The latest fight in the battle of wokeness: safety pins.
Eggplant. Cilantro. Theater kids. The world is full of polarizing things that humanity will never agree on. Some of those emotions are irrational, while others are based in fact (eggplant, theater kids).
And the most divisive object in post-election United States right now might be a safety pin.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the safety pin has emerged as a symbol of unity: a way for people — regardless of their politics — to show they are allies and do not stand for the kind of violence and abuse that has emerged and been reported on since Trump was elected last week.
Wearing a safety pin began as a gesture of kindness. But some people also see it as a performative, bullshit type of “slacktivism,” arguing that it allows people to pat themselves on the back without actually trying to fix the problems they say are important.
The safety pin is now at the center of a national conversation about hate crimes, prompting the discussion about the facile shallowness of white men and women and what good comes out of the backlash against such gestures of solidarity.
How the safety pin became a symbol of unity
For many of us, up until this week the safety pin’s utility was only realized in its absence. You rarely need them, and when you do you can never find one; few people ever have them on hand like gum or mints. They’re most useful when a button pops off your shirt or — according to pop culture imagery — to fasten a baby’s cloth diaper.
But they’ve taken on a whole new meaning in the week since the presidential election, as a Brexit-inspired symbol of “safety” meant to convey that people who wear them are allies to those who fear or are experiencing Trump-inspired racial and religiously motivated harassment and abuse.
Cases of such abuse are seemingly happening every day.
In Minnesota, a school is investigating graffiti scrawled on a bathroom door that reads “whites only” and “fuck ni**ers.” At Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, two Trump supporters harassed students and were escorted off the campus by security. Pro-Nazi graffiti has been spotted in Philadelphia and at the University of New Mexico. At Villanova University, my alma mater, police are investigating a race-related campus assault involving men who allegedly yelled “Trump” while knocking down a black student, and at Ohio State University, an anti-Trump protester was tackled and knocked down while trying to give a speech.
It’s still unclear whether there’s been an actual uptick in these sorts of events since the election, or whether they’ve simply received more attention due to the fear that Trump’s election has inspired in many people. But given how heavily Trump’s campaign leaned on anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to trace a line between Trump’s win and some individuals being more brazen about acting out on these campaign cornerstones.
The safety pin (#SafetyPin) movement is a way for people to combat these fears and behaviors. The concept originated in Britain after a rash of anti-immigrant abuse cropped up following the Brexit vote earlier this year. The idea is simply that safety pins are a way to show solidarity and allyship, and in the three days after the election the movement went viral, trending on Facebook and Twitter and appearing in articles all over the internet.
The backlash against the safety pin is a backlash against performative slacktivism
The safety pin movement isn’t unlike others we’ve seen in the past, like 2012’s “Stop Kony” campaign or, more recently, the Standing Rock Pipeline protest. They live online, are massively popular and trendy, and give a national spotlight to their respective causes.
But they also raise an important question: How much good is actually being done? The best thing you can say about many of these campaigns is that they raise awareness.
As that question pertains to the Stop Kony campaign — an online push to fight back against Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony — the warlord’s organization is still, according to Newsweek, abducting children. And Invisible Children, the company that started the campaign, hasn’t been able to disprove the claim that it benefited more from the campaign than anyone in Uganda.
With the Standing Rock Pipeline protest, more than 1.5 million people have checked in on Facebook to show their support. Initially, the idea was that a bunch people checking in would help camouflage and protect protestors at the actual site. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
In reality, the online gestures had little impact on law enforcement or the way they were treating — or tracking — protesters at the site. They may have had an unintended consequence, however: spreading awareness of the protest to people who may not have been following the events in North Dakota.
Of course, the safety pin movement is a little different from these other two movements; declaring your support for curbing racism and xenophobia isn’t quite the same as trying to eliminate a warlord or ensure a pipeline isn’t built in North Dakota.
There is no special alarm that sounds when someone decides not to be racist. There is no switch to just turn off someone’s racist beliefs. And even if you wear a safety pin and it helps someone else feel safe, you may not ever know that’s the case.
But there’s a still a sense of accomplishment in wearing a pin — a sense that goodness, even if you don’t see it, exists. And that seems to be the biggest gripe some people have with the pins.
“We don’t get to make ourselves feel better by putting on safety pins and self-designating ourselves as allies,” Christopher Keelty wrote for the Huffington Post. “And make no mistake, that’s what the safety pins are for. Making White people feel better.”
In his column, Keelty pleads for his fellow white people to do better. And his sentiment has been echoed by some people of color. April Reign, the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, told the Wrap she thinks the concept is lazy.
“It really is not so much about helping marginalized communities and those who may be in distress, but instead for white people, often to identify themselves to other white people as better than those who voted for Trump,” Reign said.
Both Reign and Keelty get at an important point: that activism has become a facet of one’s identity. What we share on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms — articles, cute cat GIFs, videos we like, photos of ourselves — is determined by how we define ourselves and want to be seen by other people. The activities and protests we support (and don’t support) on these platforms function in the same way.
But what separates our photos and cat GIFs from protests and safety pins is that the latter two aren’t about us or the persona we curate online. They’re about the cause — the racism, the warlord, the pipeline protest. And it’s nearly impossible to communicate selflessness on social media platforms that are designed to be selfish and self-promotional, a truth that is exacerbated by the fact that social media platforms are intrinsic to how millions of people communicate today.
Why I’m not ready to condemn someone for wearing a safety pin
When it comes to successful social media activism, I’m reminded of the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” from a couple of summers ago, when people dumped buckets of ice water on themselves to raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease). At times it felt dumb and performative, but it also raised a lot of money and awareness, which in turn allowed scientists to discover a new gene that they believe contributes to the disease. It’s unclear whether that discovery would have happened if the ice bucket challenge hadn’t caught on.
The ice bucket challenge is the ideal slacktivism success story, and it’s worth noting that its performative nature was just one element of what made it work. It didn’t end with getting soaked — after accepting the challenge, people also donated more than $115 million to the ALS Association, and the organization followed through by pumping that money into its research, as well as its patient and community services.
Online social activism works, as those ice bucket videos have shown us, when it isn’t the final step.
What gets lost in the fight to deem the safety pin movement good or bad, or to write it off as a facile white crutch, is that a lot of people in this country are feeling a very real sense of helplessness right now. Being disgusted by one human attacking another because of the color of their skin or their religious beliefs isn’t partisan. Lots of people feel a very real need to speak out about these atrocities and fight fear, but don’t know how — and if wearing a safety pin helps them start to do so, we shouldn’t condemn them for it.
“I’d like you to consider not ruining something that could help this one, vulnerable group, just because some people misinterpreted its meaning or because it doesn’t help the much greater danger you’re facing,” film director Lexi Alexander wrote in a blog post about the importance of the pin to Muslim Americans. “We are all afraid.”
The pin was never meant to fix institutional racism, and perhaps applauding it as a gesture, a start, a beginning — in addition to being honest about its limitations (especially to those wearing them) — is the way to celebrate it. We should all be asking what else we can do, rather than acting like it shouldn’t exist.