Dear “Allies”
Dear “Allies”,
This letter is made specifically for you. Yes, you. The individual who posts about mental health and suicide awareness but believes autism is an illness caused by too many vaccines. The straights who are the first to shake their asses at Pride parades, attempt poorly executed dips, and the white gays who grossly misuse AAVE born from the voices of the very black and brown LGBTQ+ folk they scoff at and diss in their circles. To the white girl who only has “BLM” in her bio on every platform (including Tinder but let me not start on yall in this essay) for the sake of attracting black men for sexual fetishes, or a “I caught a n*gger” arm trophy, and/or to keep her black friends as a good deed token as if having more than six black friends makes a white person invited to the cookout (ain’t no more cookouts, fish frys, or family reunions since black people inviting anyone that doesn’t call us a porch monkey and can step to a four count beat). To the people who thought a black or yellow square on Instagram and a one time $100 donation to a bail fund or charity fund would show your traumatized friends of color that you cared for them when it counted at least once every BIPOC killed. To the white people who posted all those George Floyd tributes and made Breonna Taylor statuses for a couple of weeks and went back to posting about Pumpkin Spice lattes and ugly Christmas sweaters while the rest of us are left with the pieces of anxiety that our skin color and heritage won’t allow us to holiday vacation from.
I have five words for you. YOU ARE NOT AN ALLY!
Before you get heated and start talking shit about me while reading this essay let me explain to you what an ally is. An ally is not a seasonal job that you only do when it’s hunting season for marginalized groups of people. IT’S ROUND THE CLOCK, 24 HRS, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK TILL THE DAY IT’S CARVED ON YOUR TOMBSTONE!
If Black Lives Matter to you, every black life should matter to you every single day and you make it known by applying your privilege in situations that better marginalized communities! Not when everyone is making it a social media trend and stupid Instagram challenges to decrease your racism/coon meter. Educate your friends who are not aware of what’s going on; however, being educated with this knowledge and power does not mean you can overstep your boundaries as a voice for marginalized people. Using your privilege to better the world does not mean micromanaging the movement and speaking for the people who are experiencing it firsthand. It means using your privilege to amplify the voices of said marginalized groups so that we can be heard front and center. Not for the notoriety or popularity of yourself but for the uplifting of another community other than your own. That’s what an ally is supposed to do.
For my white LGBTQ+ folk,
YOU CAN STILL UPHOLD WHITE SUPREMACY, EVEN AS A PERSON WHO IS PART OF A MARGINALIZED COMMUNITY!
I don’t know how many times I can count on my fingers the amount of times where white LGBTQ+ people would complain about being shat on for being anything but straight but would quickly shade the very community that threw a brick for the very rights they take for granted, especially with the audacity of their forefathers to be racist during PRIDE Month. Like sis, how dare you partake in black and brown LGBTQ+ culture, snatch it, then white wash it to be swallowable for your own consumption?! If you need a reminder on what the culture gave you, let me give you this list to go off of:
Ballroom Culture
Fashion
Music
Drag Queens
Drag Kings
Kikis
Shade
Tea
The entire catalog of queer lingo
Lil Nas X
Needless to say, no one here has no excuse not to pay homage, at the bare minimum, respect and protect LGBTQ+ people of color.
To my straight folks who indulge in said culture but feel like our “lifestyle choices' '' are not their flavor of Kool-Aid; especial-fucking-ly, to straight people who, “don’t support what we do but will respect our choices” or “mind their business”, this shit applies to ya’ll heavily. A complete and utter bullshit rhetoric to excuse yourselves from doing the work of changing problematic behavior and thinking. You cannot rebuke support of someone being LGBTQ+ and put respect in the same sentence of said declaration. Rebuking support is the most disrespectful thing to ask someone of our backgrounds to respect. I’ll be damned if I disrespect myself by staying in the circumference of someone for the sake of tolerance despite me having to swallow 500 mg of heteronormative culture, much of which a majority of LGBTQ+ people have had to endure since birth. Either you are a supporter of LGBTQ+ people, not just your loved ones or the queer person who doesn’t hit on you, or you are against us and everything we stand for. There is no in-between or kind ofs. Being an ally and supporter to our community means to appreciate it to the fullest extent, again, using your privilege and amplifying the voices of said community; furthermore, doing your proper research with valid and credible sources to better expand your knowledge of said information.
Now y'all know I can’t leave out my disability community since we get overlooked and underappreciated, especially if we fall under being non-white and non-cis/het. We are every able-person’s butt of the joke when it comes to equating a real disability with something miniscule. We get called lazy, a Debbie Downer, or a basket case for trying to get a handle on our brains while simultaneously trying to hold five minutes of social interaction a day so we don’t get baker acted for not following able-minded, social constructs. Autistic people being used as poster propaganda victims for anti-vaxxers who think having an autistic child is the worst thing that happened to them and their child when it’s nothing more than an ableist agenda victimizing people who processed information more diversely than we do. We become miracle examples for Christians and missionaries of different religions who see people with physical disabilities as cursed people who will walk or move one day by the grace of their sky father. God forbid you’re a black, brown, Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern kid who showed early signs of ADHD or any mental illness for that matter, and your parents thought beating you or putting you on anything but therapy and medication would prevent you from becoming labeled down the road just to leave you as a struggling adult wondering why you get distracted every five minutes and having difficulty spending two hours doing five minute chores. Finally, my favorite thing to hear from people nowadays to equate people’s goofiness or moral stupidity, using the medical slur for people with disabilities, the word, r*tarded (bro, it’s 2021, why is this word still in your vocabulary?!).
I NEED Y’ALL TO TAKE THAT WORD, YOUR ABLEIST JOKES AND IDEOLOGIES AND SHOOT 3-POINTERS TO THE NEAREST MENTAL TRASH CAN!
People with physical, mental, and social/emotional disabilities are in need of allies just as much as any other group, especially those who fall in marginalized racial, ethnic, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation. Being an ally to us isn’t just posting a suicide awareness post on social media and checking on your friends to make sure they don’t fall in a depression/suicidal rabbit hole. It’s, again, using your privilege to uphold said community such as advocating to your local governments to create physical accommodations ramps, Braille texts and walkways, and other ADA resources for accessibility purposes. DO YOUR RESEARCH! Not every disability looks the same nor is every disability visible! Ask if you must gain a better understanding vs. using your own judgment to sum up someone’s disability/mental illness. And for fuck’s sake, stop using the R word. It’s a slur regardless of it being used as a medical term. Medical professionals used to call black people Negro and Negresses but not nann white person is itching to use those terms publicly. Even if you remove it from your vocabulary at least one day at a time and correct yourself every time it slips, it helps. Just the effort of trying to accommodate people with disabilities can change everything for the better.
Being an ally is simply not being mean to marginalized people, it is a continuous work of educating yourself and amplifying the voices of others who get pushed to the back of the line. Silence is a deadly weapon. The voice is a weapon of mass destruction. Both are instruments that require mastery and skill. Choose your weapons wisely.
