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Nov 09, 2024

The Blue Bracelet Movement, Explained | Glamour

After the election of Donald Trump, many white women are feeling betrayed by the 53% of their peers who voted for him. Their answer? A blue bracelet. What started as a way for white women to subtly

After the election of Donald Trump, many white women are feeling betrayed by the 53% of their peers who voted for him. Their answer? A blue bracelet.

What started as a way for white women to subtly signal that they supported Vice President Kamala Harris for president has ballooned to a veritable social media movement. But it’s getting skepticism from many online.

Here’s everything you need to know in this edition of TL;DR.

Some white women who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris have started wearing a blue bracelet on their wrists to signify that they didn’t vote for Donald Trump, but the trend is being called performative.

Well, first off, Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States this week by what looks to be a majority of Americans.

I don’t really need to tell you this, but just in case, Trump has been openly racist and sexist during his entire time on the political stage, including during this campaign. Despite this, 53 percent of white women—according to exit polls—voted for him. (Brief caveat that exit polls are not firm polling demographic data, which we will have in the coming weeks.)

In contrast, exit polls show 91 percent of Black women voted for Harris, a trend that is consistent with the last several elections. As Glamour reported in September, Black women’s support for the Democratic party has been unwavering, with 80 to 90 percent of Black women voting for the party for the last quarter century.

Overall, women voted for Harris 53 percent to 45 percent for Trump. Their ranks include Hispanic/Latino women, 60 percent of whom voted for Harris. (Only these three races were included in exit polling data.)

In the wake of this reality, white women who voted for Harris online began to post—some jokingly, some soberly—that they wished there was a way for them to know which of their fellow white women were on their side, and which voted for Trump. Others expressed a desire to signal to women of color that they were not Trump supporters.

In a video posted shortly after the election, a mom named Libby in Minnesota posted a video where she asked for ideas because, “I don’t trust any of these bitches anymore.”

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“Is it like blue friendship bracelets?” she said, referring to the Taylor Swift-fueled friendship bracelet trend.

Libby’s video went viral, and now has been viewed more than 4 million times. It also seems to have given a lot of white women an idea: Yeah, let’s actually wear those blue friendship bracelets.

The trend is now growing like wildfire on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram and in Facebook groups. A lot of white women who supported Harris, feeling completely helpless to do anything to change the reality of her loss and struggling with deep feelings of rage and sadness, glommed onto this rather simple way to show their support. It’s pretty easy, after all, to buy, make, or wear a bracelet.

Many white women are also encouraging their peers to not make their own bracelets, but to buy them from Black-owned jewelry companies. On TikTok, a small business owner named Alicia shared some options from her company, Beaded & Balanced Jewelry, saying she’d sold more than 200 since the trend began. She even made a “unity bracelet” with blue beads specifically for it.

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Another Black woman, who owns a business called Melanin and Moon Minerals, said that she was making bracelets using the blue-hued mineral stone sodalite. “Sodalite is the stone for anxiety and communication,” she said.

Several Black and white women, however, are examining the trend with a little more skepticism. The main criticism is that the trend is performative—a way for white women to feel better and self-soothe without actually having to do the hard work of intersectionality and examining their own communities.

As Shannon Watts, founder of Everytown on Gun Safety and a former Glamour Woman of the Year, wrote on X, many white women have family or friends who voted for Trump. Confronting that could be a much more powerful use of their time.

“White ladies with your blue bracelets, your women’s march plans, and your conspiracy theories about whether the election was rigged, please turn your attention to the work,” she wrote. “THIS is what you need to be doing until the next election.”

That sentiment was echoed by several Black women online.

“We didn't need safety pins,” Dr. Carlotta Berry, an engineer and author, wrote on X.

“We didn't need pink hats. We didn't need blue bracelets. We didn't need marches. We didn't even need Zooms. We needed you to get granny, antie, sister, daughter, cousin, mama, memaw, mamaw to the doggone voting booth.”

Besides, the low level of effort the blue bracelet takes, these critics say, make it not a lasting symbol of change. “This whole blue bracelet thing, it just feels like a trend,” said one woman on TikTok.

Ultimately, some Black women said they feel like the blue bracelet is a distraction from the real work we need to be doing as a new Trump era dawns.

“It’s time for us to become students again, and connect with those that are doing the work already,” said one woman. “Be a part of movement building y’all. People power is the only way we are going to win.”

Unclear. The blue bracelet trend could become 2024’s pussy hat, or it could be over in a few days.