This is not about your safety pins. But it is about you.

I see we have come back to the safety pins.

In the aftermath of the UK voting to leave the European Union, hate crimes and various types of racist incidents spiked abruptly and entirely expectedly. In response, an American woman living in London started a social media campaign around safety pins — the idea being that having one pinned to your person indicated you were an ally to people at risk, “a safe person in an unsafe world.”

This was all unquestionably well-intentioned, and like anything that requires very little effort to make people feel better about themselves, went quickly viral.

But the people who were supposed to be grateful for outpouring of well-meaning sentiment…weren’t. And when those brown and black people on Twitter and Facebook dismissed the campaign as a band-aid on a gaping wound, the same people tweeting that they were rocking safety pins to show their commitment to anti-racism got very, very upset.

In the aftermath of an election in which mostly white people voted for someone who ran on an explicitly white supremacist campaign with a dash of economic populism mixed in, folks who wanted to signal that #notallwhitepeople supported bans on Muslims or were apologists for sexual assault got in on the safety pin action too.

And yet again, when the people in the way of actual harm — people being added to WhatsApp groups featuring pictures of lynchings, people facing swastikas in their schools, people about to live in a brave new world in which we have normalized a very specific kind of hatred — pointed out that anyone could wear a safety pin and maybe folks should try harder and stop patting themselves on the back for basic posturing, those same allies got very, very upset.

Because this isn’t about safety pins, really. This is about the need for forgiveness and pardon and understanding and “empathy” and the benefit of the doubt that people have always demanded marginalized people show to the powerful.

On election day in the US, white feminists sharing pictures of “I voted” stickers on Susan B Anthony’s grave were incensed when black women pointed out that she had not fought for them. As she put it, rather colourfully, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

How about that.

A safety pin won’t pardon you for holding your bag a little tighter when a black man walked past on the street. It won’t erase all the times you used “Latino” as a shorthand for “immigrant” and “immigrant” as a proxy for “undocumented Mexican”. It doesn’t excuse your view that hijabi women couldn’t be feminists. It doesn’t negate that you thought legalizing same-sex marriage meant the fight for the rights and lives of LGBT people was over. It doesn’t cover up that you’re only comfortable talking about diversity in tech when it means focussing on getting more money for more white women with Ivy League degrees because we can we not make everything about race already?

Your discomfort has always mattered more to you than the reality of other people’s pain. Your sudden experience of collective grief and shock does not, will not, cannot forgive your obliviousness to what people who do not look like you have endured for months, years, decades, generations. It was not just a joke. It was not an exaggeration. It was not something people needed to just get over. It is not unexpected. It did not come from nowhere. It is what this country is built on. It is not confined to the few.

Many now are speaking, but many were speaking and writing and showing and telling and warning before. But that’s how power works. That’s how power has always worked. All lives have never mattered.

But we told you that.

A version of this post first appeared in the #awesomewomen newsletter.