In many institutions, it’s seems like allyship isn’t optional anymore. When it comes to race relations, 2SLGBTQ1A+ people, indigenous issues, etc. allyship isn’t being forced, but it certainly does feel expected. Organizations want to foster a “culture of allyship.” They say allyship is the “responsibility of privelege,” and “we can all be allies.” Why does allyship sound mandatory?
Bureaucratic allyship serves the purpose of maintaining or strengthening the power structure.
The kind of allyship made practically compulsory by institutions is mainly performative allyship. And it’s not by accident. Real allyship is too disruptive. It challenges illegitimate authority and demands radical change. But performative allyship, where ally is an identity instead of a verb, is useful for maintaining the status quo – for containment. The institution defines which groups are marginalized and require allyship. They then specify what allyship looks like, doesn’t look like, and the range of benefits of said allyship.
Some groups don’t meet the convenient definition of marginalized. For example, consider class and socioeconomic marginalization. See if, in the name of allyship, leaders in an organization are interested in a flat pay scale, or divesting themselves of authority to make decisions. Start a committee to make this your goal and discover if they’re interested in hearing about your definition of allyship.
Similarly, you won’t find allyship being promoted when it comes to political and ideological minorities. That’s because bureaucratic allyship isn’t designed to protect all minorities, it’s designed to reproduce a particular moral and political order. Same goes for religious minorities, where the focus is instead on addressing “hate” and “phobias,” ie: antisemitism and islamophobia. True allyship with religious minorities would require institutions to share moral authority, thus diminishing the institution’s own sort of civil religion.
Stability is ensured by defining the range of actions that can be taken in the name of allyship.
None of these actions may involve challenging the power structure. Disruption is pathologized. Ultimately, authentic allyship (something we may have once called “solidarity”) is hollowed out and transformed into something demonstrated through compliance.
For example, you can form or join a management-approved mental health and wellness committee (also headed by a manager). Ideas brought about in these meetings can then be presented to management in an orderly way. However, if you send out a mass email to the entire organization making a claim about mistreatment, that’s considered unprofessional. ‘You didn’t go through the approved channels,’ you’ll be told. Alignment with the institutional moral regime takes precedence.
You can’t be everyone’s ally.
The contention that you can be everyone’s ally is a clue as to the quality of allyship being promoted by institutions.
Quick story. I have a close friend who is a true ally of people with disabilities. She’s been involved in a court case for years as a self-representing litigant. She takes on judges, lawyers, politicians, union reps. And she’s struggled with other aspects of her life – including a successful entrepreneurial venture – to make it happen.
She is, understandably, not much of an ally to other marginalized groups.
That’s an extreme case, but it’s also a good example of what doing the work to be an ally actually means. It doesn’t mean a bumper sticker, or a Facebook repost on National People with Disabilities Day. It’s not just “listening,” or “compassion.” Those things are the minimum that can be expected of any person. Without a genuine, voluntary, and courageous act of goodness based on conviction, allyship is just a formality.
But one might ask, isn’t ritualized allyship is better than no allyship?
Definitively, no. The kind of large-scale performative allyship being engineered by governments and corporations isn’t just a problem because it’s fake. It’s also harmful.
It allows these entities to appear progressive while they avoid or delay making substantial structural change. Their approved form of allyship sanitizes radical thinking and neutralizes disruptiveness. Now we have a bunch of people panicking about whether they’re doing allyship correctly instead of asking themselves who’s suffering and how they can help, outsourcing their moral imagination to institutions that literally fight people in court to maintain their discriminatory practices.
Bureaucracies co-opt allyship to secure their moral authority.
Allyship sounds mandatory because it has, in effect, become an administratively codified expectation; part of an organization’s moral infrastructure. Like service or professionalism, it has been sucked into the lexicon of signifiers for adherence to organizational values. And it is what they say it is – until we say otherwise, in solidarity.