ALLIES, ANGER, AND ACCOMPLICES
I used to be terrible about some trans and gender-nonconforming issues, specifically around bathrooms. It wasn’t in my mind a big deal to have separate bathrooms. Then a friend pointed out that not being able to use the bathroom in public is tantamount to being forced out of normal, everyday life. I had been a good self-identified ally to trans and nonbinary people, never once thinking that they didn’t have the right to exist or wanting them to be isolated or excluded from success in the workplace.
I didn’t have a problem with trans women in the ladies’ room and I thought that was enough. I didn’t have to worry about a bathroom that matched my gender identity being available, so it never occurred to me how difficult or dangerous it might be for someone who isn’t cisgender. But I hadn’t been a good accomplice. Being an ally is just the first step, the simplest one. It is the space wherein the privileged begin to accept the flawed dynamics that make for inequality. Being a good ally isn’t easy, isn’t something you can leap into, though it can feel like you’re suddenly a know-it-all superhero. Privilege not only blinds you to oppression, it blinds you to your own ignorance even when you notice the oppression.
Why is becoming an ally so hard? Many would-be allies have an immediate reaction of defensiveness when someone challenges them on their advice, their intentions, their need to be centered. It’s in that precise moment that they need to stop, step back, and realize they are still part of the problem. It is never the privileged outsider who gets to decide when they’re a good ally. Especially not if they want to use their status as an ally to excuse whatever they have done that has offended someone in the group they claim to be supporting.
A common problem is that when allies are challenged, they often insist that there is no way they could be part of the problem. They default to rattling off an extensive résumé of what they’ve “done for you people.” Instead of listening to the concerns a marginalized person is trying to express, they whip out the “I Marched with Dr. King, I Was an Ally When No One Else Was, I Earned the Right to Say These Things in the Past” laundry list, which often is intended to cover everything without ever engaging with the current problem. It’s difficult to stand outside the mind-set that privilege creates, to let go of “those people” narratives that position the privileged as an authority on the experiences of others.
Identifying yourself as an ally is a convenient way to give yourself a pass for dismissing the words or experiences of people with less privilege and power than you. You can be in their corner, right up until it makes you feel uncomfortable. Then because you think they’re overreacting or that it has “nothing to do with race,” you can tell yourself that you tried to help, that “those people” are really the problem. If you stop being an ally or never manage to become a good ally, you can assuage any possible guilt by coddling yourself with fond memories of that one time you did something. It doesn’t even matter if it was what was needed, as long as it makes you feel better.
Allies tend to crowd out the space for anger with their demands that things be comfortable for them. They want to be educated, want someone to be kind to them whether they have earned that kindness or not. The process of becoming an ally requires a lot of emotional investment, and far too often the heavy lifting of that emotional labor is done by the marginalized, not by the privileged. But part of the journey from being a would-be ally to becoming an ally to actually being an accomplice is anger.
Anger doesn’t have to be erudite to be valid. It doesn’t have to be nice or calm in order to be heard. In fact, I would argue that despite narratives that present the anger of Black women as dangerous, that render being angry in public a reason to tune out the voices of marginalized people, it is that anger and the expressing of it that saves communities. No one has ever freed themselves from oppression by asking nicely. Instead they had to fight, sometimes with words and sometimes with bullets. I come from people who only asked once, then, well, they got down to the business of taking what society refused to give them—respect, peace, rights, you name it—and the movements to achieve it have been derided as rude. Too loud, too angry, too much. But they were effective, and ultimately laid the groundwork for anger to be seen as something we might not always need.
Anger can be cathartic, motivating, and above all else an expression of the innate humanity of any community. Demands that the oppressed be calm and polite and that forgiveness come before all else are fundamentally dehumanizing. If your child is killed by police, if the water in your community is poisoned, if a mockery is made of your grief, how do you feel? Do you want to be calm and quiet? Do you want to forgive in order to make everyone else comfortable? Or do you want to scream, to yell, to demand justice for the wrongs done?
Anger gets the petitions out, it motivates marches, it gets people to the ballot. Anger is sometimes the only fuel left at the end of a long, horrible day, week, month, or generation. It’s a powerful force, and sometimes when oppressors want to demonize the oppressed, the first thing they point to is anger. “Why must you be so mean?” or “I’m trying to help.”
There’s an element of saviorism that creeps into identifying as an ally. On paper being an ally sounds great: you come in and you use your privilege to help a marginalized person or group. But when we talk about an intersectional approach to feminism, we also have to understand that the reason the concept of intersectionality centers on Black women and justice is that Black women are the least likely to have the kind of class privilege that can grant them access to anything like justice. Even now, with camera phones and body cams to document wrongdoing, being able to generate public support can make a huge difference in whether justice is even an option.
After all the hashtags and the arguments online and off, I am perhaps best known for my anger, the way I wield it, and the way it has been framed as too dangerous. My rage is sometimes eloquent and often effective, and it occasionally feels eviscerating in its intensity. I believe in rage, believe in aiming it when I unleash it because I know it can be so powerful. My targets tend to be up, not down or sideways, from where I sit.
It’s true that social media has made it easier to see inflamed emotions. Facebook and Twitter are places where the marginalized can’t be silenced as easily. It’s a place where attracting attention to social ills is easier if solutions aren’t necessarily forthcoming. On social media, the narratives around anger, especially public anger, can be skewed by the collision of different social norms. But to paraphrase James Baldwin, to be aware of what is happening in this world is to be in an almost perpetual state of rage. Everyone should be angry about injustice, not just those experiencing it.
And we can’t afford to shy away from anger. Because the bigots who use anger as a political tool, as a way to motivate, as an incitement to violence, also have access to large platforms. And in some ways, they have the upper hand in terms of organizing oppression precisely because any attempts to confront issues within feminism are met by calls to not be divisive, at the expense of being effective and honest. While white male politicians and pundits are some of the biggest peddlers of rage, the fact is that misogyny and racism creep into interpretations of rage from the marginalized. The power that could be brought to bear by addressing the roots of anger and working to resolve the problems is wasted on demands that individual feelings be a priority above safety.