last week, a bunch of people started wearing safety pins in solidarity against hate. it’s a gesture that was borrowed from brexit (hereās anĀ article explaining a bit of the historyĀ and long-ass snopes piece, too). the general idea is that the safety pin is a symbol that says “you’re safe with me.” my sense was that it was a gesture for people who wanted to show that they aren’t down with trump’s bigotry and the increasingly public hate for oppressed folks.
i actually heard a story where it worked. a women wearing a hijab was being harassed on a train. she saw someone else on the train wearing a safety pin. she walked over to stand by the person wearing the pin. the harasser stopped.
that said, as the internet does, the critique began to create more energy than the pins themselves. there was a small war in my facebook feed about whether or not people thought it was a good idea.
this article is indicative of the backlash, but there are many others (including thisĀ which is actually the best overall coverage of the phenomenon iāve see so far).
to be clear, the point iām getting working towards in this piece is a system one. people are allowed to be as angry as they wanna be at whatever they want. anger policing is oppression. full stop. but bear with me…
iām gonna be a little blunt because iām writing fast, but basically, my perception was that it seemed like more radical people shat on the less radical people. “i see you wearing that safety pin but if you’re not also down with my cause and my framing of my cause then fuck you and your symbol because you’re fake and weak.”
now i do see a point in that the pins as a symbol could actually backfire for the people who are increasingly the targets of explicit hate. in the best case scenarios, things like this tweet can happen:
in a worse scenario (because why not just be straight out with it), if the woman from the story earlier had walked over to the safety pin person, but then that person was actually a trump supporter and hurt her… like… fuck.Ā
but MOST people i saw backlashing didnāt say that. i mostly just saw people say this:
now i’m seeing people say that they were interested in wearing the pins, but have decided to stop. i’ve totally stopped seeing them on the trains.
this hurts me real deep because iām thinking about strategy and winning. if the effect of people wanting to show solidarity is rejection with anger and critique, how the fuck are we supposed to get them to take even more radical steps? (which is what’s needed to break down all these oppressive systems we’re all drowning in).
on an alternate note, my friend, felicia, posted an amazing note about the value of the safety pins for people organizing outside of cities:
i wish people had organized some active bystander trainings and harnessed the energy of the safety pin crowd to move us all forward (i guess i should do that if iām over here complaining about it… i hear mit has some resources for this…). not only did we miss an opportunity, now instead we have even more division and a whole new wave of people who have learned to stay silent and do nothing (which is less than wear a symbol) because even their well-intentioned efforts get them attacked (similar to the starbucks #racetogether backlash).
hurt people hurt people. literally everyone has the right to be angry about whatever they want. but from a strategic standpoint, iām not sure how any of us people who are in the sights of an increasingly explicitly white nationalist government are going to survive if we canāt constantly be building power.
earlier this week, i had lunch with my friend danya and she made a really insightful comment (rough paraphrase): “part of what’s so weird right now is that we still don’t know how big this problem is. it seems different everyday. it’s weird to know how to act when you’re not sure what you’re responding to.”
i think she was dead on. last week and at the beginning of this week, i was still in mourning and definitely wasn’t ready to act. now i’ve started to see some ways to act, but it’s definitely still not clear to me what’s going to be the most strategic.
every morning it seems like there’s some new front to be paying attention to. nathanael points out that trump says he’s not going to roll back marriage equality and yet he’s appointing anti-gay judges. that’s a fight in the making. maggie shareāsĀ trump’s bullshit ten-point plan for black america. she and phil both point out its absurdity. anyone (with any sort of racial or oppression analysis) who has experienced or studied cities knows that his language is a smokescreen. “reduce crime” means change laws to put as many people in jail as possible (apparently, this is already happening on the west coast). “school choice” means de-funding public schools. “equal justice and applying the law fairly” means inequity, because we currently aren’t all equal; having marijuana in a packback can put you in prison, but shutting down the economy gets you a bonus.
right now it seems like there’s a lot of energy to keep bannon from getting appointed. it’s unclear to me if that’s a distraction. obviously it will be helpful either way, but are we rallying people’s attention and energy around that while missing other insidious things happening in the background? or things we haven’t actually been presented with yet?
i don’t value reading fiction myself, but i do value it.
i think our lack of collective imagination at the neighborhood, city, and societal scales is part of what’s wrong with our country. some types of fiction, actually support and encourage the stretching of our imaginations. i think that’s the type of fiction he was referring to when he said…
“If a story doesnāt demonstrate how a character evolves through the story in some way, or if doesnāt reflect on society or our own individual hopes, fears and tendencies, then itās less interesting to me. If the story doesnāt question or explore some aspect of humanity that makes us rethink our own relationships, then I get bored.”
i’ve recently made friends with a city planning student named grant and he’s writing his master’s thesis as a series of fictional rural stories. that sort of work that speaks to real situations people are in or can sympathize with now, but paints a series of pathways forward seems so important.
now, i’m much more interested in, feel passionate about, and feel tooled for creating and building right now, but i do know that it’s super important for us to be able to imagine our way forward.
ps - i haveĀ actually started to read a little fiction (the parable books by octavia butler and ecotopia by ernest callenbach). it feels weird, though. =|
i’ve thought a lot about (and even done some writing about) alternatives to the ‘what do you do’ question. some of that is because it’s just annoying and boring to repeatedly answer the same question at social gatherings. some of it is because i think it’s in the small, but ubiquitous things that culture shifts. i have a theory that if everyone started asking 'what are you dreaming about these days?’ instead of 'what do you do?’ we’d see a culture shift over time away from our identities defined by our work.
in the past week, i’ve definitely noticed and experienced resistance to the standard question: “how are you?” although, as a general practice, i try to be honest when i answer this question, lately i’ve been feeling real tired of answering it. i’ve also heard people take the question back after they’ve answered it and i’ve heard people say “i don’t really want to talk about how i’m doing.”
i do actually think it’s really important to know how each other is doing, but i also think that this is a moment for culture shifting (even if just at a small scale/geography) intervention. what can we ask each other that moves us in the direction we want to be headed? some ones i’m going to test out today:
what are you listening to that’s keeping you going right now?
what (if anything) makes you hopeful in this moment?
what are you doing to resist and/or fight?
definitely curious about other people’s thoughts on this!
[āIn a healthy network, you have to connect on your similarities and compete on your differences… INSERT REST OF QUOTE WHEN I HAVE TIME]
the two things that stand out to me right now about what’s needed are (1) what skills a network weaver needs to have and (2) what a healthy network looks like.
to the first point, network weavers must be “connectors, mediators, teachers, behavioral economists, and social engineers.” as i think about the role i’m meant to play in the upcoming resistance, these are all things i have done. the network can’t solely be made up actors who can wear all those hats, but the people who can have a unique position to hold. and if i’m being honest with myself, i think that’s what i’ll be doing.
to the second point, a healthy network has both cooperation and competition. adhocracy (worth a look up) seems like the ideal state of a resilient healthy network. essentially, it looks like many subunits acting independently in general, but that are able to align and act in concert when necessary and beneficial. part of that means that there needs to be enough information flowing between the different groups to know when to align and when to stay separate.
i can imagine that being important from data standpoint, but also communication and action. amassing too much energy (data, action, whatever) in any one place in the network makes that point in the network an easy target. this resistance will not look like the civil rights movement with a few figure heads; it will much more decentralized.
people who understand how to build networks and systems like that need to be doing it starting now.
