After weeks of waiting out a bumpy Spring, storm after storm keeping the boats in the harbor, Our annual crab feast has arrived! If you would like to get in on this or if you are having refund regrets after such a long wait, click here to purchase your piece of the feast by mid nite Saturday! Your Bag this week will be brimming crab accoutrements like Tunawerth Butter and Cream for your Bisque. Do you remember that heat and serve Coconut Jollof Rice we sent you a few months ago? Well there is more on the way to round out your table! As Damon headed for Westport this week to pick up our bounty, Prius brimming with coolers, I turned my heart and mind to much darker matters. The day we have been dreading since 45's inauguration has arrived.
I start by reminding myself. this moment in history we are living is why Local Yokels exists. It is the fragility of equality and it’s undeniable connection to economics and generational wealth that has led us to build local Yokels the way we have and center the folks we center within its structure.
This moment has very little to do with abortion. It's about women basically being declared property of the State, to be regulated like a public utility. If these court rulings fall, we are once again faced with the legal reality that women are not protected under the constitution.
For those who need to name it and hear it, it is not up to the government to decide our personhood. We were born equal and free, and no law, no court has the moral right to take that away from us. The legality of injustice has been so thoroughly baked into our collective roots as a nation; our collective story is one of becoming a free democratic society with equal protections one piece at a time and we still have a long way to go.
As a millennial woman I have known legal equality my entire life. I have felt the weight of that specialness. As a single woman who has maintained social distance from men so as to never fall into the orbit of a man and have my identity be considered in reference to a HIM, I am aware I am having a unique experience completely inaccessible to any of my grandmothers before me, and I fight with everything in me to maintain that freedom for the future generations of women who will come after me. And while the State may impose an unjust thing on our sisters around this country for a time, our equality was never given by them, and they can not remove what was never theirs to give. We are born free and equal by right of being human, and no law can ever take that away from us.
We are in a moment where mobilization is required of us. Here in Washington State, our rights as people continue to be protected, and we must take our broader role as a safe haven actively and seriously.
And now I am going to speak directly to the white ladies in the room. We make up only 34% of the women who access abortion. We have an opportunity here to acknowledge that this fight needs to center around the most vulnerable and unprotected. If your shit is not intersectional and centering around the most vulnerable women in this fight, if the line you draw stops at your own feet, it is time to use that Google search bar effectively and educate yourself. In the words of Nitty Scott, " My Feminism will be intersectional, or it will be BULLSHIT." It is long past time to step to this fight as an intersectional and united group and do the work to make the internal injustices of white feminism history. If we are going to have to refight this fight, let’s educate ourselves, center our leadership on the women who represent the most vulnerable, and get it right this time. Be angry, be active, but also check yourself and make sure the lessons of recent years have been internalized and are now actively being applied.
And now, time to work out a little of this anger smashing and tearing into those crabs and enjoying the rewards!
Keep fighting the good fight against oppression and tyranny; we lurv you, hold each other, and have a great week! XO
