“Being More Than an Ally”

Abstract

“Being More Than an Ally” Todd C. Shaw Had the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not been assassinated in April of 1968, the week of January 15, 2019, we would have celebrated his 90th birthday. All the same, we celebrate King's legacy for providing us no comfortable answers to bring about his envisioned “Beloved Community.” On April 16, 1963, Dr. King wrote in his now‐famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” King presents us with a challenge about what it fundamentally means to be an ally in the struggles for human equality—whether it's the rights of LGBTQ citizens, immigrants, women, African American voters, or any other movements of human rights. The thesis of this essay is that to be an ally requires us to be more than ally. As a college professor and higher education administrator, I begin with an illustration that comes from an exercise I do in my classroom. The invisible vampire This spring 2019 semester I decided to ignore the advice of my department chair (me) and teach an additional course—POLI/AFAM 364, African American Politics. It is a course that is one of my main areas of research. In this course, I have 35 very engaged students—most predominantly African American but a handful of students who I believe self‐identify as White, Hispanic, and/or Asian American. The first day of class—this past Tuesday—I decided to do an icebreaker activity that I have devised called the “Invisible Vampire” exercise. The point of this exercise is to have the students process the relationships and tensions between identity and empathy before we engage in a range of difficult conversations and debates. This semester, our conversations will include African American politics topics as wide‐ranging as the “Case for Reparations to African Americans” due to Jim Crow segregation and slavery as presented by the brilliant essayist Ta‐Nehisi Coates to the view that President Barack Obama and his administration demonstrated a “politics of recognition” but did not advance policy specifically targeted at African American women as presented by my fellow political scientist Wendy Smooth. In this icebreaker, I assigned the students to play four roles in groups of four—Role A (Victim), Role B (Ally), Role C (Critic), and Role D (Opponent). I give them the “simple” task of role‐playing the following scenario: the first person or role A—”the victim”—was bitten by an invisible vampire or a vampire that is at least invisible to everyone except the person it attacks. Her task is to convince her fellow players that this has occurred. The ally cannot see the vampire and has never been bitten by one, but inherently believes the victim. The critics cannot see the vampire and know she has not been bitten by one, thus she is skeptical although willing to be convinced. The opponent cannot see the vampire and has never been bitten by one and is certainly not willing to be convinced. The students were quite ingenious in the dramatic license they took in arguing whether the victim was bitten. (I thought I had to give out a few Oscars prior to the official ceremony…) When we processed the exercise, I asked my students the following questions (or they provided amazing observations prior to my questions) including: (1) “How did you, the victim, try to convince your fellow role players you were bitten?” (They talked about the bite marks on their arms although the critics and opponents stated they could come up with dozens of entirely more plausible reasons for such marks.) (2) “How did you, the victim, feel when you were not believed?” (Their answers ranged from militant to slightly despondent.) (3) “Instead of ‘invisible vampires’, what are the concepts I am really talking about?” (The students immediately answered “racism, sexism, classism, homophobia or heterosexism or any other system of oppression.”) (4) “What does it feel like playing the role of and being labeled a ‘victim’, an ‘ally’, a ‘critic’, or a “opponent? What does it...