Is no march at all better than a march with the wrong demographics?
Organizers of a Women’s March that was scheduled to take place in Eureka, Calif., on January 19 wound up calling it off over concerns that there were going to be too many white people there.
“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” states a post on the group’s Facebook page. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.”
After the cancellation made news, the group posted a follow-up explanation.
“The organizers of the Eureka Women’s March in Humboldt County, California, are moving the focus towards an event date on March 9th, in conjunction with International Women’s Day, to ensure that the people most impacted by systems of oppression have an opportunity to participate in planning,” another post stated. “We failed to have the type of collaboration needed to be inclusive of some of the most underrepresented voices in our community, namely, women of color and people who are gender non-conforming.”
This is, in a word, stupid. For one thing, Humboldt County, where Eureka is located, is approximately 74 percent non-Hispanic white. In other words: The projected demographics of the march might have been a simple reflection of the demographics of the city where it was scheduled. It might not have been a racism issue or an inclusion issue, but a logistical one.
What’s more, I am having a hard time understanding how having no march at all is better than having a march that happens to be mostly white. If these marches do anything to fight Trump — which I’m not sure they do, but if they do, the way the organizers believe they do — wouldn’t they want to have as many of them as possible? It’s especially rich when you consider how often white women are slammed as a group because so many of them voted for Trump. People on the left have often calling these women traitors (and all other sorts of terrible names) because they chose Trump over Hillary, but when they try to do something to fight Trump, then that’s a problem, too? Give me a break.
It’s a wonderful thing to be inclusive, and I think that it is a good goal for these march organizers to focus on including as many different voices in their efforts as possible. But canceling an entire march because they didn’t get those voices (especially when the area of the event is overwhelmingly white) does absolutely nothing to further their cause. With this cancellation, the Left gained absolutely nothing — and they lost the chance to have their voices heard, simply because too many of those voices happened to be white.