March on Washington, 10/15/00
by Corinn Columpar, Instructor of Film Studies and Women Studies and Member of the President's Commission on the Status of Women

In graduate school I had a film studies professor who was obsessed with the assassination of JFK and notorious for his ability to work a discussion of this event into every course that he ever taught. Recently when he and I were catching up over a cup of coffee and our conversation, once again, started to head down the path leading to the inevitable grassy knoll, I finally asked him the reason for his insatiable interest in the subject. His answer was swift and plain: "It was the defining event of my youth." When he then asked what the defining event of my youth was, I too was able to answer without hesitation: "The Rodney King verdict." Since such a question had never been posed to me before the assuredness with which I responded took me a little by surprise. Nevertheless, it was immediately apparent to me upon reflection that everything in my world changed after that day when twelve jurors reconvened in a Californian courtroom to acquit the cops whose egregious abuse of Mr. King had been captured on videotape for the entire nation to consume, rewind, and consume again.

I was an undergraduate at the time, attending a college that never had trouble finding a political issue around which to rally on any given day. Within that charged environment, the news of "Not Guilty," whether it came from the television, the radio, or a classmate already in the know, was greeted in the same way by everyone: with a stunned silence initially and an unstoppable flood of words soon thereafter. Between all-day demonstrations on the quad and all-night discussions in the dorm, people could not stop talking, questioning, speculating, debating, and, ultimately, organizing. For example, it was the verdict that, in conjunction with the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas debacle, which had occurred only months earlier, inspired some friends of mine to start sowing the seeds for The Third Wave, a new feminist organization whose name alone served to refute the popular press's designation of ours as a postfeminist generation. While I had been involved in various types of volunteer work, community service, and consciousness raising activities prior to this period of time, I had never felt as if I was part of an activist community. Yet as I added my voice to the campus wide chorus of dissent and subsequently signed on for The Third Wave's inaugural outreach effort, I experienced the empowering exhilaration of mass political organization, and my feminist beliefs were consolidated into an identity as activist.

As I anticipate the March for Women's Rights that will take place in Washington, D.C. on the 15th of this month and the international rally at the UN General Assembly in New York City slated for the 17th, I get excited imagining all the young women and men who will for the first time be rubbing shoulders, making noise, and asserting their bodily and, by extension, political presence with thousands of people who agree with them on at least three counts: that we need to 1) demand a commitment to women's equality on the local level (by, for example, asking why the U.S. is not among the 169 nations that have ratified the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) ); 2) widen our perspective to include global issues affecting women outside our national boundaries (such as, for example, the Taliban's misogynist reign of terror in Afghanistan); and 3) explore the myriad connections between the local and the global (by acknowledging, for example, the fact that multinational corporations are making a few people and a few nations very rich at the expense of an international pool of impoverished workers who are predominantly female). Many feminist writers have noted that the last two decades or so have been characterized by the "I'm not a feminist, but" phenomenon in which young women and men pronounce the said disclaimer in order to follow it up paradoxically with an unequivocally feminist sentiment such as "I believe that women and men should have equal rights and equal opportunities in life." In my experience this phenomenon is being supplanted by a new one. More specifically, I see among my students a desire to embrace rather than spurn a politicized identity that bespeaks a solidarity with social movements of the past, yet this too is done with qualifications. The phrase "I am not a feminist, but" is giving way to that of "I AM a feminist, but" and in this case the "but" is followed by comments such as "I don't have a dusty picket sign in my basement," "I don't participate in rallies or marches," or "I don't belong to any organizations." As feminist language and ideas have come to infuse our daily discourse and public culture, feminism has been unleashed, to some extent, from any movement per se. While this unleashing has its benefits, it is important to recognize that passionate collective engagement is neither passé nor obsolete and that there is nothing like the electrifying energy of organized political demonstration. So for those contemplating a trip south for the events, I can't recommend the experience highly enough. For those who are definitely making the trek, enjoy; I envy you.