Do Allies Help?

In this post, I try to think through some of the problems of contemporary progressive discourse and its use of the term "ally". In it, I won't be recommending anything other than the prescriptions for considered action from Mia McKenzie's Black Girl Dangerous. Nor am I saying I can address Suey Park's concerns and interrogations. If I tried doing that, it would miss much of the point. And if, as the latter claims, there simply isn't any more use in the term "ally" or the people who claim it are doing more harm than good, this is also a decision I don't claim to make. I do not believe, however, that voiding the category would solve the problems introduced by contrasts and complications in contemporary discourses, as I will argue.

But I won't be writing to offer prescriptions on some of the most discussed questions of that discourse. Can men be feminists? Is affirmative action too suited to existing structures that prevent recognition of and engagement with other ways of knowledge and life? Just the two writers I mention have a host of discussions on present questions like these, and they link to people with locations appropriate to reasonings about these questions. 

My reason to talk about this involves the most important question on campus about the real world: how should we respond to precarity when it isn't us? This is not to say that a great many students and scholars here and everywhere don't have truths and stories about danger and dispossession that need hearing. It is just to say that in the contemporary world if someone benefits from a university education, there will be a situation of suffering present to him different from ones she knows.

In historical terms we might ask why this question is coming up now. Of course, the big modern revolutions like France, Russia, China, Ghana and South Africa did not have use of this idea. There is something parallel to the ally in the Leninist-Orwellian formula of revolutions: a middle class that overthrows the existing order through a complex encounter with the dispossessed. But that's hardly an inspiring parallel, and what's to distinguish it from reactionary modernization in Japan, Germany, Spain, Korea and Taiwan?

To the situation around me, at a research university in the US in the 21st century, all that seems a little removed anyway. What most of us are talking about are a half-centuries changes in the dominant culture, our discussions tend to conform to lineaments of the hopes and follies of the '60s. And by the '60s, I don't mean Che Guevara and Malcolm X, '60s that remained mostly theoretical in discourse and memory for the majority, but I'm referring generally to that bourgeois revolution that took place in America and France in the two and a half decades after the war.

There was Sartre and Simone, Brown vs Board of Ed, the Civil Rights Act, Godard, Medicaid, Algeria and Vietnam and Paris in the spring of '68. After Nixon's election, by and large, progressive things stopped happening. There are plenty of reasons for this: the normalizing of a long-present break between the left in the West and the USSR and China coming to distrust of all power-motivated responses to inequality accompanied by a retrenching and rejuvenation of market-financial networks worldwide. These are familiar etiologies.

What I want to highlight here is the difficulty of even conceiving of a politics involved in seeing and hearing people in a new species of jeopardy. That became described as precarity, most memorably theorized by Pierre Bourdieu. It is the grime and danger for people vulnerable to the 20th-century liberal values of mobility and the in-between.

A new kind of theory developed out of and the beyond the left to try to recognize whom and what modernization obscures. Foucault's prison project to publicize inmates simply speaking without interruption or editing was a performative action of what theory has tried to become. It is the world in which this kind of theory is situated that came up with a term like "ally" because the term has at its core difference and a kind of distance from those affected. It involves letting strangers be strangers, as a friend has memorably put it. 

In this, just listening with thought and with openness to transformation would be allegiance in a meaningful sense of the word. This wouldn't co-opt or obscure women, the dispossessed, people of color, those who feel or are labelled sexual different, those whose practices are not protected as religion in the familiar and dominant sense. But, it might not distinguishable from doing nothing at all. I think there are historical realities shaping the problems of the ally-discourse, even if we say we can abandon it altogether, which I'm not. I want to offer next, in no ordered and hard-prescriptive way, other possibilities that history might afford.