The Idea of Allyship Needs to End
I am not your ally; I am what you need me to be
“Do you consider yourself an ally?” she asks. We’re sitting in a studio recording my podcast.
How do you answer this? If the answer is yes, how do you prove it? How do you quantify support? If the answer is no, does that immediately mean that you don’t care about marginalized people?
Too often, I’ve seen the label not match the sentiment.
When I was a kid, I had a friend a year or two younger than me who lived across the street. I can’t remember his name for the life of me, but I do remember that he had all the toys, and that I wanted to play with them. I also knew that, for whatever reason, he was very sheltered and had no friends that I had ever seen.
I went to his house every day. He was thrilled to have a friend, and I was more than happy to play with every single one of his toys — at least until I lost interest in toys and got into sports. Once my interests changed, I found new friends and left my toy beneficiary behind. Our interests no longer aligned, so I dipped.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem with allyship: At its core, it calls for some quid pro quo. Allyship is only as good as the opportunities that bind them. Because of this, I have been reluctant to claim that I am anyone’s ally.
Over the last few years, the term has been bandied about, especially regarding liberal causes; White liberals ally themselves to Black causes, straight people to LGBTQ+ causes, and men to women’s causes. In short, it is essentially the privileged “reaching down” to those with less.
The term ally, as it is currently used, is often temperamental and easily lends itself to being self-serving. The very nature of its strategic use makes this unavoidable.
Allyship, like what I had with my childhood “friend,” is conditional, but somewhere along the way, these partnerships develop a thin layer of altruism. It’s a presentation that, seemingly by design, fools the presenter more than anyone else into thinking that their support is special, effective, and irreplaceable.
