After spending my entire adult life within my communities doing grassroots organizing and activist art I decided that the only “allies” that can have access to me will be those who speak up or put blood and tears into the working-class community. I have done work for the LGBTQ community, BLM and other Black-centered movements, the disabled community and more. So, I find it completely unacceptable that the few white friends I had were not true allies. I had one white friend for many years who claimed to stay with her sexist, neglectful, racist husband because her personality and anti-racism would rub off on him. She asserted that leaving men because they’re toxic means that we are failing them, we aren’t loving them, etc. I let her say this although I didn’t believe in an ounce of this sentiment. This is the same mentality that the majority of white women have regarding their sexist, racist, conservative husbands. This is why many Black and Brown scholars have written about this white-woman-effect, that white women are complicit in this Empire’s oppression at every level, oftentimes as the much more dangerous oppressor in comparison to white men. Simply being in proximity to those who benefit from oppression will not change their minds. Pleading with them will not change their minds if they benefit from the oppression, if they cannot even see it. Until the mask comes off, these women are playing nice in order to benefit from this supposed friendship.
I admire very few celebrities and believe they’re used as a royal court, as a way for us to witness the upper class within this Empire and inevitably to be manipulated by this spectacle. I admire the very few people who spoke up for Gaza despite the consequences. I included this screenshot of the drag queen Katya posting about Gaza in 2023 because it’s a tiny light of hope for me. I only want friends around me who can speak up and take risks; I will give my money to public figures who speak up against injustice and not to frivolous celebrities or politicians.
I only had ONE real white ally out of a handful of white friends was very disheartening. It was disheartening not because I needed those friends but because for years they didn’t see me as a whole person. They didn’t understand what I was doing for years, didn’t know that they would one day benefit from the rights I was fighting for, the liberation that I was fighting for. They attribute my drive for liberation as a personality trait rather than my participation in a lineage of resistance. They couldn’t see that I was standing with other working-class people, Queer folks, BIPOC folks, homeless people. It makes me mad that white allies COULD do more, COULD take more risks, but few actually do. Very few are actually getting arrested or doing direct action to benefit Gaza (or any other number of causes they could get involved with). They leave the dirty work to us and later benefit from the working-class, as usual.
The anger that I have is valid. If those with privilege used their privilege to take risks for everyone then we wouldn’t be in this place. People wouldn’t be losing their family members to ICE and incarceration. People wouldn’t be dying from hate crimes and poor healthcare. There is no excuse for apathy or a lack of participation on the path to liberation for the collective working-class. Seeing Gaza up close set everything in place for me. Nothing is unclear to me any longer in this Empire.