buff your inner glow

There are three things all allies need to aspire to:

1) Learning. This is base learning; getting the lingo, getting the philosophy behind what lingo is good and what is charged, the various terms that people in the group in question use, and whether that same lingo might be cool in one group and not cool in the other group. Get used to asking people how they would like to be referred to. Get used to using turns of phrase and removing turns of phrase that you might not have before. Actually look up the research before you talk, and make sure it is from an actual credible source, as well as an experiment that was carried out in a way that doesn’t severely skew the results.

Learning is the BEGINNING of your journey. Your job as a GREAT ally does not end after you know the basics, and that’s all this is. The basics.

2) Internalizing. This is where the “liberal” allies get stuck. They know the basics, but they haven’t internalized them. ACT as if it is not all about you. EXPECT to be brought down a peg if you mess up, ACT like you KNOW how to apologize. ACT like you understand that the pain of oppression is greater than yours. Prepare to change your usual actions on a dime so that your ACTIONS speak for you. ACT like you understand that when you do something oppressive, you are NOT the first person, and you WILL NOT be the last, either. ACT like you know that you have no right to speak to the marginalized group about their marginalization.

Now that you’ve done this, you’ve made sure to stop YOURSELF from being oppressive. But this is not enough. Using a metaphor I’ve seen applied to this situation, even if you removed 100 snowflakes from the avalanche, it will still kill many people.

3) Action. Not just through controlling your own actions, but by taking action against others when you see oppression. This is the crux of being a great ally, the willingness to, for a moment, actually take on what the marginalized groups take on every day, all day, and attack it. Is there a risk to you? Yes. Is that risk nowhere near the risk the marginalized person would take for saying the same thing? YES. So you have no excuse. NO excuse. NOTHING is an excuse. Especially because this is the part MOST people want to give excuses about.