What would love and solidarity do?

beyond the blue bracelet

I’m not here to tell you as a white woman to wear or not wear a blue bracelet to let Black people know you are a “safe” person and that you’re on the “right” side of history, even though over half of your ilk chose to reelect Donald Trump.

It is easy to dismiss blue bracelets or safety pins or pink pussy hats—whatever symbol primarily white people want to wear to signify that they are safe to people in the global majority. If they were truly safe, would the symbol even be necessary? But in a soundbite world, perhaps these talismans make sense to some. Sadly we don’t seem to have the bandwidth for a relationship over time, or a real conversation, even, so let’s just boost signal. (This is a sad state of affairs all on its own). But what are these talismans saying, really? “I’m trying really hard not to be racist, I’m not like all those MAGA women, and I’ve got your back?” Is our bar really this low? As the photo says above, “Stop worrying about whether Black women know you’re a safe white woman to be around and start making sure white women know you’re not a safe person to be racist around.” BOOM. No bracelet needed.

Is the blue bracelet all you’re doing? Then, no. Maybe save your dollars at the craft store and get some liberatory education instead. (Here’s one great opportunity from a friend of mine starting in February 2025 that will provide education about your whiteness.)

We need to seed imagination for a new, creative future grounded in solidarity. If I asked 100 Black women what would best show them I was in solidarity with them, a piece of jewelry would likely be near the bottom of that list. In fact, it wouldn’t appear on the list. Can it hurt to wear a blue bracelet? Only if it is the one thing you do to show solidarity, and only if you don’t mind being dismissed as performative, centering yourself, or virtue-signaling. Don’t make this about you and your bracelet. Accept if it is dismissed or shunned by those you are seeking to impress or signal your “good whiteness” to.

Performative activism is a term used to describe actions that are done to increase social capital or to appear supportive of a cause, rather than because of a genuine devotion to it. Performative activism turns the spotlight on the “activist” for self-serving reasons without a true commitment to that cause. Anytime we are centering ourselves in the work, it feels performative to me. We have to do our own work first: Understand your whiteness. Interrogate it. This is a quieter and less signifying process, an internal one. The bar is higher. The stakes are larger. The need is greater.

As Paola Maranan wrote on Facebook:

“I'll know you're safe when you stand next to me with your body and your reputation and your relationships on the line. I'll know you're safe when I see you realizing that you need to go and get your damned people despite relationships or risk. Stop performing. And stop getting all hurt when people tell you that your gesture is not desired -- honestly, it should be your first clue about what you are actually centering.”

As writer and speaker Ally Henny wrote on Facebook:

I’m seeing a lot of “well I’m going to go ahead and wear the bracelets because [insert reason].”

That’s all fine, well, and good. Perform for whoever you wish to perform for. Just know that, by and large, Black women aren’t here for it and won’t be participating.

Black women are telling you, once again, that your movement is insufficient, performative, has the potential to place us in danger, and is an all around crappy idea.

A lot of y’all are deciding to ignore us and go forward with it anyway—and you are making our point for us. And to be sure, this is exactly what your mamas, grandmas, great grandmas, on back have done to Black women in y’all’s so-called “women’s movements.”

Rather than listen, a lot of you would prefer to individualize and do what makes *you* feel good.

The whole point of the bracelets, I thought, was to signal your allyship and that you are “safe.” Yet, when Black women tell you that they are empty symbols, and that solidarity with us is going to take a lot more than a friendship bracelet, some of y’all decided to double down.

Y’all, as a collective, can’t “I’m sorry” and “This white woman” one minute then not listen to Black women the next. You don’t get to cry and distance yourself from toxic whiteness one minute and then individualize and do what you want the next. That’s not how being safe or being an ally works.

And that cuts to the heart of the matter. Women of whiteness wonder why Black women don’t trust or feel safe with them as a collective. But when we tell y’all why, y’all don’t listen.

And when it’s time for y’all to show up in substantive ways, y’all can’t seem to get it together.

And when it’s time to root down and do work in your own communities, y’all would rather individualize and differentiate yourselves and then call yourselves “doing the work.”

And when Black women say we don’t want any part of your performative nonsense, y’all fold your arms and say you’re gonna keep on keeping on.

And when the feces hit the fan and Black women are the only ones who consistently show up with any level of moral clarity once again, y’all will start the cycle of “I’m sorry” and “this white woman” and empty gestures all over again.

The answer is right in front of you.

We don’t trust y’all because y’all ain’t trustworthy. We don’t have solidarity because y’all ain’t solid.

We can’t even get past this recycled conversation from eight years ago because y’all didn’t learn and won’t listen.

How are y’all different than the 52% when you act just like them? Voting for a democrat don’t make your racism any less violent. That’s a hard truth but I’m trading in hard truths today.

Earlier in the week on Facebook, just after the election, Henny wrote:

It’s telling that in times of deep public exposure of white supremacy (such as exit poll data, police brutality recordings, Karens caught on tape, etc.) certain people of whiteness lean into one (or all) of the following impulses:

• Differentiation- they try to separate themselves from whiteness to show that they’re not “one of *those* white people.” This is where we get safety pins and blue bracelets.

• Seeking Emotional Mammies- they seek out Black women to tell them “you is smart, you is kind, you is important,” because *they* feel so terrible about what happened and so they need to not feel bad and need someone to dry *their* tears and tell them what they should be doing right now.

• Seeking absolution- similar to seeking an emotional mammy, the people of whiteness seeking absolution want Black folks to absolve them of the guilt that they feel for being white in a moment when the nefariousness of whiteness is being exposed.

The insidiousness of each of these impulses is that not only do they center white folks and demand labor from Black folks, but it’s a whole lot of nothing.

The impulse is to avoid reckoning with whiteness in any substantive way by redirecting the attention to each individual’s sense of “goodness.” All of this is suddenly an individual issue and not a collective horror inflicted by a group of people.

Individuals get to make friendship bracelets and be reassured that they’re “one of the good ones” so they never have to be accountable for the actions of the collective. Differentiate. Deflect. Delude.

Individualize the problem or put it off on “those people” who aren’t like them: the poors, the uneducated, the south, the republicans. It’s everybody but their people. But it is their people. The data is showing us that it’s their people.

And until people of whiteness deal with **their** people, they are going to be screaming and choking and crying a lot over the next four years (and really the next 12 because JD Vance is gonna run y’all).

Let us support Ally’s emotional labor. You can join Ally’s Patreon here to support their work or give one-time donations through PayPal, Ca$h, or Venmo: PayPal.me/allyhenny, Cash: $allyhenny, Venmo: @allyhenny.

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There’s no shame in just waking up to all this. We all come to this work when we come to it. I came to it in my late teens because I fell in love with a Black man and my Southern family was having nothing of it, which radicalized me right quick. Others don’t have those formative experiences. One of my favorite memories of teaching the Hard Conversations course on racism was a woman in her 70s who took the course and said her life was changed. To do the work, you have to come to it when you come to it, and not before. There is a readiness that comes at different times for all of us—depending a lot on our generation, background, exposure to new ideas, and more. But when you come to the work, really come to it. Get your ego out of the way and let it change you. Even blue bracelets can spark that internal revolution if we can really hear the responses to them.

As organizer Mariame Kaba said on the Rebel Steps podcast:

“I’m actually super bored with the concept of performativity….I believe in co-strugglers and I believe in coworkers and I believe in solidarity. And I believe we need more people all the time in all of our work, in all of our movements, in all of our struggles. And I think the question is, how do we get folks to struggle alongside us and with us…I’m an incredibly curious person and I feel like that’s a huge help in finding yourself connected to struggles, is be super curious, come with what you know, be willing to learn, and be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.”

Poet Andrea Gibson wrote, “When we allow our egos to do our heart’s work, what needs to get done doesn’t get done.” We have got to take our egos out of this work and bring deep curiosity in. If an approach isn’t working, be curious about why, not defensive. Get to the roots of things.

For our world to change, we have to change internally as well as externally. Perhaps there’s no easy way to “tell” that change has occurred except in relationships over time. The trust window is long—and a blue bracelet is short.