In Defense of Safety Pins

In Defense of Safety Pins

Emily Mitchell

In Britain, the country where I was born and spent my childhood, a small gesture took hold after the nation’s vote this summer to leave the European Union. Like the US presidential election, Brexit was fueled by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The success of the Leave campaign saw a big spike in hate crimes. People, including white Britons who by dint of their ethnicity might have supported Leave and all its attendant nastiness, began wearing a safety pin on their clothing to signal their their rejection of the ugly, xenophobic sentiments the Leave campaign had legitimized.

Now in the US we are facing something comparable and arguably much, much worse. The election has left the federal government in the hands of irresponsible, bigoted fools and the civility of our public culture has been shredded. The same upsurge in attacks motivated by racism, homophobia and Islamophobia is happening here. It is terrifying for everyone but exponentially more so for those who have been the particular target of the president-elect’s incitements. And, in response, some of those looking for ways to begin to organize resistance to this catastrophe have advocated that we also start wearing safety pins.

In the past weeks, a number of writers have come out to criticize the #Safetypin movement (such as it is) as being about, as Christopher Keelty put it in the Huffington Post, “mak[ing] White people feel better.” Referring to the long and ghastly history of liberal white Americans expressing noble sentiments, patting ourselves on the back and going home to our protected and privileged lives, Keelty says that white people wearing safety pins are embarrassing. April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, has called wearing a safety pin “lazy”. In an incisive and haunting essay in The New Inquiry, Christina Sharpe concludes that the safety pin is in fact exactly the wrong thing to use to show solidarity: “Symbols are important and a safety pin is not enough. A safety pin is a temporary fix for a rend in the fabric. One must be willing to say this is abhorrent.”

All of these criticisms make sense to me. It should go without saying that the frustrations of people of color with white liberals’ lack of commitment to social justice and anti-racism are entirely justified. And of course the safety pin is enormously insufficient, not even the start of a start, to the work that must be done.

Nevertheless for the moment I’m going to continue to wear mine. Here’s why:

In my job, I am the teacher of a highly diverse group of students. After class the week after the election a student approached me, a woman of color who is rather shy about speaking in class, to say how glad she was to see that I was wearing a safety pin. So I’ll keep wearing it for her and for those who’ve expressed similar feelings since then.

Then there is the fact that one of the things that we are not so good at in the US is recognizing that our national life takes place in an international context. Right now, a wave of xenophobia and nationalism is sweeping the globe. Greece, France, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, India, the Philippines — the list goes on of places where right wing nationalists are gaining or taking power. Because it was a symbol that began outside of the US, the safety pin reminds me that this is a global phenomenon with global roots. To say that the reemergence of ethnic nationalism is connected to the rise of economic inequality and the aftermath of the financial crisis is not to excuse those who support it. It’s just to try to see clearly what we are dealing with and to recognize that if we are going to fight this thing, we will probably need to do so across national borders.

In addition, I’m not just wearing my safety pin to dispense my solidarity to others who supposedly need it. Actually, I would really appreciate seeing some more safety pins on those around me because among the many groups targeted by the president-elect and his supporters this election were women. As it happens, I was assaulted in precisely the manner described with such disgusting relish by the president-elect in his “locker room”. I’ve written about the after-effects of that experience. I’m scared about what is going to happen to women under this new administration. Roe v. Wade may be overturned because of the president-elect’s Supreme Court pick. Access to abortion and birth control may well be restricted further even in those states where abortion is not banned outright. It is possible that Planned Parenthood will be defunded and that the ACA will be dismantled and the mandated provision of OBGYN services with it. And then there is the attitude towards us that the president-elect has so often made apparent and, by doing so, made permissable. As Jessica Valenti pointed out in the Guardian: “This is … a man who has sexually harassed a woman on air [and] blamed rape in the military on the fact that men and women serve together.” He’s publicly advocated treating women “like shit”. One of the most appalling things about this election was how many women voted for him anyway since none of us are safe from the consequences of the decision they contributed to.

Finally, I’m going to wear a safety pin precisely because it is so clearly not enough. Because I am relatively lucky, the middle-class resident of a blue state, it is distinctly possible that I could do just what so many writers and activists from marginalized communities fear, which is to go back to some semblance of normal life. I’m going to wear my stupid, inadequate safety pin because every time I see it, I’ll remember that this is a crisis. I’ll have to ask myself what else I’ve done, what other efforts I have made, how I am trying to use my skills and my advantages to mitigate and oppose the forces that are threatening all of us to differing degrees and in different ways. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, but this is where I am right now. If I’m embarrassing myself, I can live with that. If wearing a safety pin is the only thing I do in response to this election, I should be a lot more than just embarrassed.