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You Don’t Need to Announce Your Allyship
Many Black and Brown people can attest to feeling bombarded with declarations of allyship from white friends and co-workers as of late. We get it. You care. Or, in the absence of caring, you want to identify yourself as someone who is not racist. We get that, too. The problem here is that announcing your allyship is 1) performative, and 2) not as helpful as action.
There’s also another layer to this, which is that you might be giving yourself the benefit of doubt that is, in fact, not yours to give. “Here’s the thing about allyship,” Bridgette L. Hylton notes. “I don’t think I or any of the other Black people I know think the vast majority of white people and other non-Black people are very good judges of their own racism or anti-racism.”
