Hey, White People, Pt. 2: We Don't Get to Decide that We're Allies

We The Whites have a broken understanding of the word "ally," and a dangerous habit of centering ourselves in other peoples' fights for liberation.

Nov 19, 2021

Hey, White People” is an ongoing series from “Recently” that examines white conduct in the contexts of social justice and decolonizing work.

Ally, verb: late 13th century, “to join in marriage” from Old French alier, “combine, unite,” from Latin alligare “bind to, tie to,”

Ally, noun: late 14th century, “relative, kinsman” from 15th century, “one united with another by treaty or league.” Allies as the name of the nations aligned against the Central Powers in WWI, and aligned against Germany, Italy, and Japan in WWII.

— Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed November 2021

I think I first became aware of the term “ally” in middle school history class, in the context of WWII. The etymologies listed above remind me that the U.S. was one of a pack of allies during the first AND second world wars, but Western memory is strange; it’s the second conflict, more than any other, that education in the U.S. and Canada returns to again and again. Thus, my personal interrogation of the word “ally” is grounded in Euro-American history and WWII, and it is there that I will begin.

The U.S. allied with the “good guys" in World War Two, but we showed up late; the conflict was already two years old by the time we finally decided that the Axis Powers were a problem. The comedian Eddie Izzard has a great bit about the Americans’ late arrival to the scene; “where the fuck have YOU been?!” a British solider gasps (from where he is lying on the ground) at a newly-arrived GI, who has rocked up to battle like a cowboy on steroids. But that arrival was significant, in all its tardiness. The Allied powers, so-named by their leadership at the time, were the “good guys,” who had been fighting the scourge of fascism for some time, but the American forces were essential to the ultimate defeat of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and their brethren.

But why did the U.S. get involved in the first place?

During WWII, the bombing of Pearl Harbor drove the country to war with Japan, which then elicited an additional declaration from Germany. A perceived threat to American safety and freedom resulted in the nation’s decision to enter the international fray. But prior to that, the war seen as an issue that did not directly impact the U.S. to such a degree that its involvement would be merited. So from the ages of maybe ten to eighteen, I understood “ally” generally to mean “teammates who are the heroes.” And once I moved into social justice spheres, I learned that “ally” could also be extended to mean “being on the same team as those who are marginalized.” But I still found “WWII good guys” popping up regularly in my head. The thinking would generally go:

ally —> supporter of people who have been marginalized —> WWII good guys?

And ultimately, it was this train of thought, revisited over and over again, that pushed me to start questioning the use of the term “ally” by white people in particular. Okay, I would begin, internally. Okay, the Allies in WWII were united in common cause: defeat Hitler&Co. in order to protect the world from fascism. And then I would hit a roadblock; if I say that I am an ally to the Black effort to secure equity and defeat antiblackness, does that mean the same thing? Ally and ally? I am not threatened in the same way that Black individuals are. So what am I?

Somewhere along the way in the last ten years, I stopped saying I was an ally. I’d say that did ally work. Or I’d just skip the whole “ally” thing completely and say I worked in anti-racist education or social justice. I felt like a fraud whenever I said I was an ally, but didn’t necessarily go around suggesting to other white people that they might consider this fraudulence themselves. It took a recent exchange with a peer/mentee/quasi-niece about allyship for me to realize that, in fact, I wanted to say exactly that. So here we are.

The complete etymologies of both the noun and verb forms of “ally” offer valuable revelations. To ally with someone, via the Old French, means to be joined to, or bound to (as in a marriage). To be an ally of someone or something, deriving from the Old French verb form, is to be a relative of another person or “to be united with another by treaty or league.” As I examined these linguistic histories, I was reminded of Murri activist and elder Lilla Watson’s thoughts on the matter of allyship between the oppressed and the oppressor:

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Watson, born in 1940 and raised on her mother’s ancestral lands in what is currently known as Australia, has long been involved in decolonial social justice work. The quote above is dated to the 1970s, when white Australians came to Indigenous leaders (including Watson) looking for guidance in terms of “helping the aboriginals” in the wake of apartheid. The issue, Watson emphasized, was not that Indigenous people such as herself and her community members “needed help.” Rather, society as a whole was in dire need of change, and whites would have to center social equity, not the rescuing people of color, in order to effect positive shifts that they claimed to be seeking. Allowing the narrative of “white people saving the aboriginals” to hold, Watson pointed out, would only lead to the reiteration of the social structures that had disenfranchised Indigenous peoples in Australia in the first place. It wasn’t enough for whites to want to help; the whites had to understand that their liberty was inextricably linked to that of non-whites. This was allyship.

So then I considered: if being an ally in the social justice context means the inextricable linking of one group’s liberation with another, does the WWII definition thereof actually hold water?

During the second world war, people were getting murdered by the Axis Powers in droves; droves. Hitler eradicated millions of lives based on religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Thousands of soldiers suffered and died in Japanese POW camps. The Allied Powers (most notably the Brits, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.) came together to bring these nations and their bloody campaigns to heel. But when held up to the mirrors of both etymological and recorded history, this narrative of allyship begins to fray.

The U.S., followed by Canada, created a system of internment camps in the early days of its involvement in the conflict, and funneled over 100,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration, in order to prevent possible domestic collusion with The Enemy, Japan (a threat greatly overblown by white government leaders). The U.S. also led the firebombing campaigns in Japan that eradicated whole families, livelihoods, and histories (to say NOTHING of the total obliteration we oversaw in the Pacfic, and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). One of the American minds behind those violent campaigns (Curtis LeMay) was later quoted as saying, “killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal…” For all that the U.S. claimed to be pursuing a liberation bound up with others’, it looked a lot like mass murder versus genocide. Not to mention the Soviets! Throughout the war, the USSR was operating decades-old gulags, or concentration camps. In short, the Allied Powers weren’t exactly paragons of “your liberation is bound up with mine.” Frankly, engaging in war doesn’t make anyone a paragon of “your liberation is bound up with mine.” But then, this begs the question: if the standard examples in the Western lexicon are, in fact, inaccurate facsimiles grounded in white savior complexes and struggles for power, not shared fights for intersectional liberation, what does being an ally, engaging in allyship, ACTUALLY look like?

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t look like anything that we white people actually want anything to do with.

Consider the repatriation of land.

Returning ancestral lands to Indigenous guardianship is a core tenet of decolonial activism. After centuries of losing heritage lands through treaties, occupation, or straight up robbery to colonizing forces, the reestablishment of Indigenous stewardship of lands is imperative. In many countries, the Indigenous peoples who call the land home never actually released guardianship thereof to settlers, meaning that all non-Indigenous peoples living in those areas are, without hyperbole, living on stolen land. It is possible to buy a condo, dig a swimming pool, open a business, or erect a Walmart on these lands. Individuals and corporations both can declare ownership, or a right to profit making, on these lands. Governmental and private outfits can extract natural resources from these lands, and wreak havoc on the surrounding environment and communities. And this repeated misuse of these lands, plus the resulting harm done to the Indigenous communities on them, has come to a head.

At the time of this writing in November 2021 on Turtle Island, the defense of Fairy Creek and its old growth forests in British Columbia by the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations, the Six Nations fight against oil and natural gas extraction in Ontario, and the Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s resistance to the expansion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, are all ongoing crises of land and resource abuse between settler powers and Indigenous protectors. The repatriation of those lands, the repatriation of land as a whole, is integral to the process of reinstating Indigenous sovereignty and allowing those communities to rebuild their identities after years of violent displacement and erasure. But it’s not just an issue of repatriating lands that are under siege. The question is one of how a full, ethical return of heritage lands to their rightful protectors as part of the larger effort to promote Indigenous liberation.

So, what could being an ally to the cause of Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization look like? Advocating for land repatriation, which most likely include lands on which you and your family live, work, or otherwise function in your day-to-day lives? Divesting oneself of stocks in fossil fuel companies that wrongfully extract on heritage lands? Living with poisoned water sources, a result of harmful extraction practices? Living with the threat of environmental collapse in the place you call home? Fearing that your children will be permanently compromised to toxic wast on the very lands that hold the history of you and your ancestors?

Yes. That is what allyship really is.

Consider employment.

Positions of power in the West are disproportionately held by white individuals (largely male, but there are certainly plenty of white women in the proverbial C-suite; et tu, LouAnna K Simon?). Black men in America, meanwhile, have some of the highest unemployment rates of any group on record. This is due in part to the fact that Black men are under-surveyed for this data, or are underreported on if they are unemployed in certain sectors. But another issue at play is the fact that Black men are disproportionately represented in the America prison system. Pew Research points out that, “in 2018, black Americans represented 33% of the sentenced prison population, nearly triple their 12% share of the U.S. adult population.” (Pew, 2020) This is in large part thanks to the fact that Black men are targeted by police and the state at much higher rates than other groups. The ACLU has a series of infographics that breaks down marijuana arrests in the U.S. between 2001 and 2010, and points out:

“Blacks and whites use pot at about the same rate. But these [drug] busts aren’t happening on every block…Blacks have been nearly four times as likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession.” (ACLU, 2020)

Additionally as per the National Academy of Sciences, “1 in every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police. These generational disruptions (a pattern established over centuries of Black enslavement in the U.S.) contribute to the prevention of wealth accumulation and transference in Black families. (PNAS.org, 2019) Now, I acknowledge fully that this is a very, VERY brief survey of the systematic disenfranchisement and elimination of Black men from American society. But it can help white readers connect dots that many, many Black people have connected, or have had connected for them, since a young age: to be Black, particularly Black and male, is be at high risk of getting denied a fulfilling life on one’s own terms, if not getting denied a life.

So what could being an ally to the cause of Black equity and empowerment in America look like? Embracing police abolition? Releasing Black individuals who have been incarcerated on counts of marijuana possession? Introducing social supports to combat the antiblackness that inhabits schools, workplaces, governmental systems? White people stepping down from C-suite jobs, hiring more Black professionals? Divesting oneself, if one is a white person, of wealth? Experience disproportionate rates of underemployment and incarceration? Getting regularly targeted by police? Living as a visible minority, and being dehumanized for it?

Yes. That is what allyship really is.

Again, I know I’m barely scratching the surface, here. Individual groups’ conceptions of liberation varied widely, and do not exist in a vacuum; one liberation is bound up with another’s. Indigenous peoples make up over 30% of the incarcerated population in Canada’s prison systems; abolishing the police and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline is essential not just for Black Americans, but for First Nations peoples (as well as Black Canadians, and other groups marginalized by the white mainstream). The queer community deserves unilateral access to medical care and protection from violence, and its liberation is also tied up in Indigenous liberation (recognition of two-spirited individuals, non-binary identities, and the freedom to live beyond the West’s linear constraints). White people who are members of marginalized groups must hold space for the dueling realities of pursuing liberation while also being positioned at the top of Western society’s food chain by nature of their skin color (read: being white but queer does not mean one “has the right” to be anti-Black).

I say all of this, pull all of these threads loose and open these various doors, because at the end of the day, what white people must understand is that “an ally” is NOT “a privileged individual acknowledges the challenges facing a group, and believes that that group should be treated better.” An ally is someone who shoulders a burden alongside another, such that the emancipation of each becomes a single, shared goal. And I just don’t think that We The Whites can be, or do, that.

I was recently reading the writings of Lee Maracle for a course I’m taking, and found (I’m sure to no surprise for readers of her work) that her thoughts on what it is to be an ally are invaluable. Maracle, a member of the Sto:lo Nation, was a leading Indigenous thinker, writer, and activist in Canada who passed away far too soon last week. Her departure has left a hole in many hearts, but her words will live on for generations to come, and for that, we are very, very fortunate. In terms of reflecting on allyship, a quote from her book Heartless Teacher speaks (I think) directly to the sticky conundrum of a non-oppressed individual’s claim to be united with an individual who lives under oppression:

“I realize you hold no gun to my head, dear teacher, but it was your culture that spawned physical genocide and now you ask me to erase the shadow of my grandmother. Before you ask me to erase her, please reduce yourself to a shadow. Then, we will at least be equal. At base zero, I am willing to negotiate a whole new culture, if you like.” (p. 82)

It’s not enough for the person who has NOT been asked to lose themselves to tell the person who HAS that they are now teammates. Allyship is a move towards equity that would upend everything that we know as normal in today’s world, not preserve white comfort while making non-white and other marginalized groups slightly more comfortable. Etymologically speaking, allyship is a union, and generally unions (say, a marriage) ask for consent from both parties. So it isn’t enough for a white person to announce, “hello, I am united with all Indigenous peoples in Canada; their burdens are mine, their history is mine, we are fighting for the same decolonial liberation,” because one, that is a bananas thing to say and impossible to enact, but also, two, if there’s no consent to that union from Indigenous peoples of Canada, then there’s no alliance. That white person is not an ally, based purely on etymological syllogism.

But also, it just isn’t possible for We The Whites to bind up our liberation with the liberation of the peoples we have oppressed (by nature of being white) for centuries. We, The Whites, don’t know what it’s like to carry the legacy of African enslavement or Indigenous genocide in our bodies and histories. We have no reason to be terrified every time a cop pulls us over while we’re driving. In terms of compassion, we simply lack the human capability to put ourselves in such systematically violent shoes. And above all, there’s the simple fact that we don't want to find out.

We don’t want to return (NOT sell) the land on which our homes sit to the Indigenous communities who call that land home. We don’t want to give away our financial assets in order to close the wealth gap. We don’t want to be imprisoned as often as Black men are for marijuana possession. We don’t want to experience what Salvadoran communities experienced trying to gain refuge during civil war, or live in fear of faith-based purges, and thus be driven to fight for a shared liberation. We want to say the right thing at a staff meeting, and tell our friends over drinks that “I KNOW the people of color at work can trust me, and .” The level of discomfort we must tolerate in order to hold a manager at work accountable for speaking inappropriately to an employee of color, or to tell a friend that their casual anti-semitic jokes are anti-semitic, is already a huge stretch. And those actions do not make any of us allies! They are perhaps examples of ally work— making an effort to support the pursuit of liberation— but we can still turn back to our desks after having A Word with that manager and carry on as white people moving in a white-centric world. To be a member of a marginalized group is to live without respite from the fact of marginalization. We The Whites cannot conceptualize that.

There is plenty to explore well beyond what I have covered in this piece; none of us are the mouthpieces of some divine intellect, especially those of us who are white writers and academics. It’s worth exploring, for one, the individual practices that some marginalized communities have of bestowing the title of “ally” on particular white individuals. There is also the argument that the semantics of “what makes an ally” take away from the real issue of liberation work. And I definitely urge you to explore the content that people from both oppressed and oppressor communities have put out about what allyship means (I have listed some of these different resources below). But here and now, having traced the backstory of the word “ally” in the Western lexicon, explored the faults in its mainstream WWII contexts, and parsed some of its linguistic, historic, and activist histories, here is what I know: white people cannot name themselves as allies.

We do not get to decide that we are united with marginalized groups. Nor do we get to pretend that we have accepted that our oppressor liberation is bound up with the liberations of the oppressed. Every time we do this, we center ourselves in a narrative that has always centered us. And that centering, which Lilla Watson, Lee Maracle, and so many thousands of others have warned us against, is what keeps the violence of oppression in place.

So keep showing up at political actions. Keep pushing back when your bosses make sweeping generalizations about entire non-white groups, keep holding your loved ones accountable for their actions, keep supporting the pursuit of liberation. White people are needed in social justice efforts; we have power and platforms and access that few people do. We have to contribute to the stores of energy fueling what amounts of a mass societal overhaul and re-imagining. But it’s never going to come to anything if we keep centering ourselves in someone else’s fight for liberation.

It’s not about you. It’s about everyone, particularly everyone else. So shut up and work.

Sources

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history#section_9

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history

https://lillanetwork.wordpress.com/about/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/queensland-review/article/abs/lilla-watson/16131B34E295C6039BCBC01804CB5344

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/bomb-us-officials/

https://tworowtimes.com/uncategorized/lee-maracle-a-leading-voice-in-indigenous-literature-dies-at-71/

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-pop-history-bombs-a-response-to-malcolm-gladwells-love-letter-to-american-air-power/

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-are-employment-rates-so-low-among-black-men/

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/

https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers