Lessons in Allyship

Culture

In the words of our dearly departed educator and feminist icon bell hooks, “definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.” It seems allyship is one such area for which a good definition can help us imagine and enact better ways of being together and showing up for each other as we try to remake the world a better place for us all.

The most salient definition of allyship I’ve come across is from Nicole Asong Nfonoyim-Hara, the Director of the Diversity Programs at Mayo Clinic – a nonprofit American academic medical center focused on integrated healthcare, education and research. She says allyship is "when a person of privilege works in solidarity and partnership with a marginalized group of people to help take down the systems that challenge that group's basic rights, equal access, and ability to thrive in our society." I’ve added emphasis (“to help take down the systems”) because it seems, to me, that our conversations about allyship in the workplace are often more palliative than liberatory, but we can’t be good allies to others if we don’t confront the systems that work against others for our benefit.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, I was busy with research for a series of conversations on Busy Being Black funded by welcome Trust, the world-renowned charitable foundation focused on research to improve human and animal health. My concern, and the focus of the series, was the various ways the medical and health institutions we ought be able to trust and rely upon routinely undermine the very health and wellbeing they’re charged with maintaining; and the series explored how we, as interconnected and interdependent communities, can support each other, get the help we need and demand more from the organisations that should be supporting us.

In the midst of recording these conversations, the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing precarity of Black lives were brought into stark relief: this was not our first, nor would it be our last, pandemic; our vulnerability to Covid-19 was structural, and it would be our communities that would bear the brunt of the disruption and death. 18 months on and it’s clear that corporate greed and political negligence combined with structural inequalities have had devastating impact across the world, though what we’ve seen, in the past and present, is the remarkable change that occurs when we act and organise across experiences to advocate for the care we deserve. To say it another way: when effective and muscular allyship is deployed, material change occurs.

Keen to avoid any clunky connection to the (ongoing) AIDS crisis, but to understand what we can learn from HIV activists about care-giving alongside demands for resources and support, the series includes a conversation with Dr Oni Blackstock, who at the time was serving as the assistant commissioner at New York City’s Department of Health. The city had recently reported an historic drop in new HIV cases, which Dr Blackstock credited to the long-standing work in and with communities disproportionately impacted by HIV: community-based organisations helped shape and deliver the interventions the city spearheaded. Under her leadership, the Department made a commitment to naming racism, transphobia and homophobia in their funding bids, so that community-based organisations applying for funding understood the Department was committed to accounting honestly for the determinants of HIV vulnerability: “We needed to explicitly state the systems of oppression, the systems of power and privilege, that are leading to these inequities that we are asking community-based organisations tointervene on and help mitigate.”

Importantly, my guests did not only work in the health and medical industries, and brought with them knowledge and learning from adjacent movements for change. Take Ben Hurst and his work with boys and men, in schools and corporates, around intersectionality, feminism, power and privilege. In one of the activities he leads, he and the men and boys he works with anylise and interrogate what makes masculinity what it has become. But, Ben warns, it can’t just be a conversation about masculinity in isolation: “What we’ve found in our work is that if you give anybody a new version of masculinity, because there is power involved and because we haven’t deconstructed power, it will be corrupted and become a different form of toxic masculinity.”

The examples set by Dr Blackstock and Ben demonstrate that allyship is about deconstructing, interrogating and disrupting the constituent parts that make up the system, so that it can be reconstructed into something more liveable for us all. This might be a tall order for those whose approach to allyship is focused on the micro, or controlled, environment of the workplace versus the overlapping and interconnected systems of power, oppression and domination that impact the lives of those in need of allyship – and for which the workplace often acts as a petri dish. As those of us who can begin to rest and recharge over the festive period, let us take time to interrogate our own relationship to allyship so that we can better show up for others as the surefire uncertainty of 2022 unfolds around us.