Whatever happened to those pink pussyhats?
Over at Anand Giridharadas’ The Ink this morning, Anat Shenker-Osorio emphasizes the need for the left to adopt and use symbols the way MAGA uses hats. Or rather, the way abortion rights activists in Argentina use green bandanas not only to signify their movement’s cause, but to provide people not in the movement with social proof. “It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal,” Giridharadas writes. Shenker-Osorio explains (subscription req’d):
The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.
That is, what do people like me think? Or as Girdharadas explains below, what do people like me wear?
Shenker-Osorio continues:
So while I think there is some symbology on the movement side of the left, there isn’t enough. On the Democratic side, I think it’s very hard to maintain. You just can’t maintain symbology when the movement won’t carry it — like they literally will not wear a Democratic Party hat, won’t do it.
But if you go to labor actions — I mean, look at the resurgence of labor, right? We ended 2023 with something like 400 separate labor actions in one year alone. We haven’t seen this in 40 years. Bread and roses.
Like, the labor movement sings. The labor movement has songs, the labor movement has T-shirts, the labor movement has signs. It even has iconic silly things, like that goofy rat that you see at picket lines.
It’s part of an identity, not a personal one, but with a larger movement.
We lefties are often not “joiners.” Radical individualism on the left and a drive for inclusion lead to political self-marginalization. Identity politics gets in the way of solidarity politics:
On the left we have to try to convince people who are fundamentally, psychologically left-wing in their makeup, in order to get them to repeat things to convert the conflicted. And that’s very different.
So, getting back to those green bandanas. After Dobbs came down, leaders of the abortion fight in Argentina mentioned to me that they had offered a few U.S.-based reproductive rights groups green bandanas without success. Why? My guess is that they saw this as something specific to Argentina and feared wearing the bandanas would amount to cultural appropriation. Of course it’s a political symbol, not a cultural symbol.
So you saw only a few green bandanas at the protests following Dobbs, and though since 2023 more folks have adopted it, we haven’t made it the thing. It’s used by some smaller groups, and individuals who’ve traveled to Latin America and brought it back (I wore mine when I managed to get great seats for a Warriors game).
It’s not enough signal to break through the noise. Only repetition does that, verbally and visually And mass adoption also would have extended visible solidarity with campaigners for this same cause not just in Argentina, but in Colombia, Mexico, and parts of Central America. It’s a missed opportunity.
So, what happened to those pink pussyhats that were everywhere during the 2017 Women’s March? By 2018, they’d begun to disappear, explained The Detroit Free Press:
The reason: The sentiment that the pink pussyhat excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don’t have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink.
“I personally won’t wear one because if it hurts even a few people’s feelings, then I don’t feel like it’s unifying,” said Phoebe Hopps, founder and president of Women’s March Michigan and organizer of anniversary marches Jan. 21 in Lansing and Marquette.
Sometimes we can’t get out of our own way.