Only When It’s Happening to You
Dear nice White ladies, this one is for you
The day after Trump became President in January of 2017, I marched in the streets of Washington DC with my six-year-old daughter. We wore our pink pussy hats and waved our homemade signs of resistance and thronged the streets with 500,000 other women.
The Women’s March was not my first protest — that was an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco back in 2001. But this one in DC was by far the largest — and most polite — crowd I’d ever been a part of. I felt like I was participating in something big and important and necessary. Hope flared high, in spite of what had just gone down in our nation’s electorate.
Later in the afternoon when I was struggling through the crush toward the metro station, I saw a black man sitting casually on a stone wall watching the spectacle. He too held a handmade cardboard protest sign. His said: I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next Black Lives Matter march, right?
I blinked. Oof. Read his sign three or four more times. Felt a tightening in my gut because I knew I wouldn’t be there, knew I was too scared to show up at a BLM march. Those things were dangerous. Weren’t they?
It took me three more years to put my body on the line for a Black Lives Matter cause. Not that I didn’t…
