The whole thing with Scarlett Johansson is exactly why White (cis, esp.) women cannot and should never be allowed to be at the forefront of Women's Rights movements.
She shouldnât have been allowed to speak anyways considering she supports Israel, victim blamed Dylan Farrow after she publicly denounced Woody Allen and those celebrities who still support him, and has taken roles from women of color. Itâs especially gross she was given this platform when the majority of the organizers are women of color and one of the organizers of the Womenâs March is literally a Muslim Palestinian woman.
Johansson said, literally out of her own mouth, that she would support Trump if he supported women and would give her [Johanssonâs] daughter the same reproductive health care âprivilegesâ as Ivanka Trump had in her youth. This is after she made statements like âdonât let the helplessness make you complacentâ, as if standing in the middle of a crowd of thousands of women marching for their rights is the appropriate venue to talk about peopleâs complacency.
I wonât force myself to go through the full seven minute drivel she poured out on that stage before being cut off, but those two statements alone show the gigantic gap in understanding the struggleâs of being a woman in America when you come from the most privileged groups of women in the country, if not the world.
Reproductive health care is never a privilege and the fact that it is ever viewed as such is an affront to womenâs humanity. Â This isnât the âMarch for Womenâs Privileges and Special Treatmentâ, this is a march for the rights which women, by nature of being humans, are entitled to have recognized by the government and those in office.Â
For Scarlett Johansson to make her speech about her as an individual and to even think to speak the words âI will support [Trump]â is abhorrent. It flies in the face of the entire purpose of the March. This isnât about bargaining rights for patriotism, itâs about demanding rights and promising resistance if theyâre not acknowledged. To stand in front of a crowd of so many women from so many backgrounds and say âI, a White cis woman, will support your oppression of others so long as Iâm looked out forâ is the epitome of White supremacism through the feminist lens.
White women donât belong in leadership positions in movements for womenâs rights, and honestly they donât belong in leadership positions of any movement seeking to recognize and protect human rights. They donât get it and they can never get it. They shouldnât be given a platform to prove that time and time again at the expense of the women of color, trans women, disabled women, and etc. who they carelessly speak over.
