 And it's my deep, deep, deep honor right now to introduce our next speakers. I've had the pleasure of working with these women over the last year and they just never cease to amaze me and inspire me. Please welcome on stage two of the Women's March leaders, Linda Sarsour and Bob Bland. Hi everyone, I'm Carmen Aremo, I'm assistant curator here at the Brooklyn Museum in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It's my great honor to be here with Bob, Linda. Thank you so much. So thanks for clapping, we'll skip the niceties, we'll get into the questions, we have a lot to talk about. So those of us who follow the beginning of the Women's March, the beginning being like the social media updates up swell, notice of course day one, white women were at its center. On day two, the news sort of came out that Linda, of course with Tamika and Carmen, a different Carmen, Carmen Perez, were added sort of to the roster to the organizing core of the Women's March. What was day three like for you both? What is day three like when intersectionality comes to the fore? Well, for me, day three was the revolution that has to come within yourself and within your mind because as a white woman in this country, I had been sliding along the rails of white supremacy for my entire life without even knowing that that was what was happening and that is the system working exactly as intended to serve people that look like me above anyone else. And so I credit Linda, Tamika and Carmen, Jeanne Ingram and so many thousands and thousands of women who contacted us over social media in those first few days for raising our awareness and with that the awareness of so many other women who were going to the march and starting some of the daring discussions that we're having up until this day. So it wasn't easy, it's fabulous, but it wasn't fabulous in the beginning. I think what I think is really important for people to understand as we tell the story of the Women's March that it wasn't that women of color were added to the roster, it's that women of color demanded a seat at the table and in fact wanted to be at the center of the table. We also demanded to have powerful and influential positions, so I didn't want to just have my beautiful Punjabi face on a poster that said we got Muslim women, it was about what was the Muslim women's role in the Women's March and being able to bring Muslim women to the table, making sure that our group that we were a part of included black women, that included trans people, that included Latina, that included all types of folks because if we were not at the table, there are issues we're not going to be at the table. And I'll say this, I mean, white women could have had a march and it would have been probably fabulous. They would have had probably millions of people. People were up in arms around it, but what I will say would not have happened is we would not have had the boldest, most intersectional platform that has ever come out of any march. I mean, if it wasn't for the inclusion and the integration and the centering of women of color, we would not have had the current movement that we have now. So I went to the Women's March, it was amazing, I went to DC. Where I was, I couldn't hear any of the speeches, I know a lot of us probably couldn't either. I was in a great group of friends, family, and my sister's friend brought a Black Lives Matter poster. And from where we were, you know, the chance were kind of performing, it was a little awkward and I noticed that every time we kind of tried to get Black Lives Matter going, a lot of the women, white women around us, sort of felt a little bit uncomfortable and you could tell them, to tell really that they weren't quite there yet, quote unquote. Since then I think, you know, in New York specifically, the day after Charlottesville, for Philando Castile, I've seen white women sort of step to the fore and sort of be able to shout those words with confidence and among, of course, women and people of color generally, which has been great. But do you think that the Women's March helped bring intersectionality more into the mainstream? If it was an entry point for some people, if it was their first time, you know, what comes next after your first time? Well, it absolutely, because it brought intersectionality to me in my life. You know, I think that we did bring that conversation and then particularly our unity principles that were built intersectionally from leaders from all across every different type of issue area and identity were pivotal for me. Also, we brought Keynesian non-violence principles to the forefront that a lot of folks are not learning this stuff in school. So where do you learn it if you don't learn it through organizing and through activism? But over the last year, I can tell you that the March was always meant to be the start of something. It was not intended for us to just march and rally and make pretty posters and that's what we're doing forever now. And so we're at an inflection point now where we have to convert the people power in the streets into political power and we have to get women into positions of leadership and in office in numbers too great to ignore because marching is not enough. Totally not enough. I'll just add to that because I think what I try to bring into this movement is that I get critiqued all the way from the far right to the far left and I don't actually care. And I think we do have to continue to have these hard conversations and sometimes I wake up and I'm just really disappointed in our movement not because we often focus on the external, right? The opposition, we're always like the white supremacists as if that requires any courage to call out white supremacists or neo-Nazis or as if it requires any courage to call out a president who's clearly to me a fascist and those around him who are fascists and anti-Semites and all that. That doesn't require much courage at least in my personal opinion. I think what requires courage is holding each other accountable. So when I think about an uproar over Trump or an uproar over the kinds of controversies that we see happening online but then you don't see the same uproar when Sandra Bland is killed in places like Texas or when you see all these horrific things that happen every single day there's a woman getting deported and being separated from her family. There's every day there's some unarmed black woman or man being killed at the hands of law enforcement so my question always is how do you get to a point in a movement when people are moved by the right things, right? When we are moved in the same way about the sanctity of someone's life as we are when the Women's March invites Bernie Sanders to the damn convention to speak. So the priorities are not always clear to me in the movement that we're a part of and the question for me as a Muslim, as a member of a directly impacted community as someone who organizes mostly with black and brown people who's really in it for the survival of communities in this country? Who's really in it for the people who need you the most and who's in it because it's about their feelings and the Women's March was about people's feelings, right? It was about people who all of a sudden woke up on November 9th being like, oh my God, I'm feeling targeted, I'm feeling really, my feelings are really hurt. How did we get a sexist misogynist in the White House? Well, 53% of white women electorate helped him get there. Let's just be, that's just the fact. So I think the Women's March continues to struggle and we all continue to struggle in the movement together. The question is, will we struggle through love or will we struggle through eating ourselves alive as the progressive movement, right? And if we're gonna continue the internal public displays of non-controversies while the right wing sits back and watches us do this to one another, we're not gonna win. And the most directly impacted are even more in fear and uncertainty watching those of us with means and those of us with the privileges, those of us who may be documented, those of us who have these type of platform, they're looking at us like, are you, wait, wait, are you the ones that are gonna save me? We're doomed. So I'm in that moment right now where I'm just like, I'm also struggling myself to see kind of where we're going and I know the potential, I know what we have to offer, I know what we all in this room have to offer. The question is, who's ready to put it on the line and who are we ready to put it on the line for? Thank you. And Linda, Bob, both of you obviously had long, busy lives before you got to the Women's March and so we talked a little bit about vision about being beyond just resistance and that resistance can be step one but what comes beyond that? So for your past, your work with our communities here in New York, elsewhere, Brooklyn of course, but even in criminal justice reform and your work for the fashion industry, opening it up to much more different conversations about diversity, about sustainability, about manufacturing principles and labor has the attention and the excitement behind the women's movement helped your alliances grow, have people really started to open up to what they're thinking about and learning from, from you both? I mean, in my industry, in fashion, people weren't even talking about politics really before this, like one of my very close friends, Celine Samon from Slow Factory, I've worked with her and struggled with her for years just to get support and funding for her line and as a refugee herself as a Middle Eastern woman, she was not even able to really talk about the different issues around liberation, around her identity as a woman of color, all of these different things and now it's getting supported in a way but is it just because it's popular in this moment? Because we're on a very slippery slope in the creative industries and fashion if we're just using this as another fad, if this is just the next, oh, social activism and the next year it's not hot anymore, that cannot be, we must commit to each other's collective liberation, we must do it when it's inconvenient, we must do it when it's uncomfortable, we must do it with those closest to us and we must acknowledge that it's intergenerational, that this is not something where just because we all marched on January 21st that we're gonna solve all of these systemic problems this year, next year, or in the next 20 years, we need to commit to this and champion our children, like for instance, my daughter Penny, who's six years old, she always asks me, where's Linda, where's Linda? She wants to, she's like, no, another march, and just constantly I'm getting these things and for those of us with children, it's like we're indoctrinating and when she came home with her worksheet that's calling Columbus Discovered America and he was a strong man and all this stuff, I had to sit there and dismantle all of that in her head immediately so that she doesn't learn things and then have to unlearn them later like I have. Right, right. I think for me, I've been doing this work for about 17 years and doing this from the context of national security, national security form in the post-911 era and the demonization and vilification of Muslim Americans and then found myself in the larger criminal justice reform movement, seeing the intersections between immigration and criminal justice and the way that our country chooses to treat people of color or those who are perceived to be people of color and where I am now is that I went to be, I'm now by default part of a movement that I never felt that I was a part of which is the feminist movement and one of the reasons why I never felt like I was part of the feminist movement was, number one, there wasn't a lot of women who looked like me who were centered in the quote, feminist movement in this country and the way that feminism was introduced to me was this idea that women were going to the Middle East to save women who look like me when no one asked them to. But this idea that also people who look like me are feminism or the idea of the upliftment of women is questioned just simply by default of who we are. So we're Muslim, that means we can't be feminist, right? And that is the kind of the narrative that has been pushed unfortunately through propaganda campaigns. So if Muslim women are oppressed then I don't know. If that's what I represent for people then I don't know what oppression looks like because I am not a oppressed woman, let me tell you. But I think that we are bringing also and really shifting what feminism looks like in this country, who gets to be a feminist in this country, meaning that in this country that we, people like me are inspired by Chicana feminism, black feminism and those are not stories that have been centered in the feminist movement in this country. We look at historically even when we think about the suffragists and think about those movements who was left out, who was in, who got the right to vote first, right? Not all women got the right to, these are the kind of stings that need to be centered which is where we're having these really uncomfortable situations and what is actually happening is that some feminists are not comfortable with people like me at the forefront of the women's movement. That's just the fact of the matter. Some people are not comfortable with having black women as faces of the feminist movement and that's the struggle that we're having right now internally, that there's this idea of someone's losing power or someone's losing visibility and that's just not what's happening. What we're doing is we're showing the reflection of the true country that we live in right now, changing demographics and the people who are also on the front lines that are willing to risk their actual lives to protect the most marginalized amongst us and so it's important for us that we're seeing the movement that we're in and evolution, that it's not the taking away from anyone, it's just how the world works and how we're moving as a country. It's also about young women seeing people who look like them. People are inspired by people who look like them. Young black girls like to see black women in leadership. Young Muslim girls wanna see Muslims. Young white women wanna see white women in leadership and powerful positions. Young Mexicans wanna see Mexicas and Chicanas in leadership position. Young trans people of color wanna see trans people of color in leadership positions and being powerful and influential. This is just how the world works. So this idea of being comfortable with the shifting and the imagery of what leadership looks like in this country and this leadership right now is women of color. If you go to the front lines of any movement right now it is women of color who are doing the most risky work, the ones with the death threats and are still out here doing that work. So that's kind of where we're at. Yeah and I mean especially in this current moment obviously fake news, sound bites. We were even talking about when you read Fox News it feels like there's an alternative world that they're not even reporting on some of the things that people like you both are fighting for actively and thinking about it every morning. Exactly. Like they're not reporting on Puerto Rico at all as if it's not a part of our country. Yes, yes exactly. And so how can we in addition to resisting fight for something? What can we envision together and how can we get there? Well, yeah so we've all gotten really good at resisting. So we're all really good at saying well this is what we're against. But what are we for? Do we have an ideology? Is there something that we all share? We know women aren't a monolith. We don't all have the same lives. We don't all have the same experiences. And we can't just continue chopping each other up though into all these different sections. We need to be able to come together in some sort of unity. A lot of that first comes with truth and reconciliation. And so I think that's kind of where we're at this year. And every time we have a conflict within the women's movement, it's a good thing. Because it shows where the clear lines are. Like where people disagree with each other and where they don't. So we always consider conflict to be as painful as it is. It has to happen because we have to know where those lines are drawn so that we can have the hard conversations. Because you don't know until you know. Yeah, so I would just say that we need to, and especially communities of color at the forefront of this, as Linda said, need to be the ones at the forefront of visioning a world that includes them, that centers them. And then sometimes leadership, particularly for white women, means taking a back seat. Means stepping aside. And that's something that I'm so grateful that we have been modeling that with the women's march. But it can't just be about those of us at the forefront of the movement. We need to see this more in society. There needs to be intentional divestment of power from different communities. Yeah. So, his freedom isn't finite. It shouldn't be finite. Why are we acting like it's pie? And if I take five slices, then there's no slice for you. We should all be able to be free. So how can we vision a world where that is the truth? I think that communities who are the most directly impacted are always visionary. Now think about when you hear what's coming out of communities of color and those who are most directly impacted. Let's say, for example, when we say black lives matter, that's a vision. That we live in a country where black life truly matters. That there's a vision of dignity. When communities of color demand to be treated with dignity and respect, they wanna live in a world where people could walk the streets of our country and feel safe and feel embraced for everything and all that they bring to the table. So communities of color and directly impacted communities have always been visionary. If we just sit for a while and listen and reflect on what it is that these people want, right? They want human rights. They want freedom. They want liberation. They want to raise their children in a country that loves their children as much as they love their children, right? So what we say in the movement and the movements that I'm a part of is that those who are closest to the pain are also closest to the solution. And the way that we operate in this country, it's powerful white men mostly who are trying to tell me what I need to do with my body, trying to tell me what immigration is supposed to look like, trying to tell us how our prison should be run or how our school should be run, when in fact it should be the people who are the most directly impacted by these very systems people are talking about who should be telling us how those systems work, because they're the ones that are interfacing with those systems. So we need to listen carefully. And we also need to go to the communities who are the most directly impacted, right? We can do a movement, but, and I always say this to people all the time, like we're very intellectual. Sometimes I'm sitting in spaces and people are trying to explain things to me like, I don't know, like heteropatriarchy and all the stuff, and I get it. Keep having those conversations, but I always say to people all the time, if my Palestinian immigrant mother in Sunset Park doesn't know what you're talking about, then we've got a problem, right? We also have to remember that we're organizing with people who may not have high school diplomas, who have literacy levels at sixth grade level. Like we, if we're not reaching the most laid people in our community, we're not reaching that grandma that lives down the hall from us, then we're not doing a good job. And we keep preaching to the choir. And right now, the people that need us the most are not the people that we're touching the most right now. And those people are living in uncertainty and fear and are looking for our leadership, but our leadership has to be accessible. And it has to be presented in a way that embraces people and brings them to the table. One of the things that you'll find on the Women's March website is the unity principles. We already have told you what we stand for. We have clearly what it is that we stand for, the principles that we are united around and at least in our part of the women's movement. And we also are part of coalitions with movements who have very clear vision of what our country is supposed to look like and what we're actually fighting for. Unfortunately, no one listens to the vision. People just want to listen to the conflict. It's always about Trump-ish, Trump-that. I don't give a damn about Trump because Trump is actually not my problem. Trump just exposed to you what the problems in this country have always been since we founded this country. So the privilege that lies when you can actually take all oppression and put it in one man, that's actually a privilege that you could do that. Because everybody else will say, where were you when my son was incarcerated? Where were you when the neighbor down the street got shot by a police officer? Where were you when 1,000 immigrants were being deported every single day under the Obama administration? Yeah, Frank, yes. Like, so there's been also a conflict where people who are working with who are directly impacted are like, oh, all of a sudden everybody woke up. But Trump to me is a blessing in disguise. If we needed Trump for everyone else to recognize the deep systemic oppression of this country, then you know what, maybe that's what we needed and maybe we should be thinking about other ways and alternative ways to deal with this administration. And the last thing that I'll say also is I'm here because there's a sense of urgency and I don't always feel that urgency from everyone else. And the reason why I bring this up is yesterday I ran a mobilization in Washington, DC about around the no Muslim ban. That keeps coming up. Now we're at 3.0 and you know this administration is relentless so they're already figuring out what 4.0 looks like. And a woman named Holly Yasui came to speak and her father, Min Yasui, was a Japanese-American lawyer who basically appealed or went against the administration at that time around Japanese internment. And one of the things I've been reflecting on is 75 years ago, by the way, is not that long ago. I just wanna make that clear. And when I think about what they said about the Japanese, they said the Japanese were not loyal. They said the Japanese were the enemies within. They were not to be trusted. And there was a multiple year propaganda campaign against Japanese-Americans to the point that one day our government decided to go around and round them up with their children and put them in concentration camps on this US soil. And the American public turned a blind eye. It's been 17 years or almost 17 years since 9-11 where the government has continued and media has helped Muslims are not to be trusted. We cannot be Muslim and American at the same time. We are the enemies within. We have countering violent extremism program that only focus on Muslims when we know that the biggest threats since 9-11 have been white extremists and white violent extremists. And we keep putting this propaganda out. And one day, what makes me think as a Muslim that my life is more honorable than a Japanese-Americans? What makes me think that I have a better job or a more honorable job or I love my family more than Japanese-Americans love there? So we're in a sense of urgency that if we allow these things to keep happening around us, one day some atrocity is going to happen. And there is nothing that reassures Muslims or other people of color that anybody's gonna do anything for us because if there was, if anybody can point to some reassurance in history, I haven't seen it yet. But that is what people are comparing this. There are parallels to history. And there hasn't been a reassurance, at least in my opinion or my observation in the movement that we are actually prepared as a country to stand up against an atrocity like another form of Japanese internment against any community, mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, right? Right now, I just read an article two days ago that this government has put in a multi-billion dollar investment in building more immigration detention centers and more beds. What does that tell you? Just because they don't call it internment, do you need, does it have to be that explicit for us right now, for us to act? So I just hope that we leave here today understanding that we're doing what we can, we will struggle, we're not perfect, we make mistakes, all of us make mistakes, but we can be in a movement where we disagree with one another, but we can disagree from a place of love because we are not monolithic. And if you're expecting to be in a movement where we all agree, then you're in the wrong place because I walk into my parents' living room and I disagree with half those people in there. But guess what? I still love them. They're still my family. So the question is, can we build a movement that where we can disagree on things? But at the end, we meet at a place that says we have marginalized communities who are counting on us to protect them, to center them, and ensure that we in this generation do not allow something to happen on our watch. And I will say this about myself, and this is what I ask myself. 60 years from now, God forbid there be something horrible, not that there hasn't been a lot of horrible things that already happened. I wanna be able to say I did everything I could. I put it all on the line. And I wanna be able to say that the question is, do we all ask ourselves that question? Like, I don't even know how people who lived at the time of Japanese internment live with themselves if they're still alive. That that happened on somebody's watch in this country. And I hope that we are going to be the true never again generation. And it's what we're trying to build. We're doing what we can. We're educating. We're bringing in as many people as possible. And sometimes there are not gonna be people who are gonna come along and that's okay. I don't expect 340 million Americans to do what's right, but I expect the majority of my fellow Americans to do what's right. Thank you. So we just have a couple seconds left, but very soon, next week, right? The women's convention is going to kick off. So today maybe a little microcosm, art world museum version of that. What can we achieve through these conventions through getting together? Are we preaching to the choir? So we're having a women's convention next week in Detroit, Michigan. And there's everything that you can expect there. This is a convention where we hope that people not only leave inspired and motivated and rejuvenated to go back and do work in their communities, but leave with some instructions. We have a big battle ahead of us in 2018. And I don't believe that liberation comes through the ballot box, but I do believe it's part of the puzzle towards liberation and towards protecting the most marginalized. We have about 4,000 plus mostly women who will be at the convention. We have- And you can still register. And we can still register women'sconvention.com. And there'll be issue-based tracks, skills building, public speaking, voter engagement, voter registration, organizing 101 how to be an effective ally, confronting white womanhood, you name it, we're doing it. And we also have on Sunday state caucuses where people who are from the same state will have a room designated for them to network and meet people from their state in order for them to go home and build that network to organize back in their home states. And I'll say this just to also, the intentionality around how we organize as the women's march just to give you a quick understanding why Detroit? Why not Arizona? Why not New York City? We chose Detroit specifically for three reasons. Number one, we went to Detroit because we believe that Detroit represents a microcosm of all the issues that we're working on at a national level. Immigration, gentrification, police brutality, right to work, reproductive rights fights, you name it, it's happening in Michigan. But also Michigan has a long history of inspiring organizing and people who have been doing this work for decades in the state of Michigan. We also wanted to invest our money in a city that we knew would benefit from our economic power that we're bringing to that state. We also created a local host committee that is overwhelming majority women of color. Because the other thing about how we organize is you can't parachute into states and think that you're bringing something that doesn't already exist there. So having local women ensure that they are in our program, that their issues are centered, that they have the power to say that this is their convention as much as it is ours was a model that we were really modeling for the larger national movement about what it looks like to organize a local committee. So we hope to see you in Detroit. At the Women's Convention, it's gonna be inspiring, amazing, we have a social justice concert. Like a youth track. Youth, so if you're moms and wanna bring kids, we have youth tracks, we have childcare, we got nurses, spaces from nursing moms, you name it, it's happening. It's a women's convention. It's a women's convention, woman-led convention. Well, thank you. It's a lot of fun.