Allyship and the Question of Doing Something
It's yesterday, and I'm on the phone with a friend in Minneapolis, talking about the murder of George Floyd. They've watched the video. We talk about it. They say it's all over the news, every station. They tell me about the first protest.
"Did you go?" I ask
"No, I didn't know about it," they reply.
It's later yesterday, and I'm on the phone with another friend. They're telling me about their past experience with gender discrimination.
"When someone treats you differently because you're a woman, you raise hell. You make your presence known. And your partner needs to stand up for you when it happens," they tell me.
I've been having daily encounters with gender discrimination since moving up to the north woods of Wisconsin. The question I've been asking my peers and mentors is: how do you acknowledge that it's happening without breaking into an all-out fury? What do you do or say to point it out in a way that's constructive? And what does it take to get your male allies to step in and have your back?
Most of them responded that they usually just ignore it. Most of the time it takes a lot for male allies to have my back.
And this question comes up again: what are you doing about it? What am I doing about it?
Ultimately, it's not about picking on my friends. It's not about picking on anyone. I use my friends as an example of what people are willing to say when they think they are in safety.
It's about asking myself—if this is so horrific, what am I going to do about it?
Do I care enough to stop the words or action in the moment? How horrific do words or does an action need to be before I call it, step in, and actually fucking say something?
For me, the gender discrimination starts with seemingly benign generalizations that lump me in with 3 billion other women on this planet and subversively communicate to me that I am not an individual with my own thoughts, feelings, past, or future. It starts there. It ends in rape. What if we and our male allies stopped the train at the generalizations about women, so that rape was unfathomable?
What if we white folks stopped the train at generalizations about black, brown, and indigenous people, so that police violence and murder against black, brown, and indigenous people was unfathomable?
What if we called it every time a family member, friend, or coworker made a generalization about another individual human being? Even if we "didn't know what to say"?
Do I have to wait until it's someone I personally know? Or will that still not be close enough to home to address the chokehold imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has over this country?
Will it be close enough to home when they come for me?
As it turns out, at least for me, it is about friends and family. About speaking up. About calling my friends and family in when they make “harmless” generalizations about groups of people. Seeing the wolf of discrimination when it still has the sheep’s clothing on.