The first time I heard about “being an ally” was during my undergraduate years in the early 2000s. “An ally” generally meant a person who is outside a particular group but supportive of the group’s needs and aims. Being a small community, we needed our straight allies to amplify our power and voices; though at times some of us felt resentful at the effort required to include and accommodate them in our spaces and work. Sometimes straight people took up space and demanded energy, attention, and accommodation that felt draining and unsupportive. When possible, it was a joy to have spaces where we didn’t have to consider straight people at all.
That tension between needing allies and resenting them seems to have evolved over the years as social justice discourse has transformed via the Internet and cultural change. Now the onus is on the ally to prove their allyship through demonstrating right understanding, not asking for validation or praise, knowing when to take up space and when to be quiet, not centering their own needs, not arguing with people in the group, and recognizing the diversity of opinions in the group.
The sharpest expression of these boundaries is something like: “We don’t need allies. We don’t need to spend the energy educating you or kissing your ass. If you want to be an ally, you need to do the work and not expect our validation or acceptance.” The call is essentially toward prioritizing the group’s interest and needs and falling in line or shutting your mouth if you’re not in the group. Which is, to be honest and clear, not an unreasonable boundary, and entirely appropriate for certain kinds of work.
But is ally the best word for that kind of relationship?
Being an ally doesn’t seem to be the same as being in alliance, wherein compelling common interest between groups makes cooperation mutually rewarding. When I became the Outreach Chair of my queer organization in the early 2000s, I took the call as an opportunity to build alliance, find common cause and common struggle with other political and identity-based student groups, which was easier when we didn’t default to centering white LGBTQ people and remembered that queer people are in every identity group.
From the perspective of global politics, countries in alliance might not particularly like each other, but depend upon the maintenance of their agreements for stability and prosperity. In a recent interview with Jeremy Scahill, Noam Chomsky offered an illustrative example of such an action, that of Mexico allowing Chinese military to gather on the borders of the United States. While there are political tensions between the United States and Mexico, there’s a common interest in not escalating tensions to the danger of a land war.
But looking through that lens, it would be deeply problematic for one nation to demand all the accommodation and unflinching, unselfish support. I observed this personally later in life when I was in a meeting of LGBTQ spiritual and religious leaders talking about the need for interfaith work, with my Neopagan group.
One of the Christian leaders came to us and warmly invited us to attend their church services some time. Our clergy member thanked him, and similarly invited him to attend one of our seasonal rituals, and the Christian visibly blanched at the offer and never, to my acknowledge, showed.
That moment made clear to me that alliance requires mutuality. If one group expects us to extend ourselves for them, and makes no effort for us, why would we attend their services? The attitude did not suggest respect for us or an interest in collaboration—at best it was facile acceptance, at worst it was proselytizing. If there is not mutual effort and shared value, what is an alliance?
What’s become clear is that “ally” in activist rhetoric is almost without exception a term applied to people in a privileged group who support a more marginalized group. At best, it seems self-serving to call myself an ally—like virtue signaling, like calling myself your best friend—a term I need to earn rather than claim. And “being an ally” has connotations of meaning both “being a good person” and “prioritizing the comfort and needs of marginalized people over your own.”
As a therapist, it has become clearer to me over the years that a relationship without mutual benefit is a deeply unhealthy one. I have quietly sat with this concern that allyship is about self-sacrifice for the other without expectation of any gain or reward and made exceptions due to the enormous imbalance of historical economic, social, and cultural injustice. Yet I have also seen this dynamic play out to the detriment of all involved. Well-meaning white or straight or cisgender people who take this too literally and end up sacrificing too much, then becoming toxic.
To be clear: It’s not healthy for anyone to be consistently compromise their needs, wants, and desires for the benefit of another. It’s not healthy for marginalized people. It’s not healthy for privileged people. Such a relational dynamic leads to abuse, burnout, and toxicity.
I believe some allies overcorrect in response to marginalized people expressing frustrations or setting very healthy and reasonable boundaries in the crucible of social justice discourse and disembodied Internet communities. It is honestly no wonder that folks tire of being the representative and educator on behalf of their identity groups, expected to replicate the same scripts to dialogue with people who they don’t have any relationship with, who might not be acting in good faith, who have cousins and coworkers and random people who jump on the threads to add their bullshit, who come from such different lives that it’s not even possible to have a productive conversation without a lot of context-building.
“I don’t need to educate you” is a healthy personal boundary for those of us not being paid to do the work, and have other things to do with our time and energy.
Through the Internet we are connected to more people than ever in human history, but at a distance that allows us to flatten and objectify each other. From the outside, allies seeking for guidance in being right and good look to these myriad and contradictory expressions of clarity, power, grief, frustration, rage, and powerlessness, and reshare them to show their understanding and support, which amplifies a message and makes it seem even bigger. It’s too easy to see a meme shared once or fifty times and begin to think of that as a universal truth coming from a group that has diverse perspectives and needs.
For a time, for example, I saw memes floating around calling upon allies to cut off their bigoted or Trump-supporting family members, calling into question the dedication of those who would not. A person who would make such a call, I imagine, really wants to know that the folks who call themselves allies are truly on their side and committed to their safety and well-being.
But if an ally truly did cut away all of their family, and all of their privilege, who would provide the emotional and material support their family offered? That marginalized person who makes it clear they’re not here to give you cookies for doing what’s right? Who’s already got enough to manage emotionally in life? A person who posted a meme who has no relationship with you in your day-to-day life?
Maybe those allies truly doing the work would luck into being welcomed by a new, socially just family, but I suspect most would not. More often, I expect, those allies who make themselves too at home in certain communities will find themselves firmly reminded that they’re merely guests.
I was once one of three men in a group of mostly white women talking about anti-racism. Knowing that often men take up a great deal of space I was mindful about how much I participated, while also noticing that many of the participants were very new to thinking about whiteness and anti-racism. At the end of the call, one of the women expressed her concern that men were taking up too much space.
Which left me confused—was she talking about me specifically? Or the other men? Or all of us together? Was her focusing on male participation a way of dealing with her discomfort of talking about her whiteness? Did we have agreements or facilitation that could’ve helped the men find boundaries of our participation, or were we supposed to guess? I would’ve appreciated direct feedback to know how much I needed to adjust my participation, but I was left feeling mildly unwelcome and confused.
When a perspective like this arises, the typical response is that privileged people need to do the work to figure out whether they’re being talked about or not, and anxiety or discomfort may be a sign of one’s own complicity. It’s not their job to explain if they meant you. Or, alternately, you should feel grateful they felt safe enough to share this in front of you.
While these perspectives make sense, what’s being asked for are sophisticated social skills that would be complicated by growing up in families that, for example, did not have consistent expectations or give you clear, actionable feedback. Or families where perhaps a behavior was okay one day and offensive another day with no explanation about the difference. Or families that avoided direct conflict but talked about you behind your back, or chastised you with vague statements that you needed to magically divine. Or families that simply froze you out or punished you when you did wrong.
If a person happened to experience any of those communication patterns, or others, then being anxious and confused in response to indirect feedback about a group they’re in is a totally normal and expected experience. Feeling defensive or angry may be less a sign of personal guilt and more a sign of being habitually blamed and attacked.
Since asking for clarity might be condemned as demanding emotional labor, the ally is left having to deal with this indirect feedback as best as they can, which usually ends up meaning using one of their maladaptive coping strategies they learned to navigate those confusing family experiences. Strategies such as shaming and policing anyone else who does something similar, or indiscriminately taking in all feedback and overfunctioning so that they’re always good and never bad, or getting defensive and attacking back, or questioning the expectations, or shutting down. All the behaviors that exhaust the targeted activists in the first place.
These aren’t alliances, with clearly contracted agreements and a process for working through disputes and conflict. Or perhaps it is an alliance, in that there’s not open war but rather tensions expressed indirectly or through proxies.
In What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, author Emma Dabiri calls upon white people who care about racial and economic justice to find our own values and desires in this process. Not to see anti-racism as an act of charity or service we’re doing for another group, but to find its necessity in our own lives, families, and communities. To know what is at stake for us, so that we’re working for common cause.
For these and other reasons, I’ve stopped using the word “ally” to describe myself, and instead challenge myself to find my personal values and stakes in the work toward social and economic justice. I can prioritize my needs and desires appropriately, not trying to get them met by people with healthy boundaries but getting clear about which relationships are about shared values and which relationships are about emotional and material support. I don’t need to feel welcome or accepted in every space to recognize we have common interests, but I don’t have to sacrifice myself either.
It’s been important to me to move from the abstract and universal categories toward the specific and concrete, to my communities of people with whom I have relationships that can be negotiated and engaged with, where others may be willing to extend themselves to educate, challenge, affirm, or argue with me, but I can also give energy and value back. Mutuality is important to any healthy, thriving relationship—if we are constantly giving more than we receive, we are in danger.
