Even though it was organized by the committee behind the Women's March, there wasn't supposed to be any actual marching at the Women's Convention. But a few minutes before 5 p.m. on Saturday, several hundred women were stampeding from one packed meeting room in Detroit's Cobo Center to another, hoping to snag a seat at the weekend's most popular event: a panel called "Confronting White Womanhood."
The panel was held on Friday as planned, but interest was so high that only a fraction of the (mostly white) women waiting in line were able to get in. Almost immediately after Friday's session ended, the panel organizers planned a repeat of "Confronting White Womanhood" for Saturday afternoon. The line outside of Saturday's panel was again so long that women behind me in line joked that every white woman at the convention must be in it. Women crowded in to sit on the floor and stand in the back of the room. Then the location was changed to a larger meeting room with about 500 seats, which is what prompted the unintended Women's March portion of the Women's Convention.
From the opening remarks on Friday morning, the convention's overarching theme has been creating and fostering a wholly intersectional feminist movement. It's felt at once like a response to the criticism the Women's March organizers received for mobilizing a protest of white feminists and a purposeful decision to teach that mobilized audience of white feminists how to be less like White Feminists.
"I will be the first to admit that I was one of those people critiquing it heavily," said Heather Marie Scholl, one of the creators and moderators of the "Confronting White Womanhood" panel. Sophie Ellman-Golan, deputy director of communications for the Women's March and the co-creator of "Confronting White Womanhood," acknowledged that the conversation about race was "never fully had" during the evolution of the March. She said that's even more of a reason why a panel like this naturally belongs at the convention, which has also received criticism for an women who can afford the $295 ticket and costs to travel to Detroit.
Scholl and Ellman-Golan see the way the leadership of the Women's March — many of whom are women of color — has mobilized white women as a good thing. "We live in a world where some people have power and some people don't," Ellman-Golan said. "Racism is and white supremacy is the problem that white people need to fix."
Scholl co-conceptualized "Confronting White Womanhood" with Ellman-Golan over the past year. Ellman-Golan reached out to Scholl about putting together a panel that would facilitate discussions about the ways white women contribute to white supremacy and violence against black men when Betty Shelby, a white woman and former police officer in Oklahoma, was acquitted for fatally shooting Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old black man. They've tried to present the panel discussion before, but they said a lack of interest stopped them from going forward with it. Friday at the Women's Convention was the first time they said it was "fully implemented" to an overflowing room of women.
Neither Ellman-Golan nor Scholl expected there to be such a swell of interest in the panel. Scholl sees the lines of women crowding the panel as a testament to the fact that, post-election, "things feel more dire, particularly for white people."
"We haven't often felt that," she said. "Communities of color have, but it's new for us."
The panel itself began with Ellman-Golan giving a disclaimer that the room would be what she called a "brave space."
"We’re not going to pretend that this will be a safe space, and it certainly will not be a comfortable space," she said, addressing the packed room of women, many of whom were taking notes in their laps. "Assume good intentions, we’re all here, we all fuck up all the time. If you’re a white woman and this feels hard, please try to stay. That’s where the brave part comes in."
Ellman-Golan then gave a condensed history of instances where white women have been both directly and indirectly responsible for violence against black men. She spoke about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black child who was lynched after a white women said he winked at her in public (she has since admitted this was a lie). She spoke about Dylann Roof and his admission that he killed nine black people in a Charleston church because "they rape white women." She also spoke about Shelby and Crutcher and the case that was the catalyst for assembling the panel in the first place.
Scholl gave a miniature lesson in "white saviorism" and spoke about the ways even a well-meaning act from a liberal white woman can be inherently racist. And then Rhiannon Childs, co-director of the Women's March Ohio chapter, spoke about the ways in which she, as a black woman, feels white women get feminism wrong, and why black women have a hard time trusting white feminists.
"For me, as a black woman, I wanted to share my story because we just want to be heard," Childs said. "When Sophie came to me, I just really embraced it because if white women are willing to listen to my story, then I'm willing to share it."
After Ellman-Golan offered up an anecdote about a time she was guilty of a racist microagression against a black man, the room of women was instructed to break out into groups of five or six to discuss their own microaggressions and to "imagine a better future." The room of 500 or so women turned their chairs inward, and Ellman-Golan, Childs, and Scholl circulated the room to help facilitate the discussions.
When the breakout groups were wrapped up after 20 minutes of discussion, Ellman-Golan asked the crowd if they felt vulnerable, and why? One woman, Kim, 33, who traveled to the convention from New Jersey, enthusiastically raised her hand, walked to the microphone in the center of the room, and explained that no, she hadn't felt vulnerable, she wanted to go deeper in her discussion, and she was going to think about that after she left the panel room.
Kim wanted to attend the panel because, even as someone who works in issues of diversity as part of her career, she feels like she's never had to "confront [her] own whiteness and white womanhood." She said it was never a question that she would come to the convention, even when none of her friends were available to join her, and even if it meant leaving her son behind for the weekend. "As recently as three or four years ago, I would've not come," Kim said. She admits that the election was what woke her up, so to speak, and pushed her to be more politically active.
"These are people that are already wanting to be mobilized, or wanting to do something, but they're also enacting a lot of damage in communities," Scholl said of the Women's Convention audience. "So taking this moment where there already is a mass mobilization and pushing those people to do even more around race and racism is so important right now. It's really important to push white liberals to do better."
Ellman-Golan and Scholl said they definitely want to host more "Confronting White Womanhood" panels, outside of the Cobo Center and the environment of the Women's Convention. Childs added that, even though she knows she's not obligated to explain to white women how they can be better, she still feels an urgency to do it.
"I feel like I don't have to, but I have to," Childs said. "For my daughter, and for other young girls in generations behind me."
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