"It's like tying your hair to a nail in the wall and trying to pretend that you are free and you can go and sit somewhere else"
In the middle of Black folks talking about racism, about systemic discrimination, about their policy proposals for how exactly white supremacist structures can be dismantled, there’s also been a steady rise in what can only be described as incredibly misguided and very, very loud “allyship”. I’ve tried to address this phenomenon in a way that I hope will resonate: an illustrated children’s story.
There was a small green person¹, with a large purple hat, who sat down one day and discovered that other people may not live the same easy life that they did. This was quite a surprise to them because they had always prided themselves on voting for people who didn’t actively support killing Black and Brown people, and had at least one Black colleague who they smiled at in the hallways. The small green person, who felt a mixture of guilt and annoyance at said guilt, decided they must do something about these strange new feelings.
The green person began where all green people do, by asking the world why no one² was talking about this terrible discrimination that Black and Brown people face. The green person, with absolutely no self-awareness, began to read about concepts that had existed for years and then began to talk about and explain those concepts to everyone else with the confidence that only green people have. The green person, with absolutely no bone of irony in their entire green body, talked about how it was time for green people to be silent and listen to others about their pain, about how it was important to understand others suffering in silence, about how they felt incredible trauma and grief as a person with immense privilege which was why they were choosing to be silent. About what they, as green people who were silent, had learned from that silence.
The green person was paid a lot of money to write about their experiences. They added “racism expert” to their professional bio. They stopped talking about white supremacy two weeks later.
¹ The person was green so that they wouldn’t ever have to examine their whiteness or discuss their contribution to white supremacy in a constructive way.
² The people talking about this already weren’t real people.
The title is from an Arundhati Roy interview from 2007. The entire interview is well worth the read, but that quote in particular has stayed with me since I first heard it.