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“Is it like blue friendship bracelets?” she said, referring to the Taylor Swift-fueled friendship bracelet trend.
How did it explode into a trend?
Libby’s video went viral, and now has been viewed more than four 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.
But what are the critiques of the movement?
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.”
