While I believe what you express above comes from a good place of empathy, care, and respect, if you’re open to suggestions, I would offer the following.
This hat-in-hand attitude often comes across as a tedious neoliberal brand of white guilt and “I acknowledge my privilege” performative social justice that primarily seeks personal absolution from allies rather than a hand in fighting systemic injustice.
Instead, it is a more useful exercise to consider your privileged identities, such as apparent gender or the color of your skin, as a disavowable inheritance like a family name, rendering them mere tools you bring to the cause of liberation, rather than a scarlet WM you must apologize to your comrades for at every turn.
Edit: concretely, I mean that it is no better to “other” yourself than someone else. Instead, acknowledge that our perceptions of race and gender are manufactured (and historically none more-so than whiteness and masculinity, easy proxies for explicit political and socioeconomic power). Whiteness and masculinity telegraph it the way a gun telegraphs strength. So instead of apologizing for how the weapons you were born with have been used by oppressors in the past, reject and subvert what they represent by committing them to the cause of those who are oppressed today.
Exactly this. Your job as an ally is to be angry when the oppressed need to keep the peace. Oftentimes, oppressors will blatantly oppress, then claim to be the victim when then oppressed gets angry and starts talking back. They hide behind decorum, and use it as a shield. Additionally, they’ll use the angry actions as justification for oppression.
When the oppressed needs to maintain decorum, it’s the ally’s job to get angry. The ally doesn’t fit into any of the boxes that the oppressor would otherwise use to villainize the oppressed.
As an example, here is what happened when Representative Keith Self intentionally misgendered Rep Sarah McBride. We see this exact scenario play out in real time. Self misgenders McBride, an openly transgender representative. McBride returns a simple “thank you madam” as a joke, but otherwise doesn’t react to it. Because she recognizes that anything she does will be used to further villainize trans people and justify their oppression. Self will use it to paint McBride as an unreasonable snowflake liberal. Instead, Rep. Bill Keating is the one to call out Self. Keating, a straight white middle-aged man, can’t have his identity weaponized against him. So he’s the one to go to bat in McBride’s place. He demands that Self explain his actions, and refuses to back down until Self does so. When Self realizes his “bait the anger” tactic worked against him by baiting the wrong person, he retreats by immediately ending the meeting.
White man here: I don’t wonder shit. I know why people don’t trust us.
I apologize for what my race and gender have done to the world.
While I believe what you express above comes from a good place of empathy, care, and respect, if you’re open to suggestions, I would offer the following.
This hat-in-hand attitude often comes across as a tedious neoliberal brand of white guilt and “I acknowledge my privilege” performative social justice that primarily seeks personal absolution from allies rather than a hand in fighting systemic injustice.
Instead, it is a more useful exercise to consider your privileged identities, such as apparent gender or the color of your skin, as a disavowable inheritance like a family name, rendering them mere tools you bring to the cause of liberation, rather than a scarlet WM you must apologize to your comrades for at every turn.
Edit: concretely, I mean that it is no better to “other” yourself than someone else. Instead, acknowledge that our perceptions of race and gender are manufactured (and historically none more-so than whiteness and masculinity, easy proxies for explicit political and socioeconomic power). Whiteness and masculinity telegraph it the way a gun telegraphs strength. So instead of apologizing for how the weapons you were born with have been used by oppressors in the past, reject and subvert what they represent by committing them to the cause of those who are oppressed today.
Exactly this. Your job as an ally is to be angry when the oppressed need to keep the peace. Oftentimes, oppressors will blatantly oppress, then claim to be the victim when then oppressed gets angry and starts talking back. They hide behind decorum, and use it as a shield. Additionally, they’ll use the angry actions as justification for oppression.
When the oppressed needs to maintain decorum, it’s the ally’s job to get angry. The ally doesn’t fit into any of the boxes that the oppressor would otherwise use to villainize the oppressed.
As an example, here is what happened when Representative Keith Self intentionally misgendered Rep Sarah McBride. We see this exact scenario play out in real time. Self misgenders McBride, an openly transgender representative. McBride returns a simple “thank you madam” as a joke, but otherwise doesn’t react to it. Because she recognizes that anything she does will be used to further villainize trans people and justify their oppression. Self will use it to paint McBride as an unreasonable snowflake liberal. Instead, Rep. Bill Keating is the one to call out Self. Keating, a straight white middle-aged man, can’t have his identity weaponized against him. So he’s the one to go to bat in McBride’s place. He demands that Self explain his actions, and refuses to back down until Self does so. When Self realizes his “bait the anger” tactic worked against him by baiting the wrong person, he retreats by immediately ending the meeting.