#sarsour

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?

It’s not that coverage of the marches as chaotic and fractious — riven not simply by ego and competing tactical factions, but by the exposure of deep and dangerous prejudices — has been incorrect: The Women’s March, since its inception, has been built around the expression of disagreements and provocative arguments about the biases, inequalities, and resentments that wind up getting replicated in any progressive coalition. (Especially in a movement of women, who as a subjugated majority are thus a bigger and more unwieldy population than almost any other oppressed group.)

But the fighting, while often presented as perilously schismatic, has, from the start, been part of the point. As Sarsour told me, back in 2017, “contentious dialogue is by design.” The painful reflections and calls to responsibility were meant to bring anger to the surface as part of the process of marching together, rather than allowing that anger to fester and separate a group that could, united, wield power. That idea is well within the tradition of feminist argument, especially Audre Lorde’s 1981 essay “The Uses of Anger,” in which she suggests that “for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is itself a heretical and generative idea.”

And so, the fact that millions of women and men have turned out for mass protests for two years in a row, not despite tensions over racial, religious, ideological, and economic differences — but in the midst of them, some engaging them head-on — has been one of the most defining and electrifying features of this iteration of a women’s movement. The hot messiness has been one of contemporary feminism’s surest signs of life and of a willingness to work toward being better than it has been in the past.