Beyond Lists: On White Allyship and Reparations
My work centers around philanthropy and organizing rich people, so I spend a lot of time thinking about economic injustice and the racial wealth divide. As a direct result of our country’s history of institutional racism, for every dollar of wealth white families have, black families only have a dime. So in a moment like this one, when variations on the theme “10 Ways to Be a White Ally” are everywhere, I have been wondering why a more just distribution of wealth — and the institutional demands that could help accomplish it — never seem to make the list. Or why not one of these articles talk about supporting reparations.
All of the actions these articles do include are crucial and, as a white person, I know I can’t be reminded too many times to follow Black leadership, to educate myself, to speak up to other white people about structural racism, to protest, to donate.
In writing this, I am thinking about those of us who are striving to be white allies and to organize other white people for racial justice. I know lists like these are already overwhelming for many white people, and that good organizing means meeting them where they are. So I can understand why focusing on actions that feel doable for more white people is strategic. It’s hard to talk about those extra ninety cents of wealth we have for each black family’s dime, about how from employment to education, healthcare to housing, what we have is not just the result of our hard work alone. On the other hand, what exactly do we mean when we say “white ally”? If our definition of allyship focuses only on individual actions without the framework of demands to dismantle institutional racism, without looking concretely at the economic advantages all white people receive from white supremacy, “ally” risks becoming just a personal identity we can take on and off, like a hat, whenever we choose. Can we ask more of each other and even of the lists we share on Facebook?
What if, when we talked about following Black leadership, we grounded it in the institutional demands that leadership is calling for? For example, what if we said that to be a white ally means to support the Black leadership of the Ferguson Demands? These include not only an end to the prison industrial complex but also full employment, safe housing, quality education, and the development of a “National Plan of Action for Racial Justice that addresses the persistent and ongoing forms of racial discrimination and disparities that exist in nearly every sphere of life including: criminal justice, employment, housing, education, health, land/property, voting, poverty and immigration.”
Or to support the Black Youth Project 100’s Agenda to Build Black Futures which names goals like: Pay for generational oppression — reparations revisited; honor workers’ rights #BlackWorkMatters; divest and eliminate profit from punishment; value the worth of women’s work; support trans* wealth and health; and stabilize and revitalize Black communities.
What if we followed the leadership of the Black Youth Project 100 and so many others (including Beyoncé!) and said that to be a white ally means to demand reparations?
[Note: This article was written before the Movement for Black Lives released their visionary platform which makes all of these demands even clearer.]
As white people, no matter what our economic background, we have privileges and access to wealth that Black people in this country have been violently, systematically denied. Yet currently, only 6% of white Americans support reparations as opposed to 59% of Black Americans. (If you’d like to read more about reparations, you could start here. Or here. Or listen to Martin Luther King Jr.) So maybe including a demand for reparations won’t make for the most popular Ways to Be a White Ally article. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “To destroy white supremacy we must commit ourselves to the promotion of unpopular policy. To commit ourselves solely to the promotion of popular policy means making peace with white supremacy.”
I support reparations because I have seen firsthand the ways that white supremacy has built wealth for my own family. White supremacy is in fact a system for the redistribution of wealth: it steals the labor, resources, and lives of Black people and other people of color and transfers that wealth to white people. And it requires an extraordinary amount of institutional violence to keep that system in place. While I am also committed to giving away my own money, philanthropy will never even scratch the surface of hundreds of years of the systemic redistribution of black wealth to white people. Only systemic change can do that.
If being an ally means that we make a commitment to following Black leadership, then we must act in solidarity with those leaders when they call for the radical policy changes that will be necessary to dismantle white supremacy. Even — or especially when — those policies will also dismantle our own privilege.
