His embarrassment is embarrassing

Ugh, this is why people hate the left. It’s why much of the left hates the left.

Dear White People, Your Safety Pins Are Embarrassing

I already hate it, and that’s just the title.

And of course the author is white.

Seriously? This is a thing now? Wear a safety pin to show “you’re an ally?” So immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others who were targeted and persecuted and (further) marginalized by the Trump Campaign will know they’re “safe” with you?

No. Just no. Please, take it off.

Let me explain something, white people: We just fucked up. Bad. We elected a racist demagogue who has promised to do serious harm to almost every person who isn’t a straight white male, and whose rhetoric has already stirred up hate crimes nationwide. White people were 70% of the voters in the 2016 election, and we’re the only demographic Trump won. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is there’s a white nationalist moving into the Oval Office, and white people — only white people — put him there.

That’s not analysis, it’s masochistic breast-beating in aid of Advanced Virtue Signaling. I don’t always like the label “virtue signaling” or think it’s apt, but here – yes, this is some heavy duty virtue signaling. Christopher Keelty is letting the world know he’s more woke than anyone else.

So to interrupt the masochistic breast-beating for the sake of a little skepticism, allow me to point out that I did not elect Trump despite being white. Keelty is equivocating between “white people elected Trump” in the sense that white people voted for Trump in larger numbers than any other group (although you could add modifiers to make groups that would have voted for him in much bigger percentages), and “white people as such, white people in general, voted for Trump.” He’s implying the second while leaving himself room to say he meant the first, or at least to point out that the first is true.

We don’t get to make ourselves feel better by putting on safety pins and self-designating ourselves as allies.

And make no mistake, that’s what the safety pins are for. Making White people feel better. They’ll do little or nothing to reassure the marginalized populations they are allegedly there to reassure; marginalized people know full well the long history of white people calling themselves allies while doing nothing to help, or even inflicting harm on, non-white Americans.

Of course, there is the little detail that he doesn’t know that…but it signals virtue, and it sounds woke, so who cares if it’s true or not.

Not my left.

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