Solidarity is important in all movements for justice, but checking your privilege applies here, too. As someone who wants to stand in solidarity with other communities, it is your job to make sure that in your passion, you do not forget your privilege and inadvertently perpetuate systems of oppression.
Below are some "Do's and "Don'ts" to help guide you. The point of these guidelines is not to make you feel alienated from other communities or to prevent you from participating in movements you care about. Rather, it is to remind you to keep listening and challenging your assumptions so that you can better support communities in need.
Often times it is people with privilege that help push a movement forward and that is invaluable. Certain privileges can help get underrepresented communities access or visibility in spaces they may not have had previously. See your privilege as a means to support communities, instead of feeling bad about it. It’s what you do with your privilege that counts!
Being an ally is a verb, not a noun. It is NOT an identity, like “female”, “black”, etc. and it is not appropriate to designate yourself an “ally”. If someone considers you an ally, that doesn’t mean that everyone in the same community will or should also consider you an ally.
Figure out when it’s appropriate to get involved, and do it.
Many times we have the urge to organize something out of the best intentions, but a lot of the time there are organizations and groups who are already doing the work within their own communities. If you initiate and lead your own action on behalf of their community, you could be taking away attention from their movement.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, find out what organizations are doing and ask them what they need to support them. That might be doing something you are not excited about doing (i.e. folding mailers), but every little bit helps.
It can be exhausting for marginalized folks to constantly have to explain their struggle to outsiders. A great role for allies is in educating yourselves and then helping to educate other potential allies.
There will always be more to learn from other people’s experiences, and many will be happy to share their knowledge with you. But, to truly support a community, you have to be able to do some homework first.
This is what is commonly called “speak up but not over”. It’s great to use your privilege and voice to educate others, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t drown out the community members you are trying to support, or take credit for things.
It’s okay to make mistakes. Even the most educated among us make mistakes. The important thing is how you respond to your mistake – try to really hear what someone is saying if they are explaining your mistake to you, without ego or defensiveness. If you get called out, apologise, learn from that mistake, and commit to changing your behaviour going forward.