“We’re Not Going to Stand for It”: SisterSongNYC’s Jasmine Burnett

By On March 17, 2011 · 2 Comments

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

I met the inimitable SisterSongNYC leader Jasmine Burnett after I came all late to Stand Up for Women’s Health Rally in NYC on February 26.  (In full disclosure: I’m also part of SisterSongNYC.)  In the video, she discusses some of the intersections of reproductive justice–economics, voting, and mothering–and what activism needs to be done.

Transcript after the jump.

(Roar of the rally crowd in background)

Jasmine Burnett: If this funding is cut for women of color, Head Start is going to get cut, WIC is going to get cut.  Mothers will not be able to care for their children because they will not have access to the necessary job-training programs that will allow them to provide safe family and healthy communities and healthy environment for our community.  So this is what’s going to happen.

And what’s going to happen after that is that, in November, we’re going to encourage those women to vote the people who took our rights away out of office.  And that’s not a threat—that’s a promise.

The message I want people to understand today is that Black women and women of color are pissed. Off.  And we are not going to allow these billboards to continue to spread throughout the country with messages that demonize our reproductive choices.  They are trying to use these to divide our movement and create division between the racial and reproductive-justice movements, and we’re not going to stand for it.

 

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  • nga

    beautifully said. my mom, a poor vietnamese woman, relied on programs like wic and head start to raise three of us. without the leg up, i highly doubt we would have been anywhere near prepared physically or mentally for k-12.

    just when i thought further marginalization could not happen to low-income women of color, these proposed cuts come along. the various gaps keep widening.

  • http://feministing.com/2011/03/17/what-we-missed-371/ What We Missed

    [...] SisterSongNYC’s leader Jasmine Burnett on the racist tactics that anti-choicers have been employing of late: “The message that I want people to understand today is that Black women and women of color are pis… [...]