Open social annotation, while offering opportunities for the creation of new knowledge, empowerment, and dynamic dialogue for learning, also contains inherent risk of safety for marginalized student populations navigating open knowledge practices. In this paper, we will explore both the opportunities for subverting traditional knowledge structures offered by open social annotation, while also bringing to the surface the critical tensions that may make engaging in social annotation more dangerous or ineffective for students from historically marginalized backgrounds. Finally, we will offer a framework for constructing social annotation assignments for the college classroom that functions to maximize the potential for equity while taking into account ways to minimize harm in the inevitable tensions of an inherently unsafe online environment. Critical social annotation will be explored as an alternative pedagogical approach.