The Politics and Psychology of the Safety Pin
Let’s start with the basics: wearing a safety pin is absolutely not enough.
Silvering up our collars is nowhere near an adequate response to the wave of hate that has taken over our government and threatened the lives and well-being of people of color, the disabled, the LGBTQ+ community, and women.
If liberal white people like myself have learned anything in the past week, it’s that whatever we’ve been doing, it’s some tragic combination of not enough and not the right thing. We’ve got work to do, work that will take us out of our comfort zones, work that will ask more and more of us, and wearing a safety pin is barely even the first step. That work will be the topic of another post, another day, because I want to give that topic my full attention.
Today, I want to take a brief look at the politics of the safety pin, which has been covered well elsewhere, and a more in-depth look at the psychology of it, which I haven’t seen covered elsewhere (readers, please point to me to other sources as I go along, and I’ll update this post accordingly). I’ve struggled with these questions over the course of the weekend, and I’ve made some mistakes in my communication with people I care about, and people with whom I want to stand in solidarity. I’ve questioned whether I should be wearing the safety pin, and I’m still wearing one.
A lot of us spent last Wednesday feeling shocked and horrified and sad and disillusioned — though it turns out, plenty of POC, LGBTQ+, and other voices were not so shocked, because they had no illusions to lose about the racist, sexist, and violent character of this country. By Thursday, some of us were saying, what can we DO? Ijeomo Oluo over at the Establishment had already offered a list of concrete suggestions. Also on Thursday, memes about safety pins started showing up all over social media, explaining that the safety pin symbol got its start in the UK after the Brexit vote, as a way for Britons to signal to one another that the wearer was a “safe place” for all those made to feel that they didn’t belong in the UK anymore. By Friday and Saturday, lots of people were wearing safety pins, and skeptical voices started pointing out that the safety pin is a meaningless gesture compared to other vitally necessary actions, and also that wearing a safety pin was an engagement that required a certain level of commitment that people might not understand. And, it turns out, white supremacists have coopted the symbol of the safety pin, further complicating its meaning and utility.
That’s straight up oppressive.
So, back to basics: wearing a safety pin is not enough, and if you’re only doing it to make yourself feel better about yourself, then stop, just stop.
I’d like to articulate, from my perspective as a scholar, why I still think that the safety pin is a meaningful symbol. I understand that, as a scholar of Race, Gender, and Media, I get paid to study oppression rather than making sacrifices to dismantle it. There is work to do that will involve getting out from behind my desk, and out of my classroom, and sacrifices to make for the sake of a more just world. Theory, though, is a starting point for me.
I believe we are living through a moment in history that bears chilling resemblance to the rise of the Nazi State in Germany. After the Holocaust and the War, much of 20th century social science was preoccupied with trying to understand how German society could have given way to the calculated evil of the Third Reich. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a political scientist who grew up in Germany during the Nazi rise to power and began her professional life in collaboration with the Nazis (if not as a Nazi) proposed one explanation: the Spiral of Silence. According to the Spiral of Silence, as people perceive their own perspective to be the minority perspective, they fear isolation and fall silent. This tendency is accentuated when people fear reprisal for their minority perspective. As more and more people fall silent, others who share the minority opinion perceive themselves to be part of an even smaller minority. This process continues until no one expresses the minority perspective, and it appears to be completely absent. That allows the majority to behave as if there is no opposition.
For me, the safety pin is a way of moving through the world communicating my opposition to the racist, misogynist, ableist, xenophobe power structure that is being fortified as we speak. Again, I have to back that opposition up with real work in the real world, but it’s a way of saying that I’m one obstacle in the path of hate.
I wear the safety pin to communicate to the folk around me who don’t have the level of privilege I do — I don’t wish you harm, and I will put my privilege in the way of those who would harm you.
But that’s not all, or even most of it. I wear the safety pin to communicate to other privileged people around me — if you would harm someone more vulnerable than yourself, you’ll have to go through me.
And finally, to those privileged folk who see things as I do, I want to communicate a third message — let’s stand together against hate, let’s organize, let’s protect and listen and lift up all our brothers and sisters.
Wearing the safety pin is a symbol of my commitment to do the hard work that faces us as a nation. I study and teach about how to effect change in attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. One of the best primers I’ve found about evidence-based persuasion comes from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. One of the tools of influence he details is that people tend to be consistent about commitments they make, especially if those commitments are made publicly.
Right now, I’m all fired up about defeating the evils in our society that led to Trump’s election, but as my hectic life moves on, my white privilege makes me feel less insecure, and the media continue normalizing the new White Supremacist Order, my good intentions could fall by the wayside.
The safety pin represents a public commitment to move outside my safety zone, put more effort in, listen to the people I’m intending to support, and do the work to create a culture in which Trump would never be elected.
If, somewhere along the line, the chorus of voices I’m listening to is saying, “take that safety pin off, it’s insulting and ridiculous,” then I’ll take it off. Right now, some of the voices are saying that, and I’m listening. I’m also listening to other voices saying that it brings them comfort, so I’ll keep it for now.
Whether I’m wearing it or not, I promise to live up to the commitment that it symbolizes, and not let the symbol be an empty one.
Next post: Doing the Work, Starting with Listening.