Allyship Does Not Mean Seeing Yourself As Worthless

Allyship does not mean seeing yourself as worthless

There are people who like to make others feel worthless. Some of them use the language of social justice to get away with it.

Often, this comes in the form of proclaiming to hate allies and then demanding unbounded deference from allies. This is typically conflated with accountability, but it’s not the same thing at all.

Hatred and accountability are different things. Accountability as an ally means, among other things:

Listening to the people you’re trying to support instead of talking over them.

Making good-faith efforts to understand the issues involved and to act on what you learn.

Understanding that you’re going to make big mistakes, and that sometimes people you’re trying to support will be justifiably angry with you.

Accepting that your privilege and power matter, not expecting others to overlook either, and taking responsibility for how you use both.

Facing things that are uncomfortable to think about, and handling your own feelings about them rather than dumping on marginalized people.

Being careful about exploitation and reciprocity, including paying people for their time when you’re asking them to do work for you.

Understanding that marginalized people have good reason to be cautious about trusting you, and refraining from demanding trust on the grounds that you see yourself as on their side.

When people use the language of social justice to make others feel worthless, it’s more like this:

Telling allies explicitly or implicitly, that they are worthless and harming others by existing.

Expecting allies to constantly prove that they’re not terrible people, even when they’ve been involved with the community for years and have a long track record of trustworthiness. 

Berating allies about how terrible allies are, in ways that have no connection to their actual actions or their actual attitudes.

Giving people instructions that are self-contradictory or impossible to act on, then berating them for not following them.

Eg: Saying “Go f**ing google it” about things that are not actually possible to google in a meaningful way

Eg: saying “ shut up and listen to marginalized people” about issues that significant organized groups of marginalized people disagree about. https://www.realsocialskills.org/blog/the-rules-about-responding-to-call-outs-arent

Eg: Simultaneously telling allies that they need to speak up about an issue and that they need to shut up about the same issue. Putting them in a position in which if they speak or write about something, they will be seen as taking up space that belongs to marginalized people, and if they don’t, they will be seen as making marginalized people do all the work.

Giving allies instructions, then berating them for following them:

Eg: Inviting allies to ask questions about good allyship, then telling them off for centering themselves whenever they actually ask relevant questions. 

Eg: Teaching a workshop on oppression or a related issue, and saying “it’s not my job to educate you” to invited workshop participants who ask questions that people uninformed about the issue typically can be expected to ask.

More generally speaking: setting things up so that no matter what an ally does, it will be seen as a morally corrupt act of oppression.

Holding allies accountable means insisting that they do the right thing. Ally hate undermines accountability by saying that it’s inherently impossible for allies to do anything right. If we want to hold people accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible.

Someone who believes that it’s impossible for allies to do anything right isn’t going to be able to hold you accountable. If someone has no allies who they respect, you’re probably not going to be their exception — they will almost certainly end up hating you too. If someone demands that you assume you’re worthless and prove your worth in an ongoing way, working with them is unlikely to end well.  

If you want to hold yourself accountable, you need to develop good judgement about who to listen to and who to collaborate with. Part of that is learning to be receptive to criticism from people who want you to do the right thing, even when the criticism is hard to hear. Another part is learning to be wary of people who see you as a revenge object and want you to hate yourself. You will encounter both attitudes frequently, and it’s important to learn to tell the difference. Self-hatred isn’t accountability.

Tl;dr If we want to hold allies accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible. Hatred of allies makes this much harder.