Allyship’s Day of Reckoning is Here
If we’re going to adopt the label, we’d better live up to its charge
Let me start by saying this: I am all the things. Those things include: White. Male. Heterosexual. Gentile. I live in a community with good air and water and a lower violent crime rate than the national average. These are my things, and this context will make more sense in a moment. Now, let’s continue.
Allyship is having a moment; It needs to have an era
Allyship is having a moment. Quite literally. Just look at the search term prevalence for ‘allyship’ on Google Trends over the past five years:
See that huge-but-brief spike? That was the beginning of June 2020, and the peak of the George Floyd-inspired Black Lives Matter protests and Blackout Tuesday on social media. To quote Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver: “Holy shit!”
The sheer magnitude of that spike is impressive and encouraging. It suggests a national conversation unlike anything in recent memory. But the just-as-sudden drop should give all of us who wear the moniker of ‘ally’ cause for great concern. If that trend continues, ‘allyship’ risks becoming a brief blip on the heart rate EKG of an otherwise flatlined patient. And a metaphorically dead ally doesn’t make for a very good ally.
Allyship—whether White allies in the context of BLM or any other form of allyship—needs to have an era, not a moment.
The problem with White allies like me
Ally. At first blush, it can seem like such an inviting, easy label to adopt. Yes! I’m an ally! I stand with you!
Moreover, there’s no shortage of recent articles about how to be one, how to be a better one, how to bring allyship to the workplace, how to avoid the perils of optical / performative allyship, and even how to reject allyship fatigue.
That last one about overcoming allyship fatigue, although perhaps well-intentioned, is the most egregious. It lays bare the tragic flaw of so much allyship—namely, the luxury of picking up and putting down a thing that we do not bear in the first place.
You know who needs to worry about fatigue? Those groups—whether the BIPOC community, LGBTQ community, Jewish community, or other—who unavoidably face discrimination and injustice daily. They are fighting a war, not a single battle. Sometimes those wars for justice and equality have spanned generations, centuries, or longer. That is exhausting. That takes true endurance.
When we call ourselves an ally, it cannot mean “I stand with you in principle, and maybe I stand with you in action… unless something else comes up that sounds more fun.”
And therein lies the problem with allyship. Many of us are trying to be allies. Hopefully, some of us are succeeding at being good ones. Yet like gravy on an overcooked Thanksgiving turkey, the term ally “can cover a multitude of sins.”
Allyship needs to look a lot more like advocacy
Remember when I said I am all the things? I am other things, too. A father. A spouse. An advocate.
As an environmental advocate, I’ve dedicated two decades (and counting) of my career to fighting climate change and championing clean energy, public lands, wildlife habitat preservation, water conservation and water quality. It is present in my personal philanthropy, in the professional philanthrophy of my company via our membership in 1% for the Planet, in the sometimes hefty overtime hours I log but don’t charge to clients because I’m in this work for the mission, not the money.
As a healthcare advocate, I have worked in support of raising public awareness, fighting for accuracy and transparency in food labeling requirements, and calling for insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions (in the parlance of America’s broken healthcare system). That’s because for more than 13 years I’ve lived with an autoimmune condition called celiac disease.
We are all advocates for something. And when we are advocates—fighting for change on an issue that impacts us deeply, personally, directly—we have ownership of the fight. We don’t pick it up and put it down on a whim.
Allyship needs to cross this commitment chasm to look a whole lot more like advocating. Until it does, us allies risk absolving our own consciences while undermining the responsibilities of the ‘ally’ title.
Allyship’s crisis extends far beyond White allies of BLM
In her Medium article “There Is No Such Thing as a ‘White Ally’ (go read it), Catherine Pugh, Esq.—writing about racism—argues that “In no other venue of the modern American experience is the target charged to end the abuse.”
Almost reflexively, I disagreed. In every example I could think of, the targeted group on the receiving end of discrimination and injustice has been the most vocal leading the charge for equality: Women’s suffrage. Workplace gender inequality. Gay marriage. LGBTQ rights. Gun violence and school shootings. Anti-Semitism. Toxic masculinity and rape culture. Domestic violence. Child sex abuse in the Catholic church. The residents of Flint, MI, drinking its polluted, lead-tainted water. And of course, Black Lives Matter and the broader Civil Rights Movement.
In every case, the strongest, loudest, most-passionate voices fighting for justice in these and other arenas are the ones who have bled, the ones who have directly suffered. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The Human Rights Campaign advocating for LGBTQ equality. The Anti-Defamation League fighting anti-Semitism. Each of these organizations leading the charge for their respective causes were born out of and remain led by the communities they support.
What, then, of allies like me? If we profess to stand for a cause, how do we live up to the charge of being a true ‘ally’ rather than put lipstick on the pig of privilege?
Becoming a durable ally
I do not want to conclude this article by turning it into yet another list of ‘X ways to be a good ally.” There’s enough of that out there already, and it presumes I know the answer. I don’t. But I do believe this:
A day of reckoning for allyship is upon us. Those of us who identify as White allies or any other kind of ally need to take a good, hard look at how we’re doing. (Hint: Probably not as well as we’d like to think.) We need to become durable allies.
Durable allyship is authentic, not performative. It must spring forth from a deep-seated passion for justice, rather than from a superficial concern about the optics of one’s public actions.
If our allyship is authentic, it naturally follows that it must be persistent, spanning times when it is both convenient and inconvenient for us to be an ally. An ally isn’t much of one if they fade away when things get difficult.
Part and parcel with being persistent, allyship must be sustainable. If persistence gives constancy to our allyship, sustainability gives longevity to it. None of the wars for equality and justice I mentioned above have been won overnight.
Finally, allyship must be proactive. Although there’s rightly been much recent emphasis on White allies “listening and learning” from Black voices, it remains incumbent upon allies to do the work. Allies need to roll up our proverbial sleeves and get messy, not react if/when asked.
None of this, of course, tells you what to actually do. But I’d offer that figuring out that part can start with asking yourself two questions: Am I doing the right things? Am I doing enough?
If you’re like me, you’ll probably conclude: a) Partly. b) No. That’s where we start. That’s where we shift from allyship having a moment to allyship having an era. That’s when allyship stops being a compartmentalized slice of life for any given ally, and starts a new phase of simply becoming a better human being through and through.
