And If You Don't Know, Now You Know

If you're reading this, and you've read the first post about Allyship , you may be wondering where to start and what, exactly, you are supposed to do. How do you take the leap from passive progressive to active ally? My own journey began with a week-long conference: NCORE , The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education. If you work in higher education in any capacity, fill out the forms and get your college to pay for your attendance at the next conference. Their tagline is "Start the Conversation." For me, it wasn't so much like starting a conversation as it was being thrust into the middle of a generations-long conversation, one which I had thought myself well versed in yet suddenly found I knew almost nothing. I sat in many uncomfortable conversations in rooms where I was often the minority; where people of color in the audience were freely expressing their outrage, despair, and fear; and where the presenters were opening a top...

Ok, so the English teacher in me demands that I concede that "allyship" is, technically, a noun, not a verb. The important point is that allyship is not an identity. For most of my life I assumed that I was actively helping oppressed people simply because I thought that oppression was wrong. I identified as a liberal, a bleeding heart,a good white person. The problem with this is that I placated myself with this identity and thought it was enough. I never actually DID anything to help end oppression and injustice. Enter, allyship. According to The Anti-Oppression Network allyship is "an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group of people." Allyship is NOT an identity; it is the collection of actions that we take every day to demolish systems of white supremacy; it is self-evaluation, it is re-learning history, it is speaking up when you are to...