Aria Florant
5 min readJun 23, 2023

If You Support Roe, You Should Support Reparations. Here’s Why.

It is January, 2018. I am walking north on 13th street in Washington, DC, and just left the Women’s March demonstration. It is cold, and I am dismayed. I had hoped to see a diverse crowd; instead, I saw a sea of white.

I had thought carefully about what to wear that day. My outer layer grounded me in my purpose and my intersections, which felt important at the Women’s March. I wore a gray sweatshirt with one capitalized word across the front: TRAYVON.

In my walk down to the mall, I had passed many people selling merchandise — most of them Black. As I perused the array of clothes and accessories, one seller said, “I like your shirt.” The racial and economic conditions forcing Black folks to be on the clock at such an event — most without a real choice about whether to participate in it — were palpable.

I call my mother as I walk home. “I’m disappointed. Given this is DC, there should have been more Black women there. I guess not much has changed about the Women’s March since last year.”

“Well, Black women need to show up!” she exclaims.

I wince, and feel a chill unrelated to the weather. My mother is a white woman, wife of 35 years to a Black man, active in feminist and anti-racist movements, who has loved her two Black children fiercely and unconditionally. Yet in that moment, it is hard to find the words to describe both the historical inaccuracy of her statement and the gut punch of feeling so unseen.

The reality is that across time, it has been white women who have not shown up for Black women. At best, this has manifested as exclusion from their feminist agenda; at worst, violent treatment of their ‘property’ (enslaved people) and outright white supremacy as a rationale for women’s empowerment. This wound runs deep; its roots date back to the antebellum south, when white women advocated for an end to slavery, but not to racial hierarchy. It festered throughout the suffrage movement, when white supremacy was used as a rationale for why white women should be granted the right to vote. It persists today in the causes white women predominantly choose to champion; pay equity, promotions, workplace harassment. Important causes — and causes for which white women are more likely to be able to access the benefits, and that do not address structural conditions that women of color are more likely to face — incarceration, gun violence, police brutality. A chorus of Black feminists and reproductive justice advocates have made this point, and on the one-year anniversary of the fall of Roe, it bears repeating: the feminist movement is failing Black women. The antidote is investment in racial repair.

The narratives undergirding [white] women’s empowerment never resonated with Black women. Black women know that labor, especially in a capitalist system, does not lead to liberation. Black women know that true bodily autonomy — having real choices in life — requires so much more than a legal right to choose. As movement leaders chart a new path to ensuring access to abortion, they must go further than acknowledging that Black and Brown women are disproportionately impacted; they must also invest in addressing why. They must invest in repairing the root of the wound: the harms of slavery and its legacy.

The Black, queer women of the Combahee River Collective give us an example when, in 1977, they defined a new politic born from their intersectional identities. They struggled against not just patriarchy, but capitalism and white supremacy too; therefore, their analysis critiqued “the totality of American society, not just their place in it.”

What if we return to the root of this wound, and imagine an alternate reality?

What if — centuries ago — white women had acted in solidarity with Black women rather than white men? It is a difficult imagination exercise given the many economic, political, and emotional reasons why they didn’t, but let’s suspend our disbelief. What would our world look like today if white women had looked anti-Black racism dead in the eye, and committed themselves to abolishing it? If prior to emancipation, white women had confronted their husbands, organized their comrades, and faced the shame of the society they operated in every day?

Might Black and white women — and the movements they lead — share deeper bonds of trust, derived from having one another’s backs?

Might courage to do what is right be sewn deeper into the fabric of American culture — and might we have more models for how whiteness and courage can work together against anti-Blackness?

And as a society, might we be better at empathizing across race, because white women — when they watched their husbands rape Black women and sell their children — empathized with Black women’s pain?

It would have been impossible for white women to receive that pain without sharing in it; therefore, it was easier to look away. But looking away causes a different kind of pain — dirty pain — the shame of inflicting trauma.

When a person experiences shame, they have two choices: own, name, and metabolize it — or deny it. Denial leads to rationalization of the shameful act. White women rationalized their inaction by crafting themselves a story about those Black women: that they were salacious, inferior, and inhuman. These stories buffered white women’s feelings of shame, and destroyed their ability to empathize with Black women. Said differently, white women projected into Black women that which they did not want to see in themselves, and these projections continue to inflict violence on Black women’s bodies today.

My mother’s analysis of the Women’s March lacked this context. The origin of the disconnection between Black and white women lies with white women; therefore, so too does the responsibility to change it.

And the stakes are high.

They are high for Black women, for whom slavery’s hold over our bodies remains visceral; Black women are over three times as likely to die from pregnancy than white women.

They are also high for white women; this is for your souls. White supremacy hurts white people too — because in order for a person to dehumanize another, they have to dehumanize themselves.

James Baldwin once said about white men during slavery: they lost the ability to love their own children. Their own children — Black children, conceived through rape — became enslaved people right before their eyes. In many cases, white men sold their own children — encouraged by their wives — because the children were a reminder of violent infidelity.

What does it take for a parent to sell their own child?

For my mother, watching me become an enslaved person would be torture. For it to be tolerable, she would need to shut off her innate instinct and humanity — and convince herself that I was truly sub-human in order to believe she herself was not a monster. My mom gives me a window into the naiveté, denial, and unaccountability of so many white women. And, her love bestows a visceral understanding of the contortion of the human spirit that was slavery in this country. This contortion still lives in white people today, manifested by unwillingness to repair the harm of our nation’s past.

In the year since the Dobbs decision, feminists have been regrouping. This time, we need a new approach. To build the power we need to win — and the world we all want — we must build trust among women across race and move out of a scarcity frame toward one of abundance. Because the power of relationships, especially across race, is infinite. If you believe in a woman’s right to choose, you must also believe in repair for all of the women for whom there was never a choice.

Aria Florant

Co-Founder, Liberation Ventures: fueling the Black-led movement for racial repair in the US, and building momentum toward federal reparations.