A thought about yesterday’s marches hit me at church
(thoughts like this often come to me in worship)
and I tried to express it but it was inchoate and didn’t strike other people well.
I started out seeing this as women’s marches, about women’s issues. I was struck by men marching. They supported the women, I thought. And I thought that it was good. I wish I had marched.
But it struck me another way, that women needed support, as if they could not do it on their own. It struck me as an index of the sexism in our culture. This is not to say in any way that I at all think men should not have marched. But I saw the sexism of our cultural sexism laid bare before my eyes. And that men will take over everything you let them. Which I thought was a major point of the march
And then I remembered 1965, when a small group from my college went to Atlanta to ask Dr King how we could help. He told them that he had plenty of marchers for the last day’s march into Montgomery but he needed bodies for the first day’s march out of Selma. And we went and did just that.
Bodies. White bodies. Bodies less likely to be savaged by the forces of law and order. It had to have the patronage and protection of white folk. Another index, of the structural racism of that day, And of this?
I also remembered When in the religious life we attended the life profession of a sister in a “sister” order. She made her profession to our superior, not hers. It takes a man, I thought. I pointed out this dissonance to our superior. Then it changed. It takes a man.
Sigh.