Being an ally isn't easy.
It seems like it should be. You like women. Or people of color, or gay people, or trans people, or people with disabilities. You think they should have all the rights that men, white people, straight people, cisgender people, and abled people have. You don't see why on earth they shouldn't.
That should be enough, right? But it isn't.
It isn't, because being an ally means changing how you think.
It means listening. It means hearing or reading things that outrage you, or confuse you, or simply don't match how you experience the world... and rather than rejecting them, taking them on board. Accepting that that is how someone else, possibly many someone elses, do experience the world. How they have been treated. Their own truth.
It means learning about things that make you uncomfortable... and working to make yourself comfortable with them. Doing that work yourself. It means looking at the ways you have benefited from your privilege, or the ignorant things you've said or thought in the past, and owning them, without excuses.
It means offering your voice and your presence in solidarity, but resisting any urge to lead, instruct, define, or advise movements and struggles that are primarily about the liberation of people other than yourself (and your own liberation only secondarily).
It means accepting authorities that may not look or sound or act the way you expect authorities to look or sound or act. It means repressing the urge to foreground your own perspective, believing it to be "universally generalizable." It means banishing, forever, the idea that objectivity looks like a middle-class white male.
And, it means you will, occasionally, feel foolish, awkward, defensive, or judged, when you enter certain discussions. It means you may step in it, or be told you've stepped in it when you think you haven't.
And that's never pleasant. Nobody likes to feel like they've fucked up, and even less do we like to feel like we're being told we've fucked up when we don't think we have.
At that point, we have two choices.
We can take the easier path and retreat, learning from these little stings that we are not wanted, give ourselves credit for trying while we go back to our comfort zones.
Or we can lick our wounds, consider what we meant versus what was heard, whether we heard what was being said to us, whether we might have erred in ignorance, and go back. Maybe a little quieter, a little humbler, but still interested and involved, still learning and supporting, because this is about our own liberation, tangentially. Because this is about the human projects of dignity and equality, and opting out is opposition, for all the difference it makes.
We can be allies.
© cai