Thoughts on safety pins, from a white, genderqueer person in a light red bit of the map.

This week I felt alone and afraid.
Any act of solidarity was meaningful to me, including “looking slightly sad.”

The people I know who are taking care of everyone are, more often than not, multiply oppressed and going to continue to hurt the most while they also shoulder everyone else’s pain.
They are easily recognizable as folks who are hurt.
Don’t make them do all the work.
If you have privilege and can pass for a Trump supporter, get yourself recognizable as someone who resists him and his ideology. Now.

Yesterday and today I’ve seen a lot of pieces telling people not to wear safety pins, either because there’s no way to wear it that doesn’t look like a badge for white people and white people don’t get badges/cookies or because you probably aren’t prepared to be an ally.

Wear the safety pins.
Prepare to be an ally.
Wear a “Black Lives Matter” pin.
Wear an “I’ll go with you” pin.
Wear “terrorism has no religion” and “ally” and “solidarity” and “bridges, not walls” and any other damn thing you can find that takes the pressure off of those of us who might be targeted without pins by virtue of living our lives with hijab or skin color that isn’t white or living in a gendered space that doesn’t pass for normal or speaking another language than English.

Please do not normalize staying silent or pretending this isn’t happening or refusing to identify yourself on the correct side of this for fear of being targeted by the right. Or the left.
Please do not make queer people, Muslim people, people of color, etc. be the only ones shouldering this.
Queer bashers and white supremacists and the rest of the list of hateful folks have been partially in hiding, many of them limiting themselves to microagressions instead of full blown hate crimes, and we see how they are emboldened, now, to do what they have wanted.
Don’t wait to step up and show what is in your heart.
Don’t wait for a leader to tell you how and when to love and when or how to care out loud.

Do everything you can to help us connect to each other and love each other. Now.

Please don’t stop people from connecting.
Please don’t stop people from taking the burden off of those who always carry it.
Please don’t shame people for not already being a good enough ally.
Instead, teach people how to step up, so they can be ready.
Instead, tell people they are expected to share this work.
Instead, show up for people when they need you.
It will be hard; do it anyway.
You will mess up; try anyway.
Show that you are working on it.
Don’t wait until you are “good enough.”
Just keep doing the work to learn how to be better prepared.
But don’t wait.
Please.