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“The Waking Among the Woke”

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Linda Sarsour

So the story,” the activist Linda Sarsour began, “is an old lady from Hawaii, a retired lawyer, posted, ‘I think we need to march on Washington.’ ”

It was the evening of November 8, 2016, and Donald Trump was emerging as the president-­elect of the United States. Millions were in the first hours of a shock that would last for days. Among the anguished was Teresa Shook, the retired lawyer in Hawaii, who suggested the idea of a march on Washington, to protest the incoming president and all he represented, and went to bed. Sarsour, who lives on the other side of the country, in Brooklyn, continued the story of how she came to be associated with Shook’s proposal for a march: “She wakes up viral. She’s a little old lady; she probably gets six likes usually. All of a sudden she wakes up, it’s like . . .” Shook had gotten ten thousand RSVPs. In parallel, a woman named Bob Bland, a fashion designer, had posted a similar idea. “Somebody connected the two,” Sarsour told me, “and said, ‘Why are two white ladies doing two separate things? Why don’t you make this together?’ And so they did. And the event was called Million Women’s March originally.”

It was shortly thereafter that Sarsour saw the post about the now-­merged event and, with some incredulity, the name. Her reflex was, “I’m not going.”

Sarsour might have seemed like a natural customer for the march. As a progressive activist who works on immigrant rights, criminal justice, racial justice, corporate power, labor policy, and other issues, she has spent much of her life marching. As a Palestinian American, a feminist, and a Muslim, she had a special loathing of Trump, who had spent his campaign degrading people like her. If the worst visions of his presidency were to come to pass, she knew the diverse, heavily immigrant communities she organized in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge in Brooklyn would be among the first to hear knocks and watch loved ones whisked into unmarked vans.

But Sarsour, like many on the activist left, didn’t necessarily view her enemy’s enemy as her friend. She didn’t assume that any formation of women organizing a march to resist Trump were her people, aligned with her values and goals, just because of their common fear. She had been around long enough to know that when the undocumented immigrants, women of color, poor people, and other marginalized groups she represented entered into coalition with other groups, especially those with more power, they could be silenced and shut out, told to focus on what the more powerful groups deemed important and to defer their own most pressing concerns. History overflows with cautionary tales. Black women agitated for women’s suffrage, only to see white women secure the vote for themselves with the Nineteenth Amendment and leave Black women out. Sarsour’s fellow progressives routinely answered the plea to vote for moderate Democrats (“blue no matter who!”), only to see their concerns sidelined after the inaugural.

When Sarsour looked at the post for the proposed march, her in­stinct spoke to her plainly: stay away. The first tell was the name, the Million Women’s March, which all but appropriated a protest with a similar name by legions of Black women in Philadelphia two decades earlier. That suggested to Sarsour that this upcoming march didn’t merely happen to be convened by “two white ladies,” as she put it, but was anchored in a kind of white women’s feminism that Sarsour had learned to recognize and guard against: a kind of feminism that was big on issues like reproductive rights and equal pay but could be considerably quieter about the needs of women in the marginalized communities Sarsour organized—­for workers’ rights relative to corporations, for protection against the immigration authorities and the police, for economic redistribution, for environmental justice.

Sarsour might have been loath to join what she viewed as a white feminists’ march under any circumstances, but Trump’s election had intensified the feeling. Like many, she was infuriated by the recent disclosure that 53 percent of white women had voted for Trump—­in spite of the sexual assault allegations, in spite of the Access Hollywood tape, in spite of his sexist bullying. (The number came from exit polls, and it was later said by some analysts to have been just under half rather than slightly over. But 53 was everywhere at that moment and a source of anger.) “White women sold out their fellow women, their country, and themselves last night,” the writer L. V. Anderson declared. And that 53 number strengthened Sarsour’s inclination to keep away from the march, even if its organizers were from the other 47 percent. “You’re catching me forty-­eight to seventy-­two hours after this election,” she told me. “I’m not really fond of the women who voted for Donald Trump right now. I’m not feeling like I have any trust, particularly in white women.”

The 53 percent statistic reinforced Sarsour’s skepticism of the kind of coalition building that comes at a severe cost. What was the point of allying with white women—­who suffered from sexism but couldn’t help but benefit from white domination—­and abiding the sidelining of one’s particular needs, if some of those white women were inevitably going to sell you out at the first available chance? “I said, ‘Do I have the heart for it, really?’ Because I don’t organize white people,” Sarsour said. “Before the Women’s March, this was the community that I organized with: North African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and, beyond that, the immigrant rights movement, predominantly Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and then, beyond that, Black people. I never organized white people.”

Among the great projects of Sarsour’s life was the dismantling of white supremacy. But she shared with many in her activist circles a fatalism about individual white people changing as part of that broader transformation. It was almost to be assumed that white people would ultimately side with their own. You didn’t fight supremacy by appealing to white hearts and minds. You fought it by organizing your own communities of color, amassing real political power, and changing the rules and structures that upheld systems of white domination. “My mission,” Sarsour told me one day, sitting in her small office at the Arab American Association of New York in Sunset Park, “is I want to build power among people of color, knowing that we are eventually going to be the majority and we’ve got to start building our power. I don’t want to just be the majority without power; I got to be the majority with power.” That guided the work she did bringing together communities in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge that didn’t have much interaction but had common concerns. It informed her pleading with voters of color to be more than reliable Democratic voters, to demand a Democratic Party that pushed for real, structural change and answered their unique needs. And when Sarsour did this work, when she sought to build power for her people, what she often found herself up against was white people refusing to change the oppressive systems that kept them in power.

So Sarsour was wary of the march. But that didn’t stop her from doing a bit of constructive prodding. Looking at the event page one day, she noticed that the white women of whom she had been so skep­tical had actually inserted some helpful language about standing with Black women, with indigenous women, with immigrant women. That was progress! Except for one glaring problem, in her estimation. “All the stuff, but no one said Muslim women,” Sarsour told me. “I’m not going to lie to you. I was kind of like, ‘Really? Were you not paying attention to this election?’ ” Trump’s campaign had used his ­Muslim ban as jet fuel, and now the white women convening this march appeared to forget all about that. Sarsour was mad. And while to many on the progressive left, she is an icon of a fearless, unyielding brand of activism for the most marginalized people, she has the ability to be delicate when she chooses. “I wrote a very nice comment,” she told me. “I said something like, ‘I really appreciate this endeavor. I hope that you would include Muslim American women as well.’ Something very diplomatic. And so my comment goes viral.”

Her timing was good. The white ladies, the original pair and others who had signed on, came to realize they had a whiteness problem. One of them, Vanessa Wruble, told Vogue that she had written to the others: “You need to make sure this is led or centered around women of color, or it will be a bunch of white women marching on Washington.” It was not clear from the outside whether this concern was motivated more by principle or by the fear of bad public relations. But in any event, the women reached out to Michael Skolnik, a white consultant to organizations, who was once described by The New York Times as “the man you go to if you are on the left and want to leverage the power of celebrity and the reach of digital media to soften the ground for social change.” He suggested some women of color who could combine with their efforts. One of them was Tamika Mallory, a Black civil rights activist and a friend of Sarsour’s. Around the time when she volunteered to help collaborate on the march, she called Sarsour.

“I see you, girl, on that page,” Sarsour remembers her friend saying of Sarsour’s Facebook comment. “Relax, we’re about to go in there and fix some stuff.”

“Go where?” asked Sarsour.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Mallory told her.

For some reason Sarsour couldn’t fathom, Mallory believed that a march anchored in white feminism, a march Sarsour wasn’t even interested in attending, could be improved by “going in there.” Not without reason, this kind of “going in” to struggle with white people to make them less invested in...