Allies

Mab Segrest

For contemporary activists, the term “ally” is used to refer to people in historically dominant groups who align themselves politically with historically oppressed groups with the goal of dismantling oppressive systems. Feminist intersectional theory and praxis during the 1970s and 1980s led the way in making the multiple valences of power clear so that such alliances are—at best—complex negotiations of positionality and privilege. Historically, the term “ally” referred most often to relationships of marriage and kinship, as well as to those state and military alliances that often preceded or followed them. In contrast, most recent radical usages designate relationships not so much within but across systems of power and biological kinship, working against the grain of deeply embedded historical misapprehensions of Others.

A survey of book titles and activist blogs illustrates how contemporary radicals use the term today. For example, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence against Women (Messner, Greenberg and Peretz 2015) gives voice, in Gloria Steinem’s words, to “a diverse activist community of men who under­stand that feminism is their movement, too—not only because they support daughters, wives, mothers and coworkers, but because they see violence against females as a normalization of all violence, and a powerful way of limiting men’s full humanity too.” Karen Dace’s Unlikely Allies in the Academy: Women of Color and White Women in Conversation (2012) collects essays by four white women and five women of color in an attempt to create alliances toward more inclusive structures on campuses and beyond. J Love Calderón’s Occupying Privilege: Conversations on Love, Race & Liberation (2012) defines allies as “members of the advantaged group who act against the oppressions from which they derive power, privilege and acceptance.” Cynthia Stokes Brown’s Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2002) takes its definition from Beverly Tatum: “An antiracist activist, a white man or woman who is clearly identifiable as an ally to people of color in the struggle against racism.” Such people identify themselves by “taking a public stand against racist assumptions that surround one, against the prevailing system of white supremacy, when one is the beneficiary of the system” (Tatum 1994, 474).

Paul Kivel’s early and influential Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (1996) devotes its third chapter to “Being An Ally,” which explains topics such as what an ally does, getting involved, making a commitment, working with white people, and including family and friends. Generating such lists became a staple for authors struggling to define the term. Usage often arises in conjunction with group identities: white allies to people of color, ­heterosexual allies to queers or LGBT people, middle- or upper-class allies to poor and working-class people, and male allies to women. For example, Calderón refers to herself as “a heterosexual ally for queer liberation” (2012, 100). Meanwhile, current contests over the concept’s meaning detach “allies” from individual identities (“I am”) to refocus on collective actions and movements (“We do”). Contestants within these debates have also discredited the “ally industrial complex,” which they associate with the professionalization of political work carried out by nonprofits.

Derived from the Latin “alligare” (“to bind to”), “ally” passed into English through the Old French “alier” and the Anglo-French “aillaier” between AD 1250 and 1300. Its antonyms include “enemy,” “foe,” and “adversary.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest uses of the noun denoted a “relative, relation” (usually from marriage) among “kinsman, kinswoman” from elite families. This usage can be seen in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale (circa 1405): “This day I take thee for myn allye Seyde this blissful faire mayde.” The relation expands quickly from personal heterosexual binding to a “state, military force, etc., united or asso­ciated with another league by formal treaty, esp. for political or military purposes,” as in Grenewey’s 1598 translation of Tacitus’ Annales: “The like number of citizens and allies should be under Corbuloes charge.” Standing apart from state and familial relations, one strand of meaning denotes “a person who helps or cooperates with another; a supporter, an associate, a friend.” A third strand indicates “something similar to another thing in nature of characteristics, or placed near it in classification; esp (Biol) an organism which is related to another by common evolutionary origin.” World Wars I and II ele­vated state military alliances to new heights. In this context, “the Allies” became a proper noun denoting the military forces, as the OED explains, “who fought in alliance against Germany and her allies in the First World War (1914–18) or the Second World War (1939–45).” The OED also acknowledges the verb form: “to ally.”

During the Cold War, radicals began reimagining the concept of “ally” so that its emphasis fell less on close political affinities within existing regimes of power. Instead, they sought to emphasize calls for accountability across systems historically justified by biology (for example, by way of social Darwinism) and across psyches defined as non-normative or Other.

This alternate use of “allies” emerged during the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s as people of color began insisting that white people take on white supremacy in their own communities. In 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) urged the white people who had been working with them to stop trying to “escape the horrible reality of America by going into the black community . . . while neglecting the organization of their own people’s racist communities.” Although their position paper on “The Basis of Black Power” (Carmichael 1966) does not use “ally,” it does refer to “white people who desire change in this country” who are “just as disgusted by this system as we are.” Acknowledging the valuable role that whites played in helping to “give blacks the right to organize,” the Committee declares: “that role is now over.” Talk of coalitions was meaningless, they argued, because—at present—“there is no one to align ourselves with, because of the lack of organization in the white communities.” Organizing in white communities meant, in part, working to change white individual and collective psyches: “Whites are the ones who must try to raise themselves to our humanistic level.” If carried out effectively, such work might result in “talks about exchange of personnel, coalition, and other meaningful alliances.”

This new orientation established the role to be played by the “ally” on a terrain that was rapidly being transformed by a resurgent right-wing politics. By the 1970s, even as the US government worked to violently suppress radical movements, the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and initiatives launched during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (1964) opened up new government jobs (such as those in Head Start, founded in 1965) as well as positions in a growing nonprofit sector of “501-c-3s” overseen by the Internal Revenue Service. These opportunities prov­ided a base for some 1960s radicals. Some sectors of the emerging ­second-wave feminist and gay and lesbian rights movements also organized within nonprofits. Meanwhile, multinational corporations created a highly feminized global assembly line, undercutting labor organizing in the United States. Reagan-era neoliberal structural adjustment policies encouraged the accumulation of profits from information and service industries and resulted in massive new inequalities. In 1976, China turned toward “state capitalism.” The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought the “era of the three worlds” to a close, thus unleashing a triumphant new wave of capitalist globalization. Under such circumstances, what is an ally to do?

Raising the collective white psyche up to a “humanistic level” would prove to be difficult in the newly emerging “non-profit industrial complex” (Incite! Women of Color Collective 2009) as various sectors of the well-funded right deployed an array of identity-based scapegoats for a 99 percent losing footing in the new global capitalist economies.

The movement of “ally” (against etymology’s grain) from a relation between kin to one between Others explains some of the difficulties associated with “training allies” in the twenty-first century. In his Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel (1996) provides a translation of people of color’s requests to whites: respect us, listen to us, find out about us, stand by my issue, provide information, don’t assume you know what’s best for me, take risks, make mistakes. Such lists are useful, but they have been replicated to the point of becoming formulaic. Consequently, disclaimers have emerged, such as that found in the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective essay on “Undermining Oppression”: “To gain an understanding of the workings of white supremacy, one need not attend endless workshops or become involved in an obscure subculture.”

A more full-blown cri de coeur from the Colours of Resistance Archive gives voice to the emerging disquiet. In “Whose ally? Thinking Critically about Anti-Oppression Ally Organizing, Part 1,” an anonymous author laments the 2003 global demonstrations against the US invasion of Iraq. According to the author, although white people have sometimes “become a part of these efforts in ways that resist white supremacy and substantively support the struggles of people of color,” they run the risk of becoming “part of a growing culture of self-identified white, antiracist allies” who participate in a “highly specific modality of political practice” with “mostly white people” who “impose a new culture onto the work . . . of what constituted anti-racist white allies.” The author concludes: “Almost none of the groups I’d worked with had ever successfully worked on a cross-racial campaign without inviting major disasters and irreversible fuck-ups. Looking around, I saw many other white activists who had been raised through years of a very similar culture of talking about white privilege equally unable to make any concrete changes in their lives and work.”

Indigenous Action Media (2014) put forward one of the most frontal assaults on “allies” to date when they referred to them as “non-profit capitalists.” In their view, “the ally-industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the ‘issues’ they work to address. . . . Commodification and exploitation of allyship is a growing trend in activism today.” In response, they suggest that people adopt the role of “accomplices, not allies,” since “accomplice” denotes “a person who helps another commit a crime.” In the ongoing struggle against settler colonialism, such a person would be among those “who has our backs, or more appropriately: who is with us, at our sides.”

Without trashing the concept of “allies” altogether, Black Lives Matter recently accomplished another strategic shift from alliances based on single fixed identities to ones based on an intersectional approach. The movement grew out of social media and social movement responses to the murder of Trayvon Martin and the police killing of Michael Brown. Both events pointed to the lethal police and paramilitary violence in Black communities. Fifty years after SNCC, Black Lives Matter emerged to defend Black people from heinous state violence. The movement speaks to any and all who will hear. As movement cofounder Alicia Garza put it, “We call on black people and our allies to take up the call that . . . Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation.” At the same time, the movement’s Black queer creators drew upon an intersectional approach by focusing on “those who have been marginalized within Black liberations movements” in order to affirm “the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum” (Garza 2014). “Black lives” are not a monolith; instead, and as a collective, they are constituted by other systems of oppression and resistance. As movement activists make clear, such an intersectional understanding has been expected of white allies as well.

These contests over the meaning of “ally” are at the core of radical efforts to define our relationships-in-action when we are moved into alliances by the desire for justice. No amount of flip charts or weekend workshops can teach courage and fortitude, the desire to earn trust, or the imagination to envision a dif­ferent world (although those flip chart meetings can refine strategies and sharpen understandings of our active commitments). Instead, courage, fortitude, and trustworthiness are acquired when collective struggles forged in political crises stimulate the imagination, show possibilities in action, and provide occasions for us to hold our breath and leap.

See also: Accountability; Community; Conspiracy; Oppression; Privilege; Queer; Solidarity