Being an Ally

Growing up in a Scottish town in the eighties and nineties in a majority white population my understanding of racism was limited to what we saw on the TV, the books I read and what I learned in school. We learned about the second world war in History, the South African apartheid in Modern Studies and touched on slavery in America. I studied Toni Morrison in sixth year English for my dissertation. All of this I think gave me a sense that battles had been fought and won at great human cost, but we had won! It was easy to identify and understand the stereotypical racism that was personified in men with skin heads that lived down south on trite BBC documentaries about the far right. Even though I had grown up in a town that did not tolerate any kind of difference it wasn’t until years after leaving home that my perception completely changed about race and racism.

In my mid-twenties I went back to college, I had been living in Edinburgh for a few years and my group of friends was more diverse, a reflection of how the beautiful city I now call home is made up. The internet had also developed beyond the screeching dial up of the late nineties and early millennium which meant that information was now available at lightning speed. I began to read beyond the prescribed narrative of history at school and suddenly had the benefit of context to place the UK’s role in what had unfolded in world history. It felt like when the Wizard of Oz was finally revealed to Dorothy. Everything I thought I had known was either a lie or only a fraction of the full picture.

The internet began to popularise phrases like white privilege and being an ally. Through talking to friends, I could now see that any of our shared life experiences, for example single motherhood, were made easier for me because of the colour my skin. Even my name was more palatable. I witnessed how my friends were treated differently. I felt extreme guilt and anger, I felt defensive. I was angry that I hadn’t known any of this before, that I hadn’t been educated properly about how we had got to this point in society. I felt like I had been sold a lie and was ashamed about how naive my views had been. I definitely felt like I wanted to distance myself from ‘whiteness’. that wasn’t me. The only other time I had heard the word ally was in the context of historical war, to me it was aligning with other people for shared strength in battle. I thought being an ally was all about the external fight and it took me a long time to realise the real work had to begin with me.

In 2013 I was lucky enough to go to a workshop ran by the Southall Black Sisters, they addressed the feelings of anger and guilt, defensiveness that comes up when we talk about race and white privilege. They said allow it, move past it, grow from it. I know for me the temptation with friends when experiences of racism came up, I wanted to make it better by trying to relate. I should have just listened. I think now that I could have come across as dismissive. There are lots of things I will never understand first-hand. When someone is telling you the harm that has been done to them because of racism it is not a personal attack. I honestly believe that can be the most powerful way to be an ally, listen to your friends, just be there. It’s human to have a reaction, to feel guilt or shame and it’s ok to get it wrong too.

I also think that although the internet is an amazing tool to connect with people from all over the world and to access information that for a long time would have been stuck in books, allyship is also offline. It’s more than posting a black square for BLM or posting a pile of books you intend on reading written by WOC authors. It’s speaking up at work or with family. It’s accepting that we have unconscious bias and trying to unpick that. It is also clearly seeing the privilege’s we are afforded as white people mean that we owe to our friends and family and to wider society to not wait to be told, to not expect an explanation for the benefit of our understanding. We need to take the lead on learning about the complexities of race in 2021. Not everyone is political or going to be an activist, but we can all be allies and that can start with the quiet power of being an empathetic listener.