With two world wars, a global decolonization struggle, and rapid globalization, the 20th century saw waves of protest movements characterized by a display of camaraderie.
In 1961, the Freedom Riders were formed in the United States. This group consisted of black and white American men protesting segregated transit systems by travelling across the country together and fighting racism side by side. Simultaneously, on the other end of the globe, the Mahar writers and poets of India established the Dalit Panthers in 1972. This radical organization, inspired by the Black Panthers, protested the institutionalized caste discrimination faced by Dalits or “untouchables”: the lowest ranked group in the Indian caste system. The Dalit Panthers wrote speeches and produced art, such as pocket-sized political zines, denouncing inequality while also organizing self-defense initiatives. Overall, the thread that weaved these acts of resistance together was not a focus on individual identity, but instead, an affirmation of solidarity despite differences, and the active fight for justice.
Today, we have resorted to land acknowledgements and digital guides navigating the guilt associated with injustice rather than the issue of injustice itself.
Contemporary social justice movements in North America have made considerable achievements in integrating critical theory into mainstream political consciousness. The works of notable thinkers such as bell hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw have shaped our understanding of subjugation, emphasizing that the intersection of our various identities – whether that be class and race or religion and gender – influences the way we experience the world around us.
Nonetheless, the forms of resistance that have arisen from these theories lack key elements needed to unify different parties into a joint struggle: a true sense of solidarity and partnership.
Instead, the notion of allyship has dominated activist spaces and literature. Defined by Oxford English Dictionary as the “ the state or condition of being a person who supports the rights of a minority or marginalized group without being a member of it,” this concept provides clear guidelines on how those sympathetic to social justice movements should represent, speak to, and show up for people within marginalized communities. When examining the term “ally” from a political context, however, allyship often implies impermanence. Allies are made in times of war and often under strict conditions. Allies aim to further the interests of both groups involved in the partnership for the time being and can quickly be disentangled. Allies are not your fellow friends and partners, nor are they your brothers or sisters.
When we apply these ideas of conditionality to social activism, we pigeonhole ourselves into a strict set of rules concerning how we engage with others. Not only does this approach frame people as a single monolith, reducing the identities of those within minority groups to their oppression, but it also ensures we centre ourselves and our own feelings of guilt over the actual complex issues facing marginalized communities.
A tenet of allyship has been the overemphasis on the experience of privilege rather than totalizing social hierarchies. However, when our activism solely examines our own complicity in systems of power, we maintain dominant cultural narratives, guaranteeing that the stories with the most visibility in mainstream media are our own and not those of the communities we claim to uplift. Taking this idle position in the creation of art and scholarship ensures that people of colour, queer folk, people with disabilities, and all groups that are already pushed to the margins of social structures are additionally pushed to those of creative endeavours. Rather than taking charge of our activism through direct action and close collaboration with these communities, we isolate ourselves to our own experiences.
In short, when we uplift voices by creating a comfortable distance between ourselves and the communities we wish to support, we prevent true bonds of solidarity and camaraderie from taking shape.
Still, the fear of fully absorbing ourselves in the lived experiences of others does come with valid concerns. Overgeneralizations and the misrepresentation of groups can perpetuate false narratives, further obscuring the lived realities of marginalized people. Scholars attempting to capture the Middle East and Asia have sensationalized these regions and its people. Queer love in film and television is often hypersexualized. However, similarly to the notion of allyship, these depictions often centre privileged voices and gazes within discussions on marginalization. They do not aim to understand communities facing marginalization, and as a result, they fail to meaningfully collaborate with members of these groups to challenge oppressive systems.
We must stop pretending that there is not more nuance to the simple binaries of privileged and oppressed, powerful and powerless. While social structures predetermine the manner in which we perceive others and the way we are perceived, the only way to break free from this condition is to actually engross ourselves in the struggles and stories of others. An allyship that reinforces the divisions between communities does not achieve this.
We need to create a new conceptualization of active solidarity that does not create false representations of marginalized groups, does not centre our own guilt, and tangibly engages with systems of oppression. We must question the passive, unmoving, and unchanging idea of an ally and submerge ourselves in the struggles of others.