I’m no longer interested in allyship, but I once was. It was the language we had, and what it was intended to mean and represent is beautiful. I called my work Building Allies, and the model I used was the Active-Ally model. I’ve learned and I’ve grown. Now I’m no longer interested in allyship or building allies.
Instead, I am interested in Transformative Solidarity. I am interested in learning new ways of being. In living a life of becoming, of evolving, growing, and learning. What could it mean if we transformed the very core of our beings to shift the systems in which we exist? I am interested in changing the ways we show up and engage with each other. I am interested in how we live and transform into a different world. I want to learn from the differences between us and relate in our similarities.
Across social movements and history, we experience this ebb and flow of support and allyship from those in the privileged classes. As recently as today, in 2024. Four years ago, when George Floyd was murder by the police, there was an unprecedented amount of white support for Black Lives Matter (BLM). The streets were filled with more white people than after a US sports team wins or loses a game. White people and non-Black people of color attended trainings, bought books, wrote think pieces and impassioned social media posts. And what are we experiencing now? Those same people, that same unprecedented group, are now less supportive of BLM than prior to 2020.
Why?
Because systemic change requires those of us with privilege to relinquish our privilege and choose to move differently. It requires those of us with privilege to understand that when we work to liberate the oppressed, we liberate all of us.
We know the greater the visibility marginalized groups have, the greater the attack on our lives and ways of being.
There are wars and genocides happening around the world. Some with greater visibility than others. Desperate pleas for a ceasefire, for support, pleas to stop the trade of weapons and destruction, with “thoughts and prayers” as a response.
Climate Change is here, and we treat each disaster as though it were the first, and our media still promotes shock at the continuing forest fires and floods. Shock about how hot it is in the summer and how warm it is in the winter – even though, we’ve had years of record-breaking temperatures.
And as often happens, there are more protests and think pieces and social media impassioned posts. And then our news cycle shifts, our government tells us about Aliens existing, and our social media is flooded with celebrity gossip and football players. And many of us, those of us with privilege, fall back into complicity until the next atrocity happens and we begin the cycle again. We must move in a different way, we must be willing to risk something different.
Transformative Solidarity is not just about speaking to the atrocities in this world, it is also about owning the ways in which we are complicit and then turning our privilege into change.
Our systems of privilege/oppression are set up in such a way that keeps us confused and separated and not knowing which way to turn and who or what to hold accountable, or how to hold ourselves accountable.
What this has meant is that we cannot engage with Awareness of the Individual, Interpersonal, or Institutional and the ways in which they are in conversation with each other. We miss a deeper understanding and awareness of the ways we are part of maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices.
I am not interested in allyship with step-lists and dos and don’ts. I do not believe these will create change. I believe they offer information and options. And I believe they are often used to maintain a separation and allow far too much room for complacency and placation.
I am interested in the questions of who are you and who arm I? How do we relate to each other? How do organizations relate to us? How did these rules and ways of being come to be?
We cannot create meaningful actions with a one-dimensional view of awareness. We cannot create systemic change if we do not understand the parts of the system.
In the Transformative Solidarity Model, the three phases: Awareness, Action, and Integration are our map. They help us determine where we are and where to go next. The Five Guiding Principles: Honesty, Grace, Vulnerability, Witness, and Commitment are what help us determine how to get where we want to go and how to do what we want to do. Without the Five Guiding Principles I believe we will continue to stumble in repeated patterns.
This model absolutely requires and asks that we become curious about ourselves and our relationship to our surroundings. That we hold the awareness that our systems are regulated and maintained through our participation in complicity and complacency.
The Transformative Solidarity Model and the Five Guiding Principles facilitate accountability internally and externally.
The invitation is not to just challenge our privilege, but to transform the ways in which we engage, think, and learn.
