The Case for Mutual Allyship
How the discourse surrounding “transactionality” and “oppressorhood” distracts from establishing solidarity
In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7th, many self-identifying progressive American Jews felt a sense of betrayal. They had come out to march for Black lives in the summer of 2020, for Asian lives in the winter of 2021, and for queer lives each and every June, among many other core left-wing causes. Now it was their moment of need, as the Jewish people found themselves facing their worst crisis since the Holocaust, and from their point of view, the progressive movement had seemingly collectively turned its back on them, labeling them “oppressors” who deserved whatever the Palestinian “resistance” had to dish out. (This perception was based on the fact that within the first few days, before Israel had yet begun demonstrating its cruelty in its response to the attack, pro-Palestinian rallies were organized in major cities around the United States, drawing comparisons to hypothetical pro-Arab rallies immediately following the destruction of the World Trade Center.) In response to these Jewish progressives expressing this sentiment, many other leftists essentially dismissed their frustration, saying things like “allyship isn’t and shouldn’t be transactional” — i.e., you came out to support me, potentially putting yourself on the line in so doing, but that doesn’t mean I ought to return the favor, because you were just doing the right thing to do, and if you selfishly expected something in return, then you were really just in it for yourself and were never a trustworthy ally.
There is much debate to be had on how grateful oppressed people ought to be for others who come to their aid, and I don’t intend to wade into that in this article. I understand that from the point of view of many who suffer at the bottom of some hierarchy, being expected to express gratitude feels like another form of oppression. But I can’t help but be concerned that this approach is actively damaging the progressive movement’s ability to build robust coalitions. Of course, some might argue that building coalitions is not the point — that the point is just to create such a massive disruption that the mainstream society is brought to a standstill and is forced to acquiesce to your demands. This perspective makes sense if one has given up on the possibility of achieving one’s goals through existing democratic institutions. But to date, I have come across nobody offering a convincing alternative. What are you going to do? Stage a revolution? If so, you’d better be ready to fight a guerrilla war against the most powerful military on Earth on its own home turf. And even if you win, you’ll then be faced with the challenge of building a new society from the ground up without descending into authoritarianism — unless, of course, you envision yourself or your cohort ruling with an iron fist, and not your rival whom you maybe only mostly agree with. You see, if you instead had the support of a solid majority of the population behind you, you wouldn’t be at such risk of repeating the mistakes of history that I’ve explored in articles #2 and #4 of this series, because you’d have more breathing room and license to experiment.
But let’s not get sidetracked. What I believe is primarily underlying the misunderstanding around who ought to stand up for whom when it comes to issues that only or primarily affect certain specific groups is the perception of some as falling into the category of oppressor and others as falling into the category of oppressed, just as Marx laid out in his model of the six stages of history. With the rise to prominence of politics based on intersectionality, there has come an understanding of the ways in which one can be oppressed in several different ways, each compounding on the others. Less so, however, when it comes to an understanding of the ways in which one can be oppressed in some ways and privileged in others. (Note that I did not say “oppressed in some ways and an oppressor in others” — more on this in a bit.) This is unsurprising, since it would require people to grapple with nuance in ways that our polarized environment, especially on social media, is especially inconducive to (for example, with white women, their racial privilege is considered to outweigh their gendered oppression in many cases.) This can be visualized with a very helpful graphic referred to as the “Wheel of Privilege.”
There are many different variations of this chart, and my choice of this one is somewhat arbitrary. Take a look at the various axes and see which category you fall into in each. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky or unlucky, you probably land close to the center on some axes and closer to the edge on others. For example, I don’t identify as a Zionist (just the opposite, in fact), but I do identify as a cisgender man, and am also not exactly neurotypical. That means that I tend to benefit from male privilege (in most circumstances — more on this in a bit as well), but am disadvantaged when it comes to navigating unfamiliar social environments. This combination also has its own consequences, e.g. female-identifying people may be more likely to feel threatened by my presence than if I was neurotypical (and of course, the situation would be even worse if I were a person of color). Do I feel that this is fair? Of course not, but I also know that each new person that I encounter has their own set of past experiences that factors into the lens through which they see the world around them.
Importantly, I do not see this as potentially indicative of something like “reverse sexism,” partly because to describe it as such would be guaranteed to invite criticism asserting that, because the major -isms like racism and sexism operate via hierarchical systems of power, therefore the terms “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism” refer to non-existent phenomena. (As I proceed here, I am treading carefully, knowing that you, the reader, may be inclined to feel that it is simply not a man’s place to express his views on gender issues, given that many have caused harm in so doing.) Going a step further, I would imagine that even if someone criticizing me admitted that some women do hold prejudiced views of men, they would argue that, unlike the prejudices that the Civil Rights Movement and earlier waves of feminism sought to do away with, this prejudice (or prejudice held by some people of color against whites) is actually justified as a natural result of having experienced oppression, and expressions of this prejudice are healthy and good for the people who hold them. When people like me then come across such sentiments in online or in-person spaces, the proper response, from what I can tell, seems to be to simply accept being held responsible for the actions of others who happen to fall into the same privileged class as oneself, silently knowing that it doesn’t apply to you if, in fact, you really are “one of the good ones.” Any sense of defensiveness or indignation is seen as telling on oneself, and worse, perpetuating the plight of an oppressed person by tone-policing them.
As I discussed in a previous article, this is where the effect upon our thought processes of the grammatical shortcomings of the English language play out in their full Sapir-Whorf glory, when people say things like “white people uphold white supremacy” and “men uphold patriarchy” — both technically true statements, but missing a crucial “some” beforehand (whereas in some other languages, the “some” could not be omitted). (For anyone wondering about the results of this rhetoric, I’ve literally seen posts saying things like “men aren’t the problem; patriarchy is,” and comments in response saying “yeah but who upholds patriarchy?? men.”) Enough men have engaged in bad faith with this kind of discourse that even the phrase “not all men” is now seen as functionally equivalent to “all lives matter” as a response to “Black lives matter”: a signal indicating that the person saying it is so blinded by their own privilege and their fear of losing it that no further interaction with them is worthwhile. This is why I drew a distinction before between being privileged and being an oppressor; the latter tend to also be the former, but the former are not necessarily the latter. Of course, being privileged means that one has a responsibility to help uplift those who are not, but we do not live in a society where you can reasonably ask people to sign up to be your punching bags in order to be viewed with slightly less suspicion. And of course, it’s possible for people to evolve and for their views to shift, so maybe they have contributed to oppression in the past, but they may now want to make up for that.
You may now be wondering, on which issues do I feel that I could use the allyship of non-men? There are two big ones. The first is the automatic suspicion of men who are drawn towards working in childcare/elementary education. The idea that a man could be pulling his fair share in the upbringing of his own kids — a goal explicitly sought by the feminist movement — is still so foreign to many women that they feel the need to call the police on men at the playground, inserting themselves into other people’s families, insisting to the kids that they can speak openly if they “don’t know this man.” When major institutions are run disproportionately by people from one demographic, it is well understood by progressives that this often leads to other perspectives being overlooked, and yet, when nearly 80% of elementary school educators are women, hardly anyone bats an eye when behaviors associated with boyhood, i.e. rowdiness/fidgetiness, are pathologized and stigmatized by people who have never been boys. And when these boys then fall behind their sisters in one scholastic metric after another, a proposed solution laid out by Richard Reeves — a man, no less — in The Atlantic in 2022 is to simply accept the frankly offensive notion that boys naturally perform worse in academic settings, and to have them start school a year later to account for this effective developmental delay (a practice referred to as “redshirting”), i.e. treating the symptom, not the cause. Obviously, I’m not saying that boys should be allowed to just roughhouse and beat each other up with no oversight, as that would be uncivilized; instead, I believe that the presence of more male role models would help make it easier to teach them to channel their energy in healthier directions.
The second issue is the social and emotional isolation that many men endure on a daily basis. This is a result of the particularly American emphasis on individualism and self-dependence, where asking for support is seen as a concession of weakness, as is openly expressing any sort of vulnerability. Men make up about 70% of houseless people and a similar proportion of suicide victims. Many progressives feel an aversion to talking about this, however, since they do not want to be seen as taking space in the conversation away from women’s issues, or to be associated with the reactionary so-called “men’s rights movement” figureheaded by Andrew Tate that offers nothing but resentment and radicalization fuel, and that recruits from young men many of whom feel that the progressive movement isn’t a place for them.
You might object at this point — but both of those issues are consequences of patriarchy! I never said they weren’t. Sure, men are treated better by patriarchy on the surface, but it asks us to make sacrifices in exchange. We sacrifice our human warmth, our ability to relate to others beyond the superficial. You can’t say then that patriarchy doesn’t hurt everyone. At the same time, the instinct to point fingers and lay blame is strong, but this is really not the fault of most men alive today. Generations come and go; the institution that did this predates us all. Saying that these things are “men’s fault” and therefore we should be the ones who fix it, not women, ignores the third possibility: that we fix it together. Having their support would significantly lessen the social cost associated with taking a stand on these issues that men risk paying for doing so. And I am prepared to return the favor—having known many women in STEM, I have seen that they are just as capable as I am, and believe that access to birth control/abortion is not just good for them because it provides bodily and career autonomy, but that it is good for society as a whole, because it demonstrably lowers violent crime rates.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that although being an idealist has helped make myself and many others into progressives, being a progressive sometimes fails to make people into idealists. Some people see the injustice in the world and are rightly outraged, but they then lose faith that a better alternative could ever really exist. They don’t really believe that there will ever be reconciliation between whites and people of color, or between women and men, nor do some of them believe that there even should be. So they’re not worried about whether or not it’s “helpful” or “productive” to call for Zionists to be kicked off of university campuses, or to proclaim themself to be #TeamBear. They’re just left simultaneously resentful and convinced that their own actions are above reproach, some believing the suffering of certain others to represent justice. The horseshoe theory rears its head again.
Speaking of Zionists, where does all of this leave Jewish people? The whole argument in favor of Israel’s actions rests on the baseline assumption that antisemitism is such a powerful force that the only way to prevent a second Holocaust is to lash out in blind rage. As a result, many in the pro-Palestinian movement are predisposed to view the real threat of antisemitism from the far right with skepticism, since it seems like a contradiction to think that the some of the same people who are oppressing them, the Israeli Jews, could also be oppressed in other ways themselves. (In a weird irony, this leaves Jewish people pushed away from both the far left and the far right towards the center, thereby lending further fuel to the conspiracy theory that alleges that Jews are the ones pulling the strings behind mainstream society.) This is where it becomes important to remember that most Jews have little to no say in the policy of the Israeli state, just as most white people do not have a say in the racist policies through which white supremacy is enacted. Except every two to four years, that is, when, at least in the United States and at least for now, elections are held to determine who will make the decisions that impact people’s lives. Every time you read a news story about a local official taking away people’s rights, chances are that it was preventable, and you don’t get to point to these stories as irrefutable evidence of the rottenness of the American system if you don’t participate in it yourself. Yes, both parties are beholden to AIPAC, but not all Jewish people are, and they deserve the right to their identity just as much as anyone else.
Ultimately, what will determine if our civilization emerges from the crises it’s currently facing strengthened or diminished will depend partly on whether those of us who believe in a better world can set a proper example for future generations, who will have to pick up where we leave off, to follow. We want a model of government that provides for the needs of its citizens, but before we get that, we have to show that we can provide for each other’s needs, even if it may appear on paper that some of us already have our needs covered. I’m not just helping you because I expect you to do the same for me, or just because it’s the right thing to do; I’m doing it because it is on this principle that the basic idea of the social contract, as laid out by Rousseau, is based. And after all, I don’t know if you would say that the model of unidirectional allyship is working especially well, so we may as well try the bidirectional kind. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote this of the era of the Founding Fathers, and I feel that it holds just as true today:
History has its eyes on us.
