955. The recently viral case of Amy Cooper, a white woman, is another example: The otherwise liberal Pete Buttigieg supporter claimed she called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man—a verifiable death sentence in today’s America—because she feared he would assault her.

After Cooper’s video went viral, some rushed to her defense with the same faux-feminist argument: “A number of people have pointed out that a woman alone with a man in an isolated area was likely to perceive the remark as threatening,” read one think piece. While these circumstances are all different, their ethos is the same: They all commodify and whitewash the women’s rights movement to protect an institution that has done nothing but harm to vulnerable women, especially Black women and women of color, since its conception. Feminism has become a weapon by which the privileged can defend themselves from any and all accountability while steadfastly ignoring the very populations that intersectional feminism is meant to serve. It has become a get-out-of-jail-free-card by which white women can shirk all responsibility for upholding white supremacy. The police are not a feminist institution—they’re both the footsoldiers and the benefactors of racism, sexism, misogynoir, colonialism, and violence. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather my feminism stood for something different.

The possibilities are endless, if we allow ourselves to dream bigger than criminalization and bondage.

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Organizers Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez-Jordan, and Tamika D. Mallory speak on stage during the Women’s March on January 19, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Hillel Steinberg/Flickr/Creative Commons)

In January 2017, one day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March burst into existence. The march was not without criticism: It was trans exclusionary, as pink pussy hats became one of its embodied worn symbols (“As a woman without a pussy, I felt adrift in the sea of hats,” Samantha Riedel wrote in a piece for this site), and some women of color quickly marked the event as little more than an Instagrammable moment for some white women, many of whom casted their votes for Trump. But despite controversy, many Women’s March participants and supporters still considered it a deep and impactful launching point for something bigger. As the Women’s March gained traction, however, it also came under a microscope, primarily because it elected to align its branding with the iconicism of its founder Bob Bland and its national cochairs, Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, who all spoke regularly and with pride about the workings of the Women’s March, the national organization’s goals, and its intention to expand beyond a single event.

Once Mallory, Perez, and Sarsour began attending conferences, speaking on panels, and offering keynotes about the Women’s March’s forward movement, they seemingly became feminist icons overnight. The Women’s March began on Facebook, as Bland explained during Vanity Fair’s Founders Fair in 2017. “The Facebook group I was in was like, what do we do now?” Bland said. “I created an event to march on Washington on inauguration weekend. One of my friends called and said, hey look at this!’ It turned out other people had the same idea. We merged our separate Facebook events. It went from being a gut reaction to the election to being this serious thing.” During the same event, Sarsour said, “The Women’s March could have been just January 21—we’re all proud. We could have just walked away. But we had something too great to ignore. We are an entity. We’re looking for people who stand up for the values and principles we share, and we’re looking at 2018.”

At that point, the Women’s March was considered a success, though it was more complicated than it seemed. In “Race And Feminism: Women’s March Recalls The Touchy History,” a piece published in NPR on the day of the march, Karen Grigsby Bates wrote, “The Women’s March on Washington started out pretty white, but quickly added young women of color in positions of leadership. They’re three of the four main organizers, and a lot of attention has been paid to how diverse this march has been in contrast to earlier ones. But even as the march’s diversity was being celebrated, it was also causing tension.” After all, you can’t push Black women activists, women of color activists, and white women together for an Instagram photo and expect immediate synchronicity, even if they have similar aims and goals. “These groups have historically had vastly different agendas, used different tactics and haven’t even always gotten along,” Charlotte Alter wrote in a 2017 article for Time. “It remains to be seen if they’ll work together after the historic march, and if they do, what that would even look like.”

Alter was onto something: Now, a little more than three years since the initial Women’s March, only Perez is still associated with the national organization. As allegations of antisemitism rammed the sparkly surfaces of the march’s legacy, Teresa Shook, one of the march’s original founders, called for the cochairs to step down. “Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez of Women’s March, Inc. have steered the Movement away from its true course,” Shook wrote on Facebook in November 2018. “In opposition to our Unity Principles, they have allowed antisemitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs.”

Each of the cochairs were asked to step down because of their individual feminist beliefs as well as the activities they participated in outside of the Women’s March. They faced criticism for the events they attended, what they posted on social media, and what they said (or didn’t say) in interviews. Mallory’s tweets, in particular, were picked apart for allegedly suggesting her alliance with antisemitic figures, most notably the Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan, who, Rewire News notes, Mallory was asked to “condemn.” As the controversy swirled, it became nearly impossible for the cochairs to escape wild and fiery conversations about them: Are they icons worthy of honor and respect? Are they good women? Are they legitimate feminists? Are their beliefs inclusive enough? Do they have the values necessary to lead a movement? Ultimately, they weren’t deemed credible enough to lead this movement; in fact, it seems, no one is.

There came a point when it became difficult to distinguish the work and online presence of the cochairs from the work and presence of the march itself. What would the Women’s March be without them, given that their names and faces were so interwoven into the messaging of the Women’s March movement? In 2017—the same year the Women’s March movement rose to prominence—Teen Vogue pivoted to be a part of the revolution: Since many people disliked the newly elected president, it was now safe for publications to align themselves against Republicans without running the risk of losing ad dollars and access to branded content opportunities (especially if you could still sneakily publish conservative-leaning content). Teen Vogue offered up a slate of resistance-focused writers, including Lauren Duca, a then-weekend writer for the site whose piece, “Donald Trump Is Still Gaslighting America. I Really Care. Do u?,” went viral. After Duca verbally sparred with Tucker Carlson on prime-time television, Teen Vogue tapped her to write “Thigh-High Politics,” a column that “breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.”

Duca’s column made her one of the most recognizable faces of the resistance: Through her large social followings, Duca called out Trumpism, helped Gen-Z recognize its political influence, and even landed a book deal for How to Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of American Politics (2019). Thanks in part to Duca’s rising profile, Teen Vogue became the star of endless positive memes about the kids being alright and Gen-Z saving us from the end of the world. But then the pieces fell, and, as Scaachi Koul wrote for BuzzFeed News in 2019, Duca’s revolution backfired. In a 2019 piece for Jezebel, Anna Merlan, now a senior writer at Vice, wrote that Duca “seems to have particularly ardent fans among young women, and it’s that audience that she frequently encourages to become more empowered, more politically engaged, and more outspoken.” However, as Merlan explained, her former colleagues at HuffPost weren’t thrilled to see Duca’s increasing power given that she was accused of harassing them via anonymous emails.

Thanks to her growing platform, Duca was given the chance to teach a course titled the “Feminist Journalist” at New York University. Feminists, particularly feminists of color, mocked the syllabus because it lacked inclusivity and an overarching goal for what students would learn and achieve. Then, as Gwen Ihnat wrote in a 2019 article for the A.V. Club, every student in Duca’s course filed a complaint against her. What does the criticism leveled against Duca mean for Teen Vogue, the magazine of the revolution where she built her brand? In 2020, there’s no such thing as a movement without a face, so now we’re in an age when “revolutionary” brands are interlinked with their ambassadors and said ambassadors become iconicized because of their connection to said brands.

It’s difficult to have a movement without an icon because it’s easier for the larger public to connect with a singular person (Martin Luther King, Jr. and DeRay McKesson, for instance) than an overall political movement; there’s almost an innate human need to have a role model who makes us feel as if that person, alone, can save us. But social media has further complicated an already flawed idea: It’s no longer a matter of just associating a person with a movement; the person becomes the movement. If you’re invested in a movement, such as the Women’s March, then you’re more likely to follow the cochairs across social media than follow the organization’s centralized account. In this way, digital spaces have given rise to a culture where we have access to folks in a way that feels intimate, even if, in truth, they’ve cultivated an online persona to build their brand.

Feminist icons—or online feminist icons, given their ever-expanding digital reach—have a unique rise and fall. It’s more complicated than a wellness blogger turning her back on healthy smoothies and never drinking coffee or a writer-turned-influencer gaining the title of scammer seemingly overnight. The internet becomes the perfect breeding ground to go from admiring someone to hating them and everything they’re associated with. In a 2019 article in the Atlantic about the rise of online nemeses, Taylor Lorenz writes, “While having an opponent is nothing new, the nebulous concept of having a secret digital adversary is a more modern condition.” She continues, explaining how social media has turned having a nemesis into a motivator. “Broadcast-based social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have allowed everyone to have real-time updates on other people’s biggest accomplishments, and that can make it feel as if everyone on the planet is getting married, writing a book, or winning an award. It’s easy, when you see someone leading a seemingly perfect life, to want to tear that person down.”

The internet loves a good nemesis, especially a feminist one, but perceived feminist leaders are simply people—no matter how large their movements get, how many followers they accrue, and how impressive their reach or their impact is. Every movement is bigger than a singular person; King might be the one with a national holiday, but the Civil Rights Movement spanned decades and was made of a collection of activists, just as the Stonewall Riots and eventual Pride Movement expands beyond Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. And the more we invest in the people leading movements than the movement themselves, the more we blur stan culture and protest. It’s strange that Kamala Harris has the K-Hive, a political version of Beyoncé’s Beyhive, and that people get tattoos of Bernie Sanders’s face and Elizabeth Warren’s campaign hex code. It’s strange that protest has become a way to gain popularity, sell a book, and land a job, rather than a risky act that aims to push forth structural change over personal branding and success.

The perils of feminist prominence, and progressive prominence, are such that we risk losing hold of our own movements as we hand them off to a handful of leaders who, without fail, will make decisions that we view as movement-destroying mistakes. Activists are not influencers, but because many of them rely on impressions, clicks, and likes to push their movement, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between people who genuinely uplift communities and help orchestrate new conditions and those who simply want to profit from being associated with a movement. Now, and in recent years, social media followings come first and passion and skill comes last as influencers and those with high followings have activism mapped onto them, rather than the other way around. On the surface, Duca appears to be a feminist activist invested in empowering young women and teaching them how to be activists; Jameela Jamil appears to be a body-positive activist fighting for inclusion in Hollywood; and the Women’s March cochairs will seemingly stop at nothing to lead this movement and accomplish its goals. But these women are so bolstered by their own prominence that their activism gets warped by social influence and careerism to the point that it’s unclear where they end and the movement itself begins. So when they make a misstep—as people are wont to do—they’re poisoned and so are the movements they’re associated with.

Though Mallory has been pushing to end racial inequality, her association with Farrakhan was enough to push her out of a movement she believed in. As the aforementioned Rewire News article notes, Mallory “has since been asked to [condemn Farrakhan] over and over, irrespective of the fact that his words are not her words, she is not responsible for him, and that asking her to do so means effectively condemning her ‘family’ and community—the people who were there for her and her son after the death of her husband.” It isn’t about if Mallory should or shouldn’t be held accountable; it’s about the impact of so closely associating Mallory with the Women’s March that both are now tainted. It isn’t that Mallory did or didn’t push for a bill or skipped a protest; it’s that she revealed her own humanity, and we didn’t like what we saw.

At the end of the day, the failure we feel when the faces of our movements and the prominent feminists we assign power and influence to end up being little more than human is a reflection of us, and not of them. What would our small, feminist worlds look like if we put more curiosity and interest into learning the ins and outs of a movement and its mission than the tweets and Instagram Stories of its faces? What would happen if we could unlink a movement from its face, and see its goals and needs instead?

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The transformational feminism that’s required to really change the world is not going to happen in the marketplace.

amyroost_jennaschoenefeldphotography_09.

Amy Roost, coeditor of Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences in the Trump Era (Photo credit: Jenna Schoenefeld)

Since Donald Trump was elected president on November 8, 2016, women in the United States have embraced an unprecedented anger. The emotion has consistently connected and mobilized them in opposition to Trump’s presidency: upstaging his inauguration with a Women’s March, participating in airport demonstrations across the United States to protest his Muslim travel ban, and electing more women to the House of Representatives than ever before. Anger has been an emotion that women can organize around and harness to sound the alarm on Trump’s ever-escalating behaviors that particularly harm marginalized communities.

Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences in the Trump Era, an anthology coedited by writer (and Bitch contributor) Amy Roost and psychotherapist Alissa Hirshfeld, aims to capture how anger became and continues to be a motivating force for those resisting Trump. The essays in Fury are dispatches from women across the United States who are figuring out how to make sense of this new normal. Whether they’re struggling to speak to their children about this political moment or tracking the month-by-month progression of the country’s descent into authoritarianism, the pieces in Fury serve as a time capsule of a deeply consequential moment.

Roost spoke to Bitch about the importance of documenting Trump’s presidency, tapping into anger and using it as a tool for social change, and fighting for the soul of this country.

How did you get the germ of an idea for an anthology about women surviving the Trump era?

In all honesty, I thought I was losing my marbles after the election and needed some validation that my response wasn’t outside the bell curve. I should add that I was also in the midst of some personal trauma at the time. My 22-year old son, who had suffered two hemorrhagic strokes and had undergone brain surgeries, was living with us while attending rehab. My husband, a clinical psychologist, was able to provide the validation I needed by sharing with me how many of his patients were experiencing stress over the election; [he said] that women, in particular, were expressing emotions similar to my own-—sadness, anger, and disbelief. Once I realized I wasn’t crazy—or, if [I was], I wasn’t alone—I figured others without the benefit of a psychologist in their lives might be seeking validation as well. I wasn’t wrong. I received more than 200 inquiries after posting a call for submissions on a Facebook Binders (women writers) group in February 2018.

In the introduction, you write that you had two purposes for releasing this anthology: to help readers understand and develop more empathy for women, and to “create a record for posterity.” Can you say more about these as the guiding light?

We Knew was an early working title for Fury. By “we” I meant women. There’s an essay in the collection titled “It’s Been There” that addresses this: Many women and people of color knew before the election that Trump was a misogynist, racist, and con artist. All the evidence was there. If you are hypervigilant (which is just another way of saying you were paying attention) like women who’ve been sexually assaulted, then you knew.

On the morning after the election, I saw a Facebook post [from] a millennial white male that said “Apparently, lots of women like having their pussies grabbed.” In the days following the election, I also heard a lot of people—mostly white men—saying things like, “Let’s give him a chance. Let’s see what he’s got.” As if everything he’d ever said and done leading up to the election could simply be dismissed. I recognized these tropes for what they were: magical thinking. You don’t miraculously become a decent human being or develop empathy when you get a promotion. If anything, the power and the mandate that came with being elected reinforced Trump’s negative traits.

I wanted men—and the 52 percent of white women who voted for Trump—to understand what the rest of us had seen all along, what they had missed. Not in a nasty, I-told-you-so sort of way, but in an interpersonal, “let me tell you my story” kind of way. I think a Trump supporter with empathy would find it difficult to dismiss most of the essays in Fury because they read like conversations with a neighbor you know to be decent, even though you may not belong to the same political party.

[As] far as creating a record for posterity, I believe future generations will look back on this era and question how and why a hateful, divisive human being like Trump could have been elected the leader of a country that ostensibly stands for justice, equality, and sometimes even decency. How did we let conditions ripen to the point that a malignant narcissist could possibly grab the mantle of power? I hope Fury withstands the test of time as a record of what it was like to live in America when our leader and his followers wore their hatred like a medal of honor.

Just as people still invoke “never again” in relation to the Holocoust, I hope Fury will be some small part of the canon of literature that convinces future generations that we should never again elect a someone with a psychopathology like Trump’s—someone who will always choose to put his own personal interests above those of the greater good. What comes of all this has yet to be written. I’m hoping that I’ll live long enough to look back on the Trump era as a catalyst for change that brought about greater social, gender, and income equality and helped the country reckon with and account for our historical trespasses. And I hope the era teaches us lessons in interdependence and humility, with respect to both other nations and the natural world. I realize these are tall orders.

Talk to me about empathy: Why is that an important trait to develop, especially in this time? What does empathy allow us to tap into and understand about our political moment?

With this collection, I was hoping to instill empathy in the reader who might otherwise have trouble understanding a woman’s perspective—how and why our response to Trump is unique. The essays also reveal how the feminine ethos of caring and humane treatment of others, role modeling for our children, and, in short, empathy—suffered a direct hit in the form of Trump, the ultimate self-aggrandizing toxic male.

I saw a survey recently that asked [about] the trait [people] most desire in a president. Empathy ranked number one. I may be wrong, but I don’t think empathy would rank as high during a different presidency, because up until Trump, empathy from our leaders was a given. I remember how Obama comforted the parents and families of the Sandy Hook massacre; and while it was beyond touching to see his response, I wasn’t surprised. [It] was not only consistent with how he presented himself, but also consistent with the public’s expectations of a leader during a calamity.

Contrast Obama’s presidential demeanor with Trump’s, which Melanie Brooks writes in her essay, “The Biggest Hole Is Where the President’s Empathy Should Be.” She bemoans Trump’s “shockingly inappropriate responses in moments of national crisis.” [She points] to “his vulgar and hate-filled comments about Haitian and African immigrants on January 11, 2018, when he reportedly used the word ‘shithole’ to describe their countries of origin. His striking lack of compassion in that moment was startling, but no words can describe the added cruelty of maligning Haiti one day before a painful anniversary when memories of trauma and unfathomable loss inevitably resurface.”

Another contributor, Lorraine Camenzuili, also addressed Trump’s [lack of] empathy:“…subtler feelings like empathy, curiosity, doubt, sorrow, or tolerance are rarely on display; to wit, hurricane victims are offered paper towels in the context of underfunded disaster relief and asylum-seekers are separated from their families and put in cages rather than offered safety. His presentation seems geared toward a relentless show of strength laced with intimidation and deflection.”

Did you learn anything particularly impactful or significant as you put the anthology together?

Definitely. It was like an upper-division course in humanity. My biggest worry when Trump came to office was what would my kids—both with pre-existing conditions—do for health insurance if the Affordable Care Act was scuttled. By the time I’d read everyone’s essays, I realized my troubles were relatively small compared to the existential challenges faced by several of the contributors. I learned more about hypervigilance, intersectionalism, the Catholic Church, challenges faced by members of the LGBTQ community, discrimination and bigotry directed at Jews and persons of color, multigenerational trauma, suicidal ideation…the list goes on and on.

I learned from Pamela Woolford, whose essay was originally included but later withdrawn, that people of color experienced fury and disappointment toward presidents—even Democrats—long before Trump. I learned that there is room in my heart for everyone’s experience and that no one’s experience can be “wrong,” which is a powerful realization.

In the end, I came to understand that all roads lead back to empathy. My co-editor Alissa put it best: “People on different sides of the political divide, as well as people of different cultural backgrounds and faiths, seem unwilling and sometimes unable to empathize with others’ perspectives. But when we listen deeply to one another’s stories—meaning we practice seeing things from another’s perspective while silencing the voice inside us that wants to disagree or tell our own side—we learn that we all want the same basic things: a good life for ourselves and our families, good health, an adequate income to provide for our needs, and a sense of meaning and purpose.”

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Fury: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Trump Era edited by Amy Roost and Alissa Hirshfeld (Photo credit: Regal House Publishing)

Emily Sinclair wrote a really poignant essay titled “Panic Drapes the Look of the World: Literary Treatment for Anxiety in an Uncertain Age,” which is broken down into literal months and years. One thing it highlights is how time under Trump is simultaneously moving slowly and at breakneck speed. How can we get our bearings and really take it day by day?

I’m so glad you called out Emily’s essay. It’s a stunning piece of writing, and I think so much of it applies to what we’re currently experiencing with COVID-19 and the various stay-at-home orders. Time seems to evaporate into thin air while paradoxically moving slower than we previously thought possible. Living in the time of Trump is like living in a house of mirrors, not only because so many regulations have been rolled back but because of all the gaslighting he does. He says one thing, then another and another, all of which seem to contradict each other. We’re led to believe we’re either mistaken or crazy, which contributes to our growing anxiety and has us constantly speculating and worrying [about] what’s next. That we can’t get our bearings is a feature of his administration, not a bug. We can’t effectively punch back if we can’t get our footing.

While we’re distracted, he and his enablers loot and pillage without [consequence] or even detection. He’s destroyed our capacity to be outraged and our ability to respond appropriately. We’ve learned he has a financial stake in unproven treatment for COVID-19 he touts against the advice of his medical advisors—a violation of the emoluments clause. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was caught conducting his re-election campaign out of the White House—a violation of the FEC. He’s firing government watchdogs, like the Inspector General, and he’s replaced his acting secretary of the Navy and the White House Press Secretary. Meanwhile, a key enabler, the GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is suspected of dumping stocks based on insider information about the virus. All of this is intended to exhaust the public with rage, despair, and fury. He wants us to just give up and his message is “I have no shame and know no bottom.”

On a macro level, I have no answer to your question. On a micro level—when I find myself getting sucked into the minutiae—I follow the advice of Audre Lorde, who famously said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” I also try to zoom out to 30,000 feet and see the big picture. I’m not always successful, and that’s when I put myself on a news diet and up Vitamin N (for nature) intake. When I’m really stuck, I listen to my “Songs that Make Me Cry” playlist.

I especially loved the essays are from parents who are trying to explain and contextualize this moment for their children. Jaimie Seaton’s essay, “Can We Reassure Our Kids Monsters Don’t Exist When We Know They Do?” really gets to the heart of that. What should we be telling children—both our own and those in our orbit—about this time in U.S. history?

There is no one answer to this question, and I think a lot depends on the developmental stage of the child—while simultaneously acknowledging that the Bully-in-Chief’s example is accelerating childhood for many. On the one hand, I believe parents should shield younger children from pain and suffering that the child is not old enough to make sense of. Shannon Brescher Shea talks about this in her essay, in which she’s deciding whether to go to a march protesting Trump’s migrant policies. But kids are also far smarter than we give them credit for. Lea Grover’s essay addresses active shooter drills with her kids, and Krystal Sital uses the pussy-grabbing video as an opportunity to address agency with her very young daughters.

Unfortunately, as much as we’d like to, I don’t think we can just refrain from explaining what an active shooter is if your child is being taught how to respond to one. I recently [had] a similar situation with my 8-year-old grandson, whose teacher instructed him to choose a hero to write about. He chose the [comic-book writer and publisher] Stan Lee (over Barack Obama, his second choice). Prior to his death, Lee was accused of sexual assault by a number of women, and so I suggested to my stepdaughter that she may want to redirect her son. That wasn’t popular, so I then suggested that she at least turn it into a teachable moment by explaining that being a hero doesn’t mean the person lived a perfect life. A lot of parents were recently presented with this same dilemma when Kobe Bryant died.

My boys are grown, but I was never into whitewashing or sugarcoating. Any time the topic of sex came up, I’d blurt out, much to their embarrassment, “Remember, no means no!” Did I force them to watch the collapse of the World Trade Center on repeat? No. But I also didn’t shield them from the fact that other people and countries don’t always think of Americans as nobly as Americans think of themselves, and a small percentage of those who don’t like us also believe that violence is the only solution. That’s scary but true. And the truth always wins in my book.

There’s a lot about our current moment that feels familiar for people from marginalized communities, which is the reason the “Our People” section of Fury is so impactful. But what is it about the Trump administration, specifically, that activated so many people for the first time?

It’s pretty simple: Trump says the quiet part out loud. Many white people, including myself to a certain extent, were naive enough to believe that racism and bigotry had diminished to the point we could begin to imagine a post-race future for the country. We were wrong, and I for one would like to apologize for ever believing such a load of crap.

What do we most misunderstand about the righteousness of women’s anger?

It’s not new. It’s only that now more women are voicing it. And the media is finally giving it coverage—thank you Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Ronan Farrow, Julie Brown, etc. Traditionally, being a woman has been a long, slow process of swallowing your anger until it poisons you and you die. I know this because I’ve watched angry women die—my mother, [for one]. She was born and raised on a small Iowa farm with no running water or electricity. She escaped to Chicago after high school [and] was hired as the executive assistant to the American Postal Workers Union boss. She “ran the joint,” according to her sister, who also worked for the union, “but could never take credit for that.” She quit her job when she married my dad and helped him start and build an expanded metal business. She wasn’t paid a salary, and when they divorced, she wasn’t awarded any part of the business. After launching the business, she became a full-time doting mother, not only to her own children but to every other child in the tidy cul-de-sac where we lived.

In 1962, she and my dad adopted their third child, who they named Rebecca. Rebecca was spindly with a ruddy complexion, but to Mom, who’d waited nine years for a daughter, she was perfect. When my parents discovered they’d unknowingly adopted a biracial child, my dad insisted [she] be “returned.” Mom, who by then had bonded with Rebecca, had no say in the matter. The only reason I know how bitter she was about these events, and my dad’s womanizing, and her struggle to establish credit after the divorce, was because I discovered her diaries after she died. Fury is dedicated to Mom. It’s no surprise that the #MeToo movement and Women’s March were begun by Black women. Women’s anger has been segregated for far too long, and white women have finally joined the chorus.

How can we tap into our anger and discontent and use it to fuel social change?

The same way Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights movement leaders did, by purposefully directing the heat generated by our discontent for the greater good. I’ve learned the hard way that throwing punches in the air dissipates my anger and, while I may feel better, [those punches] do little to benefit society. But if I direct my passion and energy at injustice and get others to join me, there’s no injustice we can’t incinerate.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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Infiltrating the toxic architecture, learning and exposing its mechanics, cutting the wires, and burning it all down is my type of Trojan Horse chess play—being strategic and precise, turning fury into fortitude.

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