Explaining an Alliance Away
So I’ve been thinking about folks of all types, Master’s tools, people being tools (in the helpful and harmful senses of the word), appropriation, and action.
I’ve talked to allies and friends and sisters and homefolks.
I’ve learned so much today. I have to freewrite it because I’ll lose it.
- An ally is not a person in a state of being; it’s a person performing valuable action. It’s you taking action with someone because you’re both invested in each other’s lives and humanities. Alliances are not passive. They are constant and vigilant.
- Listening to someone with whom you’re allied is only half the battle. If you plan to act in concert, you have to have a conversation with them. If they get angry, that is not the time to apologize and run away. Running away is too easy. It delays taking action when it is needed and it leaves your once-ally alone again.
- Do not spend needless time whisking away, shunting away, explaining away, or heavily denying yourself your privilege. Please. Don’t. You will still have privilege and once again that is an exercise in exasperation.
- Lorde’s point about the Master’s tools not taking down the Master’s house? Look at it this way. Becoming an ally to someone when you’re in a privileged position means you are LEAVING that house. You are moving outside, and you are going to start throwing rocks and hauling tree trunks at it with the rest of us. But if you see an opportunity to run in the house and start taking a machete to some beams and supports, DO IT. The problem is not being in the house; the problem is what you’re doing while you’re inside. If you’re sleeping, eating, shitting, and cooking in the house with full knowledge there are walls of insomniacs — hungry, dirty, and devouring things raw — outside with no intent of leaving, YOU ARE ABUSING YOUR PRIVILEGE. Can you peek outside from time to time and still sleep soundly? Sure, but your conscience may not like you for it. Can you send out the occasional meal and an invite to take shifts sleeping in your bed? Sure can, but that’s a half-assed way of helping someone — just giving them a sample of something you experience all the time because you don’t want to lose your precious goodies. If you want to be an ally, leave the house with the intention of staying out. That way, when you visit from time to time, you’ll want to see it come down and you won’t miss much of anything in there. You won’t be cooking one or two meals; you’ll be emptying the pantries and throwing them out to the yards.
- Do NOT sit around and tell me I don’t understand what it’s like to have privilege. Do not have that much fucking nerve. Everyone has some form of privilege whether we want it or not. It is true everyone wants to end suffering to some degree, but do NOT center your privilege or call on me to center my privilege because you want to suspend any guilty feelings you have about possessing it. That is NOT how things are supposed to go. The point is not to analyze privilege from every angle all the time; it’s to remain aware of the fact that a system exists that gives you those privileges at the expense of harming your fellow human being. And when you recognize that, your priority becomes ending that system. It’s a difficult shift, but it’s necessary to creating and sustaining alliances. And the lifetime of work deals with keeping that awareness in the front of your mind.
- I want to read this essay every day and I thank Fire Fly for sharing it with me.
- I want to live this every day. I’m not going to deny my guilt, but I’m not going to build an altar to it and call it “activism,” either.
- I want to express my opinion without having my life attacked or having my ideas absorbed into a giant blog that tries to silence and disappear me at every opportunity. Expressing an opposing opinion does not mean I want you to improve yourself at my expense.
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Becoming an ally to someone when you’re in a privileged position means you are LEAVING that house. You are moving outside, and you are going to start throwing rocks and hauling tree trunks at it with the rest of us. But if you see an opportunity to run in the house and start taking a machete to some beams and supports, DO IT. The problem is not being in the house; the problem is what you’re doing while you’re inside.
Damn you’re good. Thank you for crystallizing that for me.
evil_fizz
January 11, 2008 at 11:05 pm
I’m glad it helped.
Sylvia
January 12, 2008 at 10:11 am
The point is not to analyze privilege from every angle all the time; it’s to remain aware of the fact that a system exists that gives you those privileges at the expense of harming your fellow human being. And when you recognize that, your priority becomes ending that system. It’s a difficult shift, but it’s necessary to creating and sustaining alliances. And the lifetime of work deals with keeping that awareness in the front of your mind.
Boom. That’s it, right there. I’m puttin’ that one on my fridge, right next to the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever”. Thank you for putting into words a concept I’ve felt in my bones, but had a hard time sharing with other folks in union and labor council meetings, or at the break table, or the “second meeting” (at the tavern or the hall—there’s usually food and always drinks after the meeting; provides an opportunity to catch up with one another, especially during the hard times when people are on the road–not working locally). Can’t share a concept if you don’t have the words for it, and now I do. (mouthy as I am, I still get tongue-tied, y’know.) Seriously—I like the way you phrased that. I’ve heard/seen other versions, but that one is more “concrete” to me, less abstract. Less big, high-flying theory, and more nitty-gritty.
Because I have a hard time thinking in the abstract. I have to have a concrete example. Part of the reason I struggle with the master/house metaphor is because I don’t see just one “house”. The example most salient to my everyday life is the union—it can function as both the “house” and a tool for dismantling the house. The historic origin of the Union is that of the tool of opposition. But add some assassinations, disappearedness, imprisonments, deportations, corruptions, and co-optations; shake and stir, and you’ve got the current hidebound labor movement of the United States (at the large-scale level).
Anyway, thanks for some tasty food for thought. I’m gonna let this digest, and maybe I’ll be cooking something up on this later.
La Lubu
January 12, 2008 at 11:06 am
Do NOT sit around and tell me I don’t understand what it’s like to have privilege. Do not have that much fucking nerve. Everyone has some form of privilege whether we want it or not. It is true everyone wants to end suffering to some degree, but do NOT center your privilege or call on me to center my privilege because you want to suspend any guilty feelings you have about possessing it. That is NOT how things are supposed to go.
Such a very good point.
I’ve been meaning to write up a post about what it means to have privilege when you’re also oppressed in other ways. Often, white people, sometimes men of colour too, will talk about privilege as if they’re unique and special for having it, that women of colour don’t understand what it’s like to have privilege and have to negotiate it when making alliances… and that is such bullshit. It’s completely not true. I think Reagon’s piece highlights that so well, because she talks about how the dynamic of multiple alliances played out in the Civil Rights Movement, and in the women’s movement, without centring whiteness.
We so often centre whiteness when discussing privilege and alliances that we forget that woc have varied privileges and oppressions to work across too. But while whiteness is centred, we ignore the multiple ways that alliances are being formed between people and communities of colour. Alliances which don’t seem to involve as much loud bleating about guilt and privilege as alliances with white folks.
Fire Fly
January 12, 2008 at 7:32 pm
La Lubu, I can’t wait to see what you do with it. It’s a hard thing to put into practice, but it’s not going to happen overnight. I think that’s why people are afraid to fight daily to keep those realities in mind and make strides towards ending the disparities that guide so much of our lives.
Fire Fly, Reagon did and she did it so well, and these movements happened with full acknowledgment that privilege may tip the scales for some and hurt others. But the point was trying to stop that system of scale tipping. If people did huge privilege-centered workshops while people sat in jail, those people in jail would probably have never seen daylight again.
Absolutely. And I think that it would be important to center examples of alliance building rather than focus on privilege exclusively. Everyone would benefit more greatly and it’d play out less like group therapy and more like coalition towards action.
Sylvia
January 12, 2008 at 9:36 pm
This is a little late, but this post is making a lot of light bulbs go off in my head. Thanks, Sylvia.
Emily
January 13, 2008 at 7:18 pm