Interview: Alison Mariella Désir and Lauren Fleshman on Womxn Run the Vote Relay

Amira talks to Alison Mariella Désir and Lauren Fleshman about the ongoing Womxn Run the Vote Relay, its evolution and its intention -- and looks back at the 1977 torch relay from Seneca Falls to Houston for the National Women's Conference.

This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.

Transcript

Amira: Hey flamethrowers, Amira here, and I’m thrilled to be joined in conversation with Lauren Fleshman and Alison Désir, around Womxn Run the Vote. Now, you’re listening to this mid-way through the relay. If you’ve been looking at BIAD social media pages you know we are super excited to have our team on board with this amazing event. I wanted to check in with Alison and Lauren to talk about how this event came to be, and all the ways they’ve kind of evolved and pivoted as COVID curveballs and climate change and many things came to bear on the original idea for this event. I think what we have now, what we’re in the midst of, is an incredibly inclusive, important event that’s raising money for Black Voters Matter. I believe at this point it’s over $2,600 have been raised –

Alison: $260,000! [laughs]

Amira: $260,000 have been raised!

Lauren: It’s so big!

Amira: It’s so much, which is tremendous. So, I wanted to have a conversation about the idea of this relay and what the point of it is and some things going on there. I wanna ask you first, Lauren, what is the idea behind Womxn Run the Vote? 

Lauren: Well, the idea behind the relay is to raise money for Black Voters Matter, to engage a big chunk of the running community, and expanded community, to put our movement towards something collective that the time calls for right now. It has evolved over time in what that looks like, as you mentioned, specifics, but the spirit of it has been to make our movement count for something important and to give people who are participating the experience of taking a practice they already understand which is movement, a commitment to movement, and moving that into civic engagement and doing something for more than themselves.

Amira: Absolutely. So this is a virtual relay now, and it’s going from Atlanta, Georgia to Washington, DC. Teams have the next week to run 680 miles and along those miles they’ll be getting postcards and information around a civil rights trail, and this is a new wrinkle to what was originally conceived as a broader kind of relay, and so can you walk me through how this event became virtual? [laughs] And how the route was decided upon?

Alison: Yeah, I can chime in there. So, this idea was brought to my attention by Sarah Lesko and Lauren Fleshman who had already been talking about this for a long time. At one point it was meant to be an in-person relay, which…To be continued! Hopefully we can do that one day. But we immediately saw that we should switch to virtual, and I had previously used the Racery platform – shoutout to Racery. What’s really cool about it is that it has a conversion of miles, so, running miles, walking miles, cycling, swimming, gardening – really, you name it. 74+ activities that convert into mileage to move you across the route, and we wanted to be really intentional about making sure that this wasn’t just for people who consider themselves distance runners, that this was an opportunity for folks to move their body in whatever way they would make the mileage, because it’s really about collective action and about the force of all of us moving together and hopefully moving democracy and progress along.

Another key piece in terms of being intentional about being inclusive was about broadening who is considered “woman,” right? Broadening who are we talking about when we’re talking about feminists. For many – I can speak for myself – many times when you hear the word ‘feminist’ you’re really hearing people talk about white feminism, so what are the ways that we can center the civil rights movement, honestly a movement that we’re still very much engaged in, right? We can recall the work of our ancestors and our contemporaries and we can unite that struggle and center the voices of folks that typically aren’t centered. It’s marginalized folks, people who are really suffering the most under all the things that you mentioned – climate change, social injustice, etc etc.

Amira: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I was really stuck by was because it moved to a virtual platform it really did open up participation. I know our co-host Shireen is thrilled with the aspect of dancing her way to the finish line. [laughter]

Alison: Yesss!

Amira: And it really, I think, talks about accessibility in a way that thinks about movement expensively, and I really love that commitment. Certainly, Alison, you’ve done such formidable work on thinking about the whiteness of running, and of course we're sitting here in the centennial of suffrage, of the anniversary of 1920. But one of the themes that really emerged from this year is that we know that suffrage was not actually granted to all women 100 years ago. We know that there were barriers for Black women to vote, we know that the suffragettes of color, Native women, Asian women, Black women, Latinx women that also fought for the right to vote were ostracized within those communities. So I see this as also being part of that move to re-frame and restructure what we think of the racial group politics of womanhood. 

Alison: Yeah, I think Lauren, she speaks to that a lot. We’ve had conversations around her journey. I’d love for you to share, Lauren, about white feminism and the women’s march and realizing that trickle-down feminism doesn't work, right? [laughs]

Lauren: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, that was one of my first conversations that I had when I reached out to Amira was about that kind of unsettled earth-shaking feeling after the Women’s March of going, “Holy shit, white feminism is what I’ve been doing.” That's the kind of feminism I’ve been practicing, and these are the ways it kind of got things like discord in the Women’s March, and I wanna learn from those things, and I wanna do better, and I have this idea but I’m not gonna be the person at the center of this that’s gonna be able to make it the most meaningful or powerful or effective. So yeah, it’s been a big learning experience for me as well, and it’s by far way cooler and more powerful than it would’ve been otherwise, and so every time I hear Alison just talking about it I get goosebumps. So I’m really thrilled with what has been launched. We’re not perfect–

Alison: Yeah.

Lauren: –and we’re all still learning, and it’s always a journey, but I think we’re bringing that spirit to this event, bringing our humanity and our learning to this event, all of us are. I think that creates a really great environment to participate as well.

Amira: Absolutely. 

Alison: Yeah, to your point really quickly, I think about how epic this will be in person one day, but also, Amira, you’re right – the 10,000 folks that we have moving in their own spaces would not be possible in the real-life version, and we also would not be able to make sure that there were just so many ways to dance, skip, roll…[laughs] 

Lauren: Yeah, it was really gonna be in retrospect more of a spectator event, I mean, it would be limited to a certain number of people who have the privilege of getting time off work and responsibilities to participate and that those people would be watched by everyone else, and really that’s not what democracy is about, it’s not what civic engagement is about. It’s about acting from where you are, blooming where you’re planted, you know, all those things that people say. Doing what you can, moving how you can, and just doing it as a daily practice, as a consistent long-term engagement. It really is more reflective as a virtual event of what we’re trying to accomplish. That said, I also really desperately wanna run across the country with Alison in real life! [laughter] 

Alison: It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen.

Lauren: Reunion tour. [laughs] I already got the band t-shirt figured out.

Amira: I love that. I absolutely love it.

Lauren: Amira, could you…Because this was attempted before, in 1977, the torch relay, and that was an in-person event. What was it, like, 1,400 women or so that participated…?

Amira: Yeah, almost 2,000.

Lauren: Wow. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Amira: I can. So, in 1977 there was a torch relay in conjunction with the International Women’s Year. So, there was a convention in Houston which was federally funded, it was really public and very contentious because it was money from the government for the evil feminists. [laughs] This was five years after Title IX, and they wanted to have a moment within the convention to really forcefully talk about women in sports and women in physical culture. They hit up Billie Jean King, and Maya Angelou wrote like a poem about the strength of women, and they symbolically started the relay at Seneca Falls and it was going to go down through the country to Houston to kick off the convention. So there was about 2,000 runners that were recruited, from being in early kind of running clubs, in high school teams, in local women who wanted to be involved – and not just women either.

At first they were like, celebrities, and then they were like, no, we want every people to be involved. It really, much like this, bloomed in a way that they didn’t expect. It became very symbolic of the convention in the three week lead-up to it. They were very identifiable; they had these bright blue shirts. One corporate sponsor donated a car that matched the color of their shirts to pace the runners. They got a lot of press leading up to the convention so it became really symbolic of it, and then it culminated with a meeting in downtown Houston where their three kind of selected torchbearers – Peggy Kokernot, who was a woman marathoner; Sylvia Ortiz, who was a Mexican woman who played volleyball at University of Houston at the time; and another local Houston athlete, Michelle Cearcy, who was a Black woman who was in high school at the time. They selected the three of them to be like this symbol of multiculturalism and lead the torch in with Bella Abzug, Billie Jean King, everybody.

There’s iconic images that you’ve probably recalled of this, and they did the last mile together to the convention hall. So, that is the historical precedent for one of these relays that was really kind of ‘women run into democracy,’ but I think you can also see some of the ways that that foundation had fault lines in it, particularly the racial politics of the relay which I’m happy to continue to discuss. That’s one of the things that I love about this event so much, is it feels like it is kind of patching over some of those existing fault lines and gaps in the initial experience of getting women together to run a torch to engage citizenship and democratic action.

Lauren: I am super interested in the racial politics side of it.

Alison: Yeah, yeah.

Lauren: Just a little brief side note, because there’s been an awesome amount of media interest in this in the last two weeks and everyone I’ve talked to so far has said, “I’ve never heard of the 1977 torch relay–”

Alison: Same! Never heard of it.

Lauren: –and I can’t believe it, and I felt the same way. I was like, this thing is momentous! Obviously flawed, but momentous. And I’ve grown up in sports my whole life, and I’m a woman, like, how have I not heard about this? What do you think about that?

Amira: Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting because a lot of people say the same thing about the convention itself, and it’s so fascinating though. As part of a working group that studied the ’77 convention and gender in the state a few years ago at the University of Houston, and it’s so interesting because you’re even seeing it now with Mrs. America on FX and this kind of return to the 70s where there’s a lot of people saying, “I didn’t even know this history!” I think part of it just because the 70s, [Alison laughs] they just became historic, so we’re getting somewhat more books and media representations of it.

But it was so significant at the time for multiple reasons – so, having a relay where you were taking up space, where you’re engaging with physical culture, on the heels of demanding equitable space within athletics, was huge. Having a convention that was centered on women, and the planks…It was like, “We are rural women, here is what we need.” “We are farmers, here is what we need.” One of the most iconic moments was when women of color got there was was like, “Listen, your plank is trash because it is not accounting for our experiences.” This is when you actually start seeing the term ‘women of color’ even appear, and Coretta Scott King starts, and she says, “This is what Black women need.” She passes the mic, and it's a Puerto Rican woman, there’s a Chicana woman, there’s an Asian American woman, there’s a Native woman, and it cycles through. They say, “We’re standing in solidarity with each other because we are the ones to articulate our needs.”

I think this is one of the racial politics of ’77, is that that moment has become iconic, and even if you don’t know what it’s attached to, good chances are that you’ve seen images from this moment circulate in popular culture. The image of an open hall where there’s women on the banner…All of these are from this moment. But that women of color image and that clip oftentimes gets circulated as this, like, kumbaya moment, like, weren’t we all joining hands together. The same with the image of the three torchbearers, and even in the official material for the convention they literally write a line where they’re like, “The bronzed arm of Ortiz meets the blackened arm of Cearcy, and the white arm…” Like, the optics of the international solidarity of the moment were applauded without considering why there was a need for them. So all of a sudden you get these moments where it’s like, “Women of color united! This is the rainbow! This is all of us together! Women are powerful,” without stopping to consider why women of color needed to articulate their own plank, or what it meant to have three torchbearers but Peggy always central. In every single picture she’s centered. So you’re still centering white womanhood, even optically. She is the one who ended up getting the magazine covers where the other two were actually completely cropped off.

I think that is one of the undercurrents of that ’77 convention, which even came back up in 2017 at the 40th anniversary, which was kind of a reunion of people who participated, where there’s a way in which even the memory of it wanted it to be this very happy ‘look at the power we had,’ in a way that elided the welfare activists, who were a group of Black women there. I remember there was one panel where they were talking about how the lesbian plank had fought for all of this, and then they had to deal with the welfare activist plank in a way that acted like there was no Black lesbians. [Alison sighs] Even in that moment, and this was 3-4 years ago, there was still pre-existing tension. So I think that the ’77 convention, there’s still a lot of work to be done on it, and I’m glad historians have decided that the 70s are worthy of study now, because we’re starting to get some really good books and shows, and I’m hoping that people start to learn about it because as we can see it has so much direct implication to things that we’re still dealing with right now.

Lauren: It seems like the story was spun in a way, even in the moment, as, “Look, we fixed it! This whole event shows, look, we fixed it!”

Alison: Right, right.

Lauren: That just happens so commonly with…You know, especially when you consider how many of those people in charge of telling the story and the media were people of color, or women, probably, very very very few.

Amira: Oh, exactly. Exactly.

Lauren: It’s a nice convenient story to be like, “Look at this great event where we fixed it,” and then I never learned about it in school, you know? [laughter] 

Amira: That’s such a great point, Lauren, because one of the things that happens that’s so damning is so many newscasts call Michelle Cearcy five different names. They’re like, “It’s Wilma Rudolph running the torch!” 

Alison: Oh my god. [laughs]

Amira: Literally any Black woman who was popular in the 70s, she was called that woman. Which just kind of points to how interchangeable she was, because it wasn’t actually about her as a fully actualized person or human, right? It was about the symbol of needing her Black hand on that torch. The other part about that, about who’s telling the story…I met a woman who was from Detroit who was sent down to cover the convention. She was the first Black woman to be on-air talent, this was her first assignment. When she started reporting and interviewing women of color there her mic was actually cut off by one of the conference organizers who didn’t want that narrative of the event to get out. Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes this book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, like, what actually gets made into history. To answer your question another way, why don’t we remember? Well, all of those things are produced, and so the narratives that we do have are simplified because in real time there was already a kind of erasure or, you know, fixing of that narrative that they wanted the narrative to be. 

Lauren: Wow.

Alison: Whoa, I could listen to you all day, first of all!

Lauren: I know! [laughter] I just feel like, what!? That’s amazing.

Alison: Taking notes. [laughs]

Amira: But honestly, that’s why I’m so thrilled with how this has evolved, because it seems to me to really be taking seriously how do we think what it means to be dealing with democracy, what it means to be dealing with engaged citizenship, and we know that it’s gendered but we also know that there are overlapping and intersecting oppressions. That brings me to one of the final adjustments you’ve had to make, which is that the west coast is not able to breathe. You had yet another kind of curve ball thrown at you that I think impacted this relay but also prompted a conversation between climate change and sports and access and environmental racism. So, I was wondering if you guys could touch upon the last-minute adjustments you’ve made because of air quality concerns. 

Alison: Yeah, so, I’m in the east coast, and Lauren can speak to the west coast experience, but when we gathered and we were thinking about the potential of postponing the event a few weeks, but then thinking about hurricane season also coming, and so then that will impact the southeast. What we realized is, of course we want to be as accommodating and make this as inclusive as possible, but this is the reality that we live in, right? When I was looking at images of the west coast, particularly looking at images of farm workers, folks who are so stigmatized and called names and not treated with dignity, but having no choice but to go pick the foods so that we can then eat comfortably elsewhere…Not only was it heartbreaking, but it was enraging because that’s the clear intersection of climate change and systemic racism, right? Everybody on the west coast is suffering and cannot breathe, but there are folks who can stay inside and just wait it out, right?

So we were thinking about that, and then we were thinking about, the truth is, this is the world that we live in, and this is part of why we’re taking this collective action right now. We all must vote in the polls. Then as LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, says, “We’re not voting for heroes, we’re voting for harm reduction at this point.” Who are the candidates that are doing the least harm and who we can hold responsible? Because it’s about rallying them around the Green New Deal, around actually addressing the ways in which factory production and pollution and all of these things are taking place in cities where people of color are, are disproportionately affecting folks like us. It was just a really hard look at…This is 2020, and there’s no good time, right? There’s no time when we all are gonna feel great, have no issues related to social justice or weather, so we decided to proceed.

Lauren: Yeah. That's the spirit of it, right? You nailed it. We have to proceed. We have to proceed as citizens in order to preserve a democracy. We have to proceed and work with what we’ve got, and so the relay is a reflection of that as well. This time period right now is where awareness of Black Voters Matter and civic engagement can make the biggest difference in the election, and waiting two weeks for a chance at better air quality for the west coast, but something else…Other natural disasters can be happening. I mean, the event is anchored in its purpose and we must go for the best we can. One of the pivots that we made was let’s see if we can be supportive of the people who can’t leave their homes and make it as easy as possible for them to have access to indoor workouts so that we can make sure there’s a way available to participate.

You may not be able to participate in a way you hoped or planned, speaking for myself, you know – I would much prefer to run every single day, and was very excited about it, and had my little story in my head about, “This is gonna get me out every day for the first time since I had my kid two and a half years ago…” All these things that, in the end, it’s not about me. I’m doing this for this other bigger reason. I’m gonna just make it happen however I need to make it happen, and that’s how I’m gonna vote, and that’s how I’m gonna show up as an anti-racist. I’m just gonna have to keep doing it.

Alison: Exactly.

Amira: I love that. Just once again, 10,000 people involved…

Alison: It’s crazy!

Amira: That’s the thing we didn’t even really get to touch on, but even making sure to be inclusive of trans women and the trans community and really pushing against binaries is another layer of inclusivity of this event that is building on and extending the legacy past some of the way it’s been contained since ’77 and even before. Alison, did you wanna jump in?

Alison: Yeah, I wanted to say something, because we as ‘womxn’ with an ‘x’ in it as a nod…Not as a nod, but as really being rooted in a more inclusive language around womanhood or, you know, to include femmes, trans women, Black women, everybody who feels sometimes unrepresented. And then I’ve had conversations since then with trans women who had said, you know, “I prefer using ‘women’ because to say that we must use another word to identify us is not inclusive.” So this goes back to the piece about doing it imperfectly, and also recognizing that no label can really encompass who any of us are, right? So you do the best you can with what you have. You learn and you change and you grow. I really hope that if and when we make it into any kind of history books, right, [laughs] if people are looking back on 2020 and seeing some bright spots, they can see that…Hopefully people don’t see this as like the blueprint, “it must be done this way,” but being as inspiration, right? We keep iterating and hopefully getting to a time when we don’t actually need to run and use our bodies in this way to demand something that should be free for all.

Amira: Absolutely. Well, I just have to say that in a relentless year this has been a ray of light and it’s so exciting watching 10,000 people…You know, talk about 2,000 people in ’77…10,000 people coming together and doing it globally. There’s people outside the confines of the US participating, coming together and literally using their bodies and whatever bodies they have and really even figuring out what does it mean to occupy this body in this space in this year, has been tremendous. I am thrilled to have BIAD participating. I thank you guys so much for your work. What should we look for, where can people find you on social media? How do we keep this going, and connected in the future?

Alison: Me personally, you can find me at @alisonmdesir. You can also follow Run 4 All Women…Content from this week will be at Run 4 All Women and Oiselle. 

Lauren: That’s right. Give ‘em hell, Oiselle. 

Alison: So we’ll be sharing on social. Laura, where can we find you?

Lauren: @larurenfleshman on Twitter, @fleshmanflyer on Instagram. Alison, I’m spacing right now on our official race hashtag?

Alison: It’s #WomxnRunTheVote. 

Lauren: Yep, #WomxnRunTheVote. If you go on Instagram I think you’re gonna see a lot of awesome engagement on there through the week and I just highly encourage people to check that out and be inspired. There’s a team landing page…Just Google the event, you can easily get in, even if you’re not a participant. You can see the background story of it, you can see the intentionality of it. We strongly encourage you to do that and to donate to Black Voters Matter this week. Help us bring this $260,000+ donation up even more. There’s no time like right now to make a difference in this election, so please do it. And Amira, thank you for your early support for this event. Really, when ideas are new and delicate, to have you answer my email and offer your wisdom and encouragement and gentle guidance was really critical, and to have you sign up with your team–

Alison: Yes.

Lauren: You know, Alison and I just had a…We would’ve chest-bumped if we had been in the same city.

Alison: [laughs] I was like, talk about real-life superheroes! But I’ll play it cool and just tag Amira on socials. [laughter] 

Lauren: Please convey to Shireen that I’m so excited that she’s dancing her way through this relay too. 

Amira: Yes! She was the one who was like, “Race? What, are we running!?” She subtweeted us, but she is out logging miles. She already texted me this morning. I’m so…There’s almost no words. It’s been so exciting to watch it come together. So keep running, keep logging those miles. Please support Black Voters Matter.

Alison: Yes.

Amira: We have to get out the vote, and keep going, somehow. Put one foot in front of the other.

Alison: That’s the only way. Thank you so much, Amira.

Lauren: Yeah, thank you.