The bronze monument honoring abolitionist Harriet Tubman was erected at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in Harlem, in 2007, according to The New Yorker. (Image courtesy o Instagram)
The second annual Women’s March kicked off without a hitch this weekend, as millions of women gathered across the country to celebrate all things gender equality. The marchers managed to get Black folks piping mad, however, after someone placed the infamous pink pussy hat on a statue of abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
“I saw it out of my window and couldn’t believe it,” Harlem woman Alba Anthony, who lives near the statue, told The New Yorker.
Anthony uploaded a photo of the travesty to her social media, where it garnered plenty of negative reactions. Even as user timelines were flooded with powerful videos and images from the historic march, the one featuring Tubman in a bright pink hat with knitted kitten ears took the cake.
Many who suspected a white woman was behind the “disrespectful” act saw the incident as an attempt to link the Black liberation struggle with the fight for gender parity, which have their similarities but are in no way synonymous. Others saw it as yet further evidence that demands for female equality have been quite limited and even tone-deaf when attempting to include Black and brown women.
Check out some of the most fiery reactions below:
I just saw a photo of a pink pussy hat on a statue of Harriet Tubman. I can’t do this today…
— Africa Miranda (@africamiranda) January 20, 2018
Harriet Tubman was a disabled black woman, an enslaved person who risked her life to free other enslaved people. Keep your cutesy symbol of cisnormative, white normative, made-a-supposedly-subversive-joke-about-sexual-assault accessories off her head.
— wikipedia brown (@eveewing) January 20, 2018
thinking that putting a pussy hat on a Harriet Tubman statue is solidarity with Black women is THE WHITEST THING I'VE SEEN IN A WHILE https://t.co/PHX15h8f0A
— Shay-Akil McLean, Ph.D. (@Hood_Biologist) January 20, 2018
Dear "Artist" who put a pink pussy hat on the Harlem statue of Harriet Tubman,
Next time, don't.
Signed, Everybody Black
— Darien LaBeach • he.him.his (@dlabeach) January 21, 2018
Yo… They put a pink pussy hat on a statue of Harriet Tubman and called it solidarity. #womensmarch2018 pic.twitter.com/8vLt75pluz
— Sofia Quintero (@sofiaquintero) January 20, 2018
https://twitter.com/MutazElnour/status/954764389206327296
https://twitter.com/KimberlyNFoster/status/955521213119549441
Nothing more neocolonial than cister settlers putting a pussy hat on a Harriet Tubman statue.
That's the problem w/ identity politics, its based on symbolic actions that tap into sensory displays while changing nothing at all.
The grand empty gesture that is the moderate.
— Shay-Akil McLean, Ph.D. (@Hood_Biologist) January 20, 2018
