Safety pins are meaningless acts of solidarity made to assuage white guilt

It appears that we have reached the "meaningless acts of solidarity" phase of the US election cycle. Apparently, the salvation of racial minorities lies in the humble safety pin. In the wake of Donald Trump's shock triumph over Hillary Clinton, white liberals across the US, taking their cue from a similar initiative in post-Brexit Britain, are wearing safety pins on their lapels to out themselves as a safe ally.

No. Please stop. We have been here before. These pins, like other passive acts of solidarity such as wearing hijab for a day, are less about challenging oppressive power structures and more about assuaging white guilt.

As Indian author Arundhati Roy explains, oppression is about power and powerlessness, be it in the home, in the community, or on a national and global level. And make no mistake: this election was about the powerful and the powerless. The post-election commentary may be lionising them as the "disaffected working class" but the white population that united to give Trump their majority vote were demonstrating their power over everyone else.

What makes Trumpism so shocking is not the racism that motors it, but how it exposes a power relationship that has never been quite so explicit before. The power white people hold over racial minorities in the West is a reflection of the power the West itself wields over the rest of the world – and of how little the powerful care about the powerless.

Even before Trump's victory, for instance, the historic run of Hillary Clinton was framed in terms of the exciting possibility of a first female US president, and this was automatically assumed to spell social and gender progress.

But, as Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns, there is great danger in a single story. In this case, the danger was the abject failure of Western mainstream feminism to think about women in parts of the world that suffer at the hands of Western power.

This is not to crucify Hillary supporters merely for supporting her. But the misguided nature of claims that a female president would intrinsically benefit all women have to be acknowledged. Clinton's interventionist foreign policy is far more hawkish than President Obama's, and her record as secretary of state proved to be deadly to women in certain regions, including the Middle East.

But this truth was inconvenient to the feel-good narrative of the first female president, and so was erased from the story.

Of course, I do not claim Clinton to be uniquely or especially evil: this is how the Western world works. Our progress comes at the expense of others. We exploit brown and black people from the so-called Global South every day for our own benefit.

What is ironic about all this is that it has happened in a year when Western feminism was dominated by the buzzword du jour, intersectionality, or the concept that various types of oppression overlap and interact, leaving some more marginalised than others.

In the era of "leaning in", our Western society has swallowed the neoliberal line that the individual is king and as such, we have been offered up a version of intersectionality that on the surface appears to elevate all women regardless of race, sexuality, or other marginalised characteristic, but that in actuality relies on the continued hidden oppression of women (and men) elsewhere.

Why didn't Western feminists challenge Clinton on her foreign policy record that caused so much harm to other women? Why are white commentators still excusing the voting habits of a white populace that legitimised an explicitly racist platform?

Because, despite our safety pins and our solidarity, the West remains reluctant to even acknowledge, let alone challenge, the oppressive nature of its own power.

We are entering a frightening new phase in its history, one which will leave none of us unscathed. From Britain to the US to Australia, the anger of those who feel alienated, economically marginalised, and deprived of the prosperity so promised to them by the tradition of white domination, is palpable and it is the most vulnerable – racial minorities, women, LGBTQ – who are in their firing line.

The good news is, we can come out the other end with a better, fairer society. But we have to fight back, and in order to do that we must think about not just intersectional feminism or anti-racism that focuses solely on those living in the West, but about a global transnational feminism that includes and benefits all women because it recognises that women in parts of the world that have long been treated as the plaything of the West are oppressed, both by gender inequality in their own cultures and political systems, and by Western interference, be that through war or globalisation.

Undo your safety pins and fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night indeed.

Ruby Hamad is a judge in the Daily Life 2016 Women of the Year. Nominations are open until November 18.