Allies

Dear Deer,

Every movement has the oppressed and the oppressor, and the allies. Sometimes the oppressed are so oppressed they can barely cry out in their own defense, but they're there to give interviews, make statements, write memoirs, etc. Meanwhile the allies need to have respect for the oppressed, allowing them the space to form their own struggle if possible. Once in college, some of us activists who were all white talked about how to best be an ally to anti-racist activists of color. Do you go and form your own group and work in tandem? Do you join up with groups that already exist and try to transcend race? Do you say, "how can I help?" and just offer your time and labor in as respectful a manner as possible? Do you instead focus on yourself, working on your own internalized issues and serving as an example to your community? How can someone who's part of the oppressing group, even if only in appearance, be an effective ally without watering down the movement or disempowering the people for whom the movement exists?

What's particularly difficult and strange about the fight for animal rights is that the allies are the movement. You can't stand up for yourself. We have to do it for you, or you'll be destroyed. I mean no insult. Your innocence, your lack of understanding and inability to see the greatness of this horror humanity is bringing upon all of you is an incredible mercy. No human race could take so much sorrow and so much cruelty as you all take every day; they would break down, insane, or lash out in horrified revolt, no matter how suicidal.

(This is why I feel so bad for apes, who must understand on some level what is happening. I am so sorry for the apes. I shudder to even think of the dolphins, octopi, pigs and whales; we know you're all smart. What must you think of everything that's happening? The whales in particular -- I hope for your sake you're using all of that brain for wonderful things outside of our understanding and on a different plane, that you can't understand in any coherent way what we're doing to you all. If you can understand what we're doing, I am so sorry for you. I imagine you floating in the huge ocean, alone and unable to stop all the blood from flowing, with all your huge fins and mass, unable to make us stop, and I am so sorry. I wish you could, I wish you could come out of the ocean and terrify us into submission, into stopping everything. But maybe you're safe, floating in happy, uncomprehending peace. I hope.)

But yes: We're your inefficient, self-serving, timid allies, and your only hope. We're weak and we have our own priorities. Like white allies, so many of us are at heart outsiders, with our own agendas, nursing our own egos and wounds, wishing we were better people and trying in some small way to make amends for past transgressions and present embarrassments. We are part of the problem, trying to turn things around to become part of the solution, and sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, stumbling and losing sight of your goals along the way.

How can I make room for your struggle if you can't struggle at all? If I take a week off from fighting for your rights, will you care? (You're not fighting at all.) How can I make sure the fight concerns you and your needs, instead of focussing again and again on the intricacies of my life as an ally and what I do and don't do, say and don't say, my role in your fight? Because it is your fight. I may fight it for you, but you are the one in charge. Each small, weak, struggling and suffering one of you is my commander, your cries a red flag of revolution spurring me on to fight harder, to die on the battlefield if need be!

Or not. Like any ally, will I be there through thick and thin, in fair weather and in storm, or just when it's convenient for me? This is the ally's downfall. So few allies are willing to die for the cause of another's freedom. The oppressed can become so crushed that death in pursuit of freedom is a glad sacrifice; martyrs arise. How few social movements, how few revolutions, have been built on the backs of allies. We can walk alongside you in parades and rallies, but when bullets start raining down, we fall by the wayside. We have other things to do, our families and friends and selves to think of.

And here, every pig and every calf, every chicken and every rat, every elephant and every deer is a martyr we don't even recognize, and maybe not even a martyr, because none of you understand the enormity of your own deaths. None of you goes out shouting (in English, or Swahili, or Korean, or ASL, or Hindi) "I die in pursuit of liberty!" Yours is a martyrdom without consent, without acknowledgment, and without understanding. And we're too cowardly to die alongside you, or to self-immolate, saying, "I die in pursuit of liberty for all creatures, great and small!"

Aren't we? I am sorry.

Love,
A