Everything is Happening All at Once
I feel like this blog's audience right now mainly consists of myself when I go through my site to see where I can make small adjustments. However I still feel the need to kinda do a stream of consciousness about the state of our country in regards to the BLM movement and navigating allyship; what's okay, what's absolutely not okay, when to shut up, when to scream, etc.
I think when this conversation immediately started I feel like allyship mainly consisted of everyone competing to be the first ones to speak out on social media. I saw a lot of "your silence is deafening" hashtags. At this point the whole situation was pretty fresh and so a lot of the takes I was seeing from my white friends attached to "your silence is deafening" were kind of surface level. At this point we had seen time and time again unarmed, compliant black people killed by police and I felt that many people were just acknowledging that this was still an issue and letting everyone know they weren't okay with it. And to be blunt: yeah.....we know.
So I found myself not wanting to stay silent but I honestly didn't feel that I had anything new to contribute to this conversation that hadn't already been said time and time again. Which was a sign for me that I had maybe exhausted everything I knew about the topic which meant I hadn't really taken the time to dig deep enough.
Then the protests began and allyship kind of took a new form. More active involvement in the situation through donations to organizations and actually showing up to protests. But I got a weird vibe from a majority of the allies doing these things. I always felt that if you were going to do these things, you wouldn't feel the need to post photos on your story to prove you did them right? Like if the intention is the support the movement and keep the focus on black lives, why are we trying to prove we're good allies? But I wasn't able to attend any protests. 1) I was genuinely too anxious and didn't have people to go with. 2) I got food poisoning during the height of the protests. But I saw these white allies posting photos of their signs all over social media with captions like "I was there, where were you?" and while I didn't want to beat myself up too hard for not protesting I couldn't help but let that weird comparison get to me. Was I being a good ally? Was I being lazy? These questions sent me into a spiral of white guilt which then made me fall into that trap of making the focus on making myself feel good by being a good ally instead of the focus being on the actual cause.
I think the main comment here is that the people yelling the loudest on social media about this "woke olympics" that ended up happening were white people. Black people that I saw at least posting on the topic directed at white people trying to be allies tended to focus more on getting people to educate themselves on the topic instead of competing for best ally.
So I guess the point of this post is to openly admit that I have at many points throughout my life, and even in the past few week been a bad ally. But the point is to acknowledge what specifically I have done or have not done that has made me a bad ally and figure out how best to make those adjustments. Don't cry about it on social media, don't let everyone know you're trying to be better, don't prove to everyone that you're trying to be better. Just look inward and to put it bluntly: just be better.
-RJM
