One of the tasks of my job is that I am the voice—the voice of Youth Outlook, the voice of the staff when I talk to the board of directors, the voice of administration when I talk to the staff. I’m often the messenger, so I knew and was comfortable with that role. As the voice, how could I also be an ally? Did I have to be? I’m a social worker. Wasn’t I already an ally? To whom? In more recent years, it’s not a question of whether I can or not, the question has become more how could I possibly not be? It’s not an illusion–I have a role that has the voice.
For a long time, I didn’t think of myself as an ally because I’m part of the community that I’m fighting for. But as it turns out, things aren’t always as they seem. We are not always one big unified LGBTQ community, for starters. Within that heading, I only claim one of those letters as my own. I happen to claim the Q, so if I’m claiming the Q, how do I stand in service to the L, the G, the B and the T? Look at that—I might be an ally after all!
And that being an ally, I’ll tell you, is a very good thing right now. When half the country is punching down, someone’s got to run defense.
I have that chance to be in service in a lot of ways. I’m a middle aged, middle class, white woman and because I do a lot of public speaking, I often have the ear of other middle aged, middle class white women, and with having those ears comes the opportunity to let it be known –usually right up front–that I am an ally for several groups of people whose lives are being made more difficult. In role, I get to lead with the fact that I am an ally to LGBTQ youth, to my BIPOC friends and colleagues, to the trans community, to women of reproductive age whose rights have been torn away.
Even though I am out there doing that public speaking, there’s a line that I try to be aware of—that line where my voice really needs not to be the first or primary voice heard, and maybe it doesn’t need to be heard at all. It’s not always my time to be the voice, when the voices of those who are directly affected are available to do that speaking. Then it’s my job to amplify their message, to help circulate it, to offer to throw my voice behind them, behind what that group of people needs and add to the demand that their needs be heard, whether that’s safe schooling or access to care or safe communities. In those situations, the question in my thinking is always How can I help, not Here’s what you need to do.
We talk sometimes at Youth Outlook about the rights of our kids and sometimes we joke about the Youth Bill of Rights, like we see signs for Patient Bill of Rights and Client Bill of Rights. The more I thought about what I wanted to say today, the more I found myself thinking of our work in language about willingness. I have to be willing to commit to targeted groups having their bill of rights. By then I had it all laid out on a poster in my head…I have a big imagination. At any rate…
These are the things I was inspired to add to my Allies’ Bill of Willingness.
We have to be willing to present with and hear enormous pain.
We have to be willing to be wrong.
We have to be willing to be coachable.
We have to be willing to put ourselves out there, sometimes vocally, sometimes physically, always emotionally.
We have to be willing to be the pebble in someone’s shoe. Often.
We have to be willing to use our roles to help, to support, to unite, and to nurture.
We have to be willing to work actively at our own education.
We have to be willing to commit to dismantling the long-standing systems that hurt our friends. Every day.
We have to be willing to move those things about us that have consistently placed us at the forefront of other people’s consideration out of the spotlight to make room. We have to be willing to MAKE ROOM.
We have to be willing to understand deeply and acknowledge when we personally may have benefited from oppressive structures in education, in health care, in our careers, in housing, etc. at the same time that we acknowledge that there is organized, well funded and well armed pressure on us to silence and divide us.
We have to be willing to see that our experience is not everyone’s norm.
We have to be willing to risk and grapple with the question “How much risk am I willing to take?”, as we just saw with the shooting of Lauri Carleton.
We have to be willing to trust. Ourselves and each other.
We have to be willing to feel tired, overwhelmed, and depleted.
We have to be willing to be vilified.
We have to be willing to lead with our light at all times.
Comments offered at the National Association for Women, IL Chapter annual conference, August 2023.
