solidarity, safety and pins

This.

This ar­ti­cle and its com­ments are what I’ve been fight­ing since last week.

Right now these kinds of re­spons­es are un­der­stand­able. Peo­ple are ter­ri­fied. Peo­ple are fed up. Peo­ple are re­al­ly tired of mean­ing­less ges­tures es­pe­cial­ly in the face what we are all about to en­dure.

But the thing about those pins is – while they might not be for you they are for some­body.

The queer com­mu­ni­ty has a long and rich his­to­ry of us­ing sym­bols to de­ter­mine who is safe, who will stand up for us, who will get in a fight for us, who will throw their body on ours to keep our heads from get­ting bashed in.

Some of us have a very dif­fer­ent re­sponse to the sug­ges­tion that some­one who is not a mem­ber of our group would be will­ing to do this for us.

Some of us are very com­fort­able with the idea that this is in fact the only way that you build a fam­i­ly or a com­mu­ni­ty – you com­mit to fight and then you fight.

For a lot of us there isn’t very much time be­tween the com­mit­ment and need­ing to prove that you meant it.

There’s a big dis­con­nect here. There is also an in­cred­i­ble op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn from each oth­er strug­gles and suc­cess­es in our bat­tles over the years. That is what sol­i­dar­i­ty is for. This is a big com­pli­cat­ed nu­anced is­sue with all kinds of el­e­ments from trust to ac­tion to in­ac­tion are all part of it.

At some point, though, we are all go­ing to have to fig­ure out how to sup­port each oth­er. Some peo­ple are go­ing to suf­fer worse than oth­ers – that is true – but if the queer com­mu­ni­ty says hey, here’s what we do, and the re­sponse is as be­low, there is a se­ri­ous Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is­sue go­ing on that di­rect­ly im­pacts our abil­i­ty to fight to­geth­er.

Do PoC have a right to be sus­pi­cious? Ab­sa­fuckinlout­ley. Does that mean that some­thing that works for an­oth­er mar­gin­al­ized group should be dis­missed as white peo­ple shit with no bear­ing on mar­gin­al­ized folks lives? Nope. We are all more than one thing. Is that com­pli­cat­ed? Yep. That’s the world. That’s the work. That’s the way for­ward – we have to talk it through.

One thing be­ing a rad­i­cal or rev­o­lu­tion­ary has nev­er been is safe.

We can­not and must not judge oth­er mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple by their need to pre­serve their own and their family’s safe­ty.

If the only way you’re able to show sol­i­dar­i­ty in pub­lic be­cause you are afraid
you might lose your job,
your liveli­hood,
your abil­i­ty to re­main in your home or
if you fear you may be in­jured and you don’t have health in­sur­ance etc.
and you want to wear a damn safe­ty pin
in­stead of wave a flag or
wear a but­ton that might get you fired or
at­tacked
it’s all good by me.

#in­ter­sec­tion­al­i­ty­isalived­ex­pe­ri­ence
#safe­typ­ins
 
 

—dar­cy tot­ten

Flom­mist Dar­cy Tot­ten is de­vot­ed to il­lu­mi­nat­ing of­ten-over­looked voic­es and telling sto­ries from new an­gles. Dar­cy has worked with MTV, Spike TV, NBC/Hearst, ABC, Cor­bis, the State of Texas, Panthea­con, RGBB, LLC, KIA mo­tors, The Promised Band, ACSA, the NBA, sev­er­al Black Lives Mat­ter chap­ters and is the co-founder of Ac­tivism Ar­tic­u­lat­ed. Copy­right © 2016 Dar­cy Tot­ten. Im­age by flom­mist Michelle LeClerc.

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