Originally posted on the WORD website, where it has received over 9000 shares on Facebook.
In a new campaign video, Clinton uses imagery from the women’s movement to position herself as a feminist candidate and her candidacy as a step forward for women. Seemingly without irony or self-awareness, she uses the images of powerful women of color like Shirley Chisholm to sell her campaign to women, working people and people of color.
Many who identify themselves as feminist seem to believe that any progress made by an individual woman, particularly a wealthy white woman, translates into progress for the rest of us. It does not. Wealth does not trickle down, nor does societal power. Dismantling oppression just doesn’t work that way. A few token members of an oppressed group being allowed into the halls of power will not set the rest of us free, and it’s disheartening to see people in 2016 still looking to women like Gloria Steinem, Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton as saviors of women.
As the ad continues, an image from a 2012 WORD (Women Organized to Resist and Defend) rally in Los Angeles is featured. Co-founder Peta Lindsay is onstage under our very first big purple banner, which reads: “We Won’t Go Back, We Will Fight Back!” If Ms. Clinton were familiar with WORD, she might know that later banners featured a slogan much more relevant to her campaign: “The Status Quo Must Go!”
I remember that day vividly because I am also one of WORD’s co-founders, and I put my heart and soul into organizing that rally. Seeing our hard work and struggle used, even for a moment, to help sell a vicious capitalist status-quo candidate makes me sick. So let me set the record straight.
We made that banner by hand. We made hundreds of placards and thousands of phone calls. We went to local schools, block parties, craft fairs, flea markets, concerts, grocery stores, and any other event we could think of to engage with the community and sign people up for our mailing list. We called on allies from other feminist and anti-war groups to join us in solidarity. We organized permits and a march route. We did all of this ourselves, for free in our spare time.
We didn’t do that work for applause or recognition. We didn’t get paid for our time or effort. We didn’t do it to “get out the vote” and instead talked to the crowd about how we can’t count on politicians of either party to fight for us. We certainly didn’t do it to support a rich warmongering white woman killing our sisters in Syria and Libya and Palestine.
We did it for ourselves, for each other and for our families. Our mothers and grandmothers who worked in factories and fields. Our children who inherit a system with no safety net. Our sisters who struggle to put food on the table. The families torn apart by deportation and mass incarceration. We did it to build a movement that allows us to come together and fight together, to join in common struggle against racism, war and capitalist oppression everywhere it rises.
Hillary Clinton does not represent us. She has never been part of our struggle, she has never supported our struggle, and she is not a product of our struggle. WORD denounces Hillary Clinton’s callous, self-serving propaganda, her deceitful tactics and her shameful politics. The struggle for women’s rights continues, and will continue no matter how many rich white women get elected to public office.
