Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Ally Yourself

I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an ally. As a white person, a person with economic privilege, a straight person, I've often seen myself as an ally to people who experience less privilege in our culture's system. But recently an anti-racist educator challenged that idea of being an ally, suggesting that the whole concept is embedded in a system of oppression...where some have privilege and some don't, and those with privilege can be an ally. She encouraged me to think about the idea of being an anti-racist white person instead, of choosing to put forth an identity that actively works against the system of oppression. If this is all getting a little heady, let me suggest a more tangible example--a time recently when I might have been an ally, but when I felt like I was just part of a new culture. The recent election included the passage of marriage equality in Maryland, something I had worked a little on and hoped a lot for. In the days that followed, I had an interesting experience. As I spoke with friends who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual--the people who would be potentially affected by the new law because they were now able to marry their partners, at least in one more state--I struggled with what to say. Part of me wanted to say "congratulations!" as though this was their victory. And I recognize that on some level, as a woman married to a man whose marriage has never been called into question, my friends and colleagues who are LGB or queer have a personal relationship with this law that I will never experience. But at the same time, I felt as though I wanted to say congratulations to myself, to all of Maryland, to everyone else who had worked on and hoped for this. I felt not like an ally to a group that had finally won its rights, but like a part of a new thing, a full participant in a society that was doing something right, something loving and inclusive. I think that this was a taste of what it's like to move beyond ally-dom and into anti-ism-dom, whether it's racism or heterosexism or any other kind of ism. Or maybe it's not even anti-ism-dom but inclusion-dom, or equality-dom, or whatever kind of world isn't just about fighting systems of oppression but actually imagining itself without systems of oppression. We have a long way to go, on all those isms. But I'm beginning to think that on that journey, I don't want to be just an ally...I want to be a full traveler. I would love to hear thoughts and responses to all of this, from those who resonate with the word ally, who don't think it's quite right, and everything in between!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All I wanted to say about the marriage equality referendum in Maryland was, "Yay!"