JUSTICE, AND HER CHILDREN
by Eshe Ukweli
Read this in the FEMINIST ZINE
They will try to silence you. Squash the truth from your mouth. Pry equality from your fingertips, and drown justice from your heart. They will say “that’s a woman’s issue” and that “all lives matter”. That “me too” is just the carrying on of emotional women, men who “wanted it” and folks looking for a quick claim to fame. When they can not break you, they will try to unlink the arms locked in solidarity around you. To turn brother on sister, and sister on sibling. To try and get us to crush one another under the weight of our own need for freedom. Under our need for our voices to be heard. But we are not their crabs in a barrel to be picked out, off, and devoured. We are bound together in this collective under one resounding voice. Together, in an understanding that our oppression is not singular but linked and intertwined.
The trick of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and oppression and discrimination in all its forms, is the facade that one can gain freedom without one another. That cis women can gain equal pay and rights over bodily autonomy without care for their trans sisters and siblings. That Black lives can matter without Black queer lives mattering too. That we can continue to fight to dismantle policies that bar us from resources and access, while still remaining oblivious to issues of accessibility and disability. Falling prey to this deception leaves those who exist at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration status and more to fragmented lives, impacted by one system or another.
So when we say we are feminists, believing in the social and politicaly equality of women, we must uphold the sanctity of all women no matter cis or trans, Black or white, rich or poor. We must continue to broaden our language to welcome and house the binary and the non. We must say “me too,” “Black lives matter,” “access matters,” and continue to engage in the fight for liberation for ourselves and others. For not only are our chains linked but also our freedom.
Justice, radical justice, encompasses Marsha P. Johnson and W.E.B DuBois. It is home for Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, and Brad Lomax, just as much as it is for Tarana Burke,George M. Johnson, and Janet Mock. So dare to dream, a dream that dreams back at you. Dare to dream a dream of liberation broad enough for us all. Dare to dream of justice, and all her children, rooted in shared humanity and grounded in the radical joy here and to come.