Diversity Cafe 2020-2021

"How do we reach through the deadly, isolating culture of white supremacy and act in ways that confront violence and rebuild our communities The simple answer is: By working in solidarity for racial justice. What are the hallmarks of true solidarity work? What distinguishes solidarity from its ubiquitous and much discussed ‘cousin’, allyship?" Here are 9 important distinctions.

"This provocation is intended to intervene in some of the current tensions around solidarity/support work ... Where struggle is commodity, allyship is currency. Ally has also become an identity, disembodied from any real mutual understanding of support. The term ally has been rendered ineffective and meaningless." This zine encourages us to shift to becoming accomplices in the anti-racist, anti-colonial struggle and seek to disrupt and dismantle the "ally-industrial complex."

"The great black freedom struggles of the past have been joined by many white people — not just out of a sense of moral obligation or sympathy for the oppressed, but out of a sense of shared interest and a desire for collective liberation. That spirit of solidarity should be central to anti-racist struggle today."

"It is never an ally’s place to speak for an oppressed group, but rather to amplify the voices of the oppressed... [Their] role as an ally is to use [their] privilege to raise our voices, as well as to call out others with privilege who oppress us."

"Political solidarity is often key to addressing societal injustice. Yet social and political psychology are without a common definition or comprehensive measure of this construct, complicating advancements in this burgeoning field. To address these gaps, we advance a novel understanding and measure of this construct. We conceptualized political solidarity as a construct consisting of three factors—allyship with a minority outgroup, a connection to their cause, and a commitment to working with them to achieve social change—that can emerge within and across social groups."

"Social movements are pedagogical spaces for collective learning across difference. Divergent worldviews, interest and identity, historical legacies and relations of power complicate notions of allyship and solidarity for common cause. In this article, we draw on social movement and transformative learning to reflect on our experiences of learning and unlearning as white settler-colonialists researching allyship in the Standing Rock struggle against an oil pipeline in the United States... We position our work within social movement and transformative learning scholarship, critique notions of allyship and then solidarity. We argue for the unlearning of colonial practices and mindsets which centre our particular white colonial knowledge, leadership, privilege, power and bodies and learning towards decolonising solidarity... We conclude the article with a discussion of how best we believe learning towards decolonising solidarity might proceed in social movements."

Academic article in Journal of Family Violence, 2019
This synthesis of the primary elements of allyship (as defined by 40 selected activist and academic sources) provides conceptual and practical insights that can be applied to men's gender equity promotion.
"...questions about the usefulness and limitations of the term ‘allyship’ have surfaced. Moreover, studies demonstrate that social justice activists with privilege often perpetuate inequalities, perhaps despite their best intentions. To explicate the current understanding of allyship and to apply it to male activism, this paper synthesized the primary elements of allyship as defined by 40 activist and academic sources. Eight unique and discrete themes surfaced... The implications of this synthesis for allyship discourse and scholarship are offered. This synthesis provides conceptual and practical insights that can be applied to men’s gender equity promotion and gender-based violence prevention work." Broader implications to other kinds of allyship can be drawn from this work.