Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

as i’ve said before, i am not an ally. but i was just talking with a friend and it occurred to me that there are some figurations of ally that don’t ever seem to make sense — and probably aren’t really even uttered.

ally work typically comes from a critical race theory perspective, so it’s most typically used to address the ally work done by whites in terms of the racialization of blacks. (I called it racialization because race is a process, not a product.)

but the terms has been taken up more broadly and moved out of the critical race theory framework and allies can be thought of as non-Latino whites supporting and centering the lives of Latino/as, non-Asian whites supporting and centering the lives of Asians. And so forth.

Now, do we ever think of it as Latino/as being allies to Asians? Or Asians as allies to Latinos?

How does it all work? Hmmm.

Another interesting thing: you rarely see anyone speak of being an ally to working class people. Maybe to the poor, but that seems to take on a certain cast: the homeless, the perpetually jobless, maybe welfare *hack**cough* recipients. maybe best described as the deserving poor. But the idea that anyone should be an ally to, say, the white, rural working class Ohio/PA/W VA/VA voters….. Seems kinda odd. Something different about those people and they just don’t merit ally work.

Are u.s.ers, citizens of any ethnicity, race, etc., allies to immigrants to the u.s. — Mexicans? Indians? Pakistanis? Chinese? Thais? Brazilians? Germans? Saudis? Palestinians? Algerians? Egyptians? Australians? Liberians? Canadians?

If I’m making sense, what I’m looking at are ways in which what “theoretically” makes sense in terms of the way “ally” is typically used but, in practice, doesn’t make sense because no one ever goes there with the ideas behind allly work and what is implicitly meant by the groups to which one is an ally and the groups to which one is not — the identities involved, etc.

I was thinking of situations where we can imagine folks objecting, have observed folks objecting, to the idea that a member of one group appears to have privilege and should, theoretically, be an ally, but because of hir situation as a member of another oppressed group, would never be asked to be an ally.

Or situations where technically, someone committed to “intersectionality” and who has some form of privilege (straight, cis, race, ethnic, citizenship, gender) should engage as an ally to someone who doesn’t have privileged, but where this rarely happens because people are so unused to thinking of some relationships of privilege/oppression as worthy of considering and acting on — whereas others are not worthy, or we just can’t think outside of our history to consider them worthy.

Or, as I also suspect, where some issues — such as class — operate so differently (in terms of how oppression operates) that it doesn’t fit into the identity-political burdens of the ally framework.

Or, perhaps because of the burdens of identitarian epistemology — rooted in, for instance, the Combahee River Collective’s Statement — mean that a comparative oppression framework colonizes our thinking so that it’s impossible to think that a straight working class Latino should be an ally to a white, middle class lesbian.

Other good and juicy examples.

P.S thanks to murphy for pointing out the thread that I should read about gay v civil rights. wow. even the title of that post is offensive.

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the earlier post rejecting the label, ally, is below. a peremptory note. amber points out that i’m wrong, a theory as to the causes of racism and oppression does underly the critical race theory framework. She is entirely right about that. Foo on me!

I’m wondering if anyone who does “ally work” in the vein of critical race theory has ever blogged about it? Or at least point me at the books they’ve read so I can retrieve them and re-read.

Why I’m not an ally

I’ve mentioned before that, while I share many assumptions and fundamentals with folks who do what is called ally work, I have enough criticisms of the approach that I won’t slap the brand, “ally,” on myself. Mostly, my criticisms have to do with the lack of class analysis — well, a particular kind of class analysis. Lots of people can and do criticize social status and social stratification. Few people bother with class analysis and the examination of exploitation. Someday, I’ll get around to writing that post I mentioned, the one explaining the difference between class and stratification.

Another reason is one piny mentioned once: I think it might be a bad idea to simply label yourself ally or to even label the work you’re doing “ally work.” Why does a white person get to say that about themselves? You know? It also sets up this sort of superiority thing that I’ve mentioned before, which is what one anonymous poster seems to be getting at in the responses to changeseeker’s post. What happens when, as Angela points out, people get a little thrill from doing the calling and being called — calling out racism and being called out as racists?

That is, to be really really clear: people get enjoyment out of calling out other people’s racism, sexism, heterorsexism, etc. They feel the pleasure of superiority as to being morally superior to those they deem less enlightened. And, similarly, some folks (especially people who toss around the term PC as an insult) get enjoyment out of being *called* racist, sexist, bigoted, heterosexist, etc. You can see the latter especially among National Review types like Jonah Goldberg, but you can also see it among people who otherwise thing of themselves as lefties, liberals, libertarians, and maybe even allies…. yes indeedy.

But I digress.

And then there is the problem of adequately conveying the structural and institutional character of oppression. We have so much trouble with that — as USers. There’s a certain amount of ideological resistance built in to seeing society as composed of anything other than individuals. The idea that social structures and institutions operate in ways that are not reducible to the actions of individuals is a litte hard for us to grasp. Even sociologists who’ve been studying it for years have a hard time doing it themselves — as Alvin Gouldner once pointed out in The Crisis of Western Marxism when he wrote about methodological dualism.

At any rate, while Changeseeker’s post ($1 and a click of the fuckmepumps to Kevin Andre Elliot ) is wonderful and I certainly agreed with much, I found myself engulfed by immobilizing depression at how much work really needs to be done. Because, from my perch, ally work ain’t gonna go far without an analysis as to the causes of racism.

I thnk that, without such an approach, it’s perfectly possible to have a world that has all the same problems that we have now, but absent Whiteness. That is, the categories of race could go away, but we’d still have the same problems, only it’d be largely acceptable to most of us. We’d think it’s normal. Just the way it is. Etc. That’s where I effectively tend to get off the bus when it comes to ally work, criticial whiteness studies, etc. It’s a pivotal theoretical position I share with Linda Alcoff, which is why she pursued the questions in this essay, which I’ve mentioned before: ‘The Whiteness Question,’ which was included in Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self and also published as ‘What Should White People Do?’ in Hypatia, Summer 98, Vol. 13, No. 3: pp. 6-26.

Anyway, that’s very opaque, I’m sure. I don’t really have time for an extended thesis on the topic. It’d take reams and reams. I write this just by way of asking two questions:

1. Why does racism exist?
2. Why does sexism exist?

I don’t really care what the answers are. I mean — I do — but I’m asking because I wondered how others thought about it, if anyone does at all.

Also, as I’ve pointed out before, sometimes, a set of social practices, institutions, and norms can emerge for one set of reasons, but their persistence no longer need be dependent on those original conditions and causes. Max Weber made this argument with regard to the rise of capitalism — but this is also connected to why he ended up settling in for what I think of as a rather reactionary account of social change.

Bla bla bla. Must get back to work.

One thing: of course, I should think that no one who is an ally or does ally work will see this as an attack. I’m just outlining what I perceive as fundamental theoretical differences, not moral ones or anything. Ultimately, we’re all on the same side. But I suspect that people like ilestre, Foolish Owl, me, and maybe Jenn and Mike are in the same boat on this one!