Darcy Richie: Common ground in fights for rights

I am afraid that we are gradually becoming expensive people. Joyce Carol Oates wrote Expensive People about self-destructive violence. This was seen as an external expression of "the radical discontent, the despair, the bewilderment and outrage of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America of their elders so steeped in political hypocrisy and cynicism." This weekend, millions of men and women will gather to March for Women's Lives, and this might be the bridge we need on several levels.

My generation might be the generation of expensive people, self-destructive in our independence and self-destructive in our lack of a cause. We are independently idealistic in a hope for future prosperity and peace and at the same time isolated from the generations and causes that came before.

I see this march as our generation's bridge to the fights of our parents. It reminds us that we not only have one cause -- we have several. This is a frightening time for women. It is not yet accepted in this country that women should be able to control their bodies and, to many extents, their minds.

More broadly, however, this is a frightening time for those who must defend their rights. It is true that we are overwhelmed by the hypocrisy of our leaders and bombarded by discontent, but this might be our time, our cause, to relate to our parents and the battles they fought.

To me, this march is about relationships and mutual advocacy out of those relationships. More than 30 years ago, James Baldwin wrote, "If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own ... For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night." Baldwin wrote these words in 1970 in an open letter to Angela Davis. In one of the most compelling and powerful testaments of strength and support, Baldwin concluded his open letter with a call for all to rally.

He said, "You look exceedingly alone." Baldwin, who faced struggles of his own as a gay black man, was responding to the image of Davis, a black women's rights advocate, chained on the cover of Newsweek. He wrote, "One might have hoped that by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles."

It is important for us to understand our internal divides. Sometimes my fight to hear my own black voice might drown out that of my female voice or my youth voice. It is important for me to understand the intricacies of separate causes in order to find the common ground. In this light, my black feminism expands me, not divides me. For this reason, this march is about relationships between causes that are worth fighting for.

Baldwin's message, which comes to my mind at this time in history as an acknowledgment of a need to cross lines for support, reads clear with bitter relevancy. As an expensive generation, we are sometimes unable to see beyond our individual causes to how we are similar. Baldwin's letter suggests that previous generations could see the ties between different causes and how they had the potential to unify and develop a larger coalition.

Far too often, we can't find this common ground. In my mind, we see chains every day. My generation was raised with the vision of chains in the past: the struggle for affirmative action, struggle for civil rights, struggle for gay rights and abortion rights. But I fear our relationship to these images has made us distrusting and self-serving -- even self-destructive.

As a woman, I fear that our dialogue around issues of rights and protection still have lonely undertones. We don't connect the struggle for women's rights with the struggle for gay adoption, and we don't see how the discrimination is similar.

I am optimistic about this march and its potential to bridge divides, magnify voices and unify on the grounds of similar struggles, because I hear more people relating to its cause. This is the March for Women's Lives, but it is not only for women.

This march is for men to relate to women's vulnerability, for black feminists to relate to white feminists and for all who struggle against discrimination to recognize the dangerous conditions we are all in.

This march is spurring on the idea in so many people's minds that no cause can be boxed in isolation; they all flow into each other. Once we start crossing lines between different causes, we realize that in some ways, most of us identify as "the other." For the first time in a while, this march is not about a hierarchy of oppression, but about the reality that oppression exists.

Darcy Richie is a senior urban studies major from Birmingham, Mich. Strange Fruit appears on Wednesdays.

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