Since today’s the day of the March 8^th Women’s Strike and International Women’s Day, it makes sense to consider the thoughts of one of the strike’s organizers, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who was interviewed on 2-28-17 by Truthout’s Sarah Jaffe. As always, I’ve edited the interview for clarity and brevity.

SJ: The call to strike that you coauthored talks about building a feminism for the 99%. Can you talk a little bit about what that means?

K-YT: It’s partly a response to the idea that the last frontier for women to challenge are the glass ceilings blocking the ascension of women in electoral politics and corporate America. That isn’t the last frontier for ordinary and working class women. Feminism for the 99% is about rejecting that idea that women are only or primarily concerned with their role in the elite male world, and emphasizing that there are still basic issues such as wage differentials and access to reproductive health care. Black women make $0.63 for each dollar that white men make, for example. Which, of course, is lower than the usual barometer that people use, the $0.78 to the dollar that white women make.

In a sense almost all issues are women’s issues, as attacks on social programs, public education, and government-funded health care have a severe impact on women’s lives. There is also no publicly funded childcare. On a very basic level, we need a feminist politics that responds to these issues as the most urgent. The outpouring around the January 21^st protest showed that there is actually vast support for a resurgent feminist movement on this basis. There’s also an understanding that the problems experienced by women today are rooted in an economic system that privileges the 1% over the 99%, a system that also relies on the free labor of women in the home to reproduce itself. Also, we now have as president a billionaire who’s made his money by exploiting loopholes in the system, a misogynist who’s abused women, so it’s not surprising that the first protests against his administration have been organized by women and mostly attended by women, and that women’s issues have become a focal point of the resistance movement.

SJ: You wrote a wonderful book about the Black Lives Matter movement (From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 2016), putting it in historical context. I wonder what your thoughts are on how that movement is changing and shifting under Trump.

K-YT: I think that Trump put Black Lives Matter and the activist organizations affiliated with it in the crosshairs early on. His entire posture around law and order was created in opposition to Black Lives Matter and what he called a climate that was “anti-police.” That’s had a particular impact; for the president of the United States and his supporters to refer to political activists as terrorists, which they’ve done around Black Lives Matter, means a particular thing in the security state atmosphere of the United States. It’s put activists on the defensive and created a situation in which people internalize – look inside of their organizations to figure out how to tighten things up and politically respond to Trump. That’s understandable, but I think we’re at a moment where we need to look outward and connect with other groups of people experiencing some of the same attacks. Police abuse and violence isn’t just an issue affecting African American communities, and Trump is trying to expand the powers of the police to put other groups in the crosshairs. Attacks on the undocumented and the attempts of the Trump administration to deputize police officers in the effort to round them up, and attacks on Muslims and Arabs also call on greater powers for the state and its armed agents. These create an almost natural alliance of people to stand up against policing and police abuse. What all of this means is that we need a bigger movement to confront the police – a movement that tries to connect the issues. I think there has to be a great effort among folks from Black Lives Matter and other organizations that have been fighting these things to make connections with other groups for the sake of expanding the movement, while also preserving the space and understanding that these policies continue to have a disproportionate impact in Black communities.