We knew this was going to get messy. Going from shock to anger to depression to what next (oh, and back-and-forth again, believe me) creates a very circuitous path from the certainty of righteous indignation to the reality of jeez, I’ve got to burst my bubble and interact in our fuzzy, contradictory, constantly evolving, unfamiliar new reality? And that’s just on “our” side.
Well, what better for bursting a bubble than a safety pin.
You’ll notice these are not the same thing. Depending on who you are, it’s not necessarily a big deal — but it’s also a very, very big deal.
If you’re wearing a pin as if it were a cancer ribbon, or a walking Facebook profile picture, you can feel good about that.
If you’re a black gay woman on a subway platform, and you’re not feeling comfortable, and you notice that a group of white men has been eying you, can you trust that the pin wearer studiously staring at a phone screen and not making eye contact is going to have your back? Is ready to step up and make sure you’re safe? What does the pin mean to you?
I’ve got to thank one of my top 10 favorite nieces for helping me think through this, and realize how much and at the same time how embarrassingly little the wearing of a pin can mean.
Here’s part of what she said:
I just feel like there are already so many people thinking they are doing well by saying I’m in solidarity and that’s sufficient — even lots of liberals can’t have a real discussion about race. This is an easy way to be, like, “I’m cool with black people,” but I don’t actually have to have a conversation. Or you might just be like, “Hey, I’m with all y’all but if someone yells ‘gay,’ too bad.” It’s another way people can say they are doing something that doesn’t mean much.
And she’s completely right. But does that mean that people who are, at the current moment, not aware enough or not brave enough or not sure enough aren’t allowed to participate at all? Many people may have had light-bulb moments after last Tuesday, but that doesn’t immediately flip the switch from uninvolved to 100% action.
My niece and I and her mom talked about the pin being the start of something — a very incomplete but for many people necessary first step toward commitment and action. It’s going to take time for some of us to get from mean well to do well.
This argument, of course, screams of white privilege — I have the luxury of taking my time and gently waking up to what many other people have always lived with. And as I’m rousing myself, people who are in real, serious physical and emotional peril have no idea if they can trust me or not.
So it’s on me, and people like me, to wake the hell up fast.
We also agreed that in a few days, maybe the meaning of the safety pin will have been sufficiently debated throughout the socialsphere and an “official” meaning will gel. And both wearers and people in need of support will agree on what it stands for.
But this is just one of countless potential landmines we’ll have to identify and talk about and step around as our new coalition-of-the-unwilling-to-take-it evolves and a structure for fighting back takes shape.
My plea: Be hard on ourselves. Be kind to each other.
There will never be a single path forward, a single type of action to take, a single answer for all of us. Beyond our universal revulsion about the results of the presidential election, we’re not all processing at the same rate. We’re not all coming from the same place. We’re not all focusing our anger at the same targets. We’re not all equally comfortable engaging with people with whom we disagree. We haven’t all thought about racism, sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia, fear of brown people, scorn for the differently abled or many other isms in the same way, with the same depth or for the same length of time.
That’s okay. It’d better be okay, because I have a lot of catching up to do.