Reader,

Can I call myself an ally? An accomplice? A co-conspirator?

This question seems to come up again and again in liberatory spaces, and I have a somewhat uncomfortable answer: we don’t get to decide.

Not because allyship is some exclusive club with a secret membership card, but because allyship is not really an identity we get to claim. It is a relationship, and whether we are actually being supportive is something that the people and communities we are trying to support get to experience, assess, decide, and name.

And that means we might be seen as an ally today and not tomorrow. We might show up in ways that are genuinely supportive and then cause harm in another moment. We might be trusted in one relationship and not another. I actually think that is okay, because if we’re serious about liberation, we have to be willing to let go of the comfort of having a permanent gold star next to our name.

What matters to me is what happens next.

Real support is not just making our practices more welcoming or learning the right language or knowing which words we’re no longer supposed to say. Those things matter, but allyship becomes much more meaningful when we are willing to look at the systems producing the marginalization in the first place, including the ways we may benefit from those systems.

Sometimes that means centering the people most affected instead of centering our own discomfort. It means believing people when they tell us what they are experiencing, making room when they need space, witnessing without immediately trying to fix, and using whatever power or access we have to help shift conditions rather than simply helping people survive them.

It also means being willing to experience rupture without immediately making our own feelings the center of the conversation. We will get things wrong. We will misunderstand, miss something, say the wrong thing, or discover that something we thought was helpful wasn’t. Liberation doesn’t require us to become incapable of causing harm; it asks us to become more capable of accountability, repair, and doing better.

And sometimes support looks like stepping back. Sometimes it looks like resting, tending to our own capacity, and coming back with enough energy to keep doing the work. Rest does not absolve us of responsibility, but neither does exhaustion make us more committed to liberation.

Because this is not a performance review.

There is no point at which we can say, Okay, I’ve done enough. I am officially an ally now.

The cycle keeps going. We listen, we learn, we act, we get feedback, we repair when possible, we adjust, and then we do it again. Sometimes we are welcomed. Sometimes we are challenged. Sometimes we are asked to do something different than what we thought we were doing.

And maybe that uncertainty is part of the point.

Hit reply and tell me what comes up for you. I am reading every response, and I know it’s taking me a little while to write back. I genuinely appreciate the reflections you trust me with.

With liberatory care,

Silvana

​​Liberatory Letters | The Practice of Liberation | Decolonize Your Practice​

PS.

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