A Critique of Ally Politics

M.

This piece emerged from reflections on recent struggles in Durham, North Carolina, and was originally published as a zine in 2013 under the title Ain’t No PC Gonna Fix It, Baby. Its author, M., can be reached at sweet_things*at*riseup.net.

Dear Beloved Ones in Struggle,

This essay is a love letter to you because I believe in our tremendous power together. I have felt the powers over us, the authorities who would be, tremble, when we can find each other in real and lasting ways. I want to talk survival/liberation with you because those two ideas are inextricably intertwined, as is my future to yours.

We have a lot of work to do checking our egos, while bringing up our fighting spirit and balancing it with wisdom. Immersed in endless disappointing and hurtful experiences with friends, comrades, and activists, my need is unrelenting for us to practically rethink how we engage with the question of otherness and the organization of our lives. How do we integrate a genuine approach to anti-oppression? It’s painfully clear that spitefully throwing out all frameworks of understanding oppression as a response to critiquing ally politics only works to destroy us. This writing takes apart the concept of “ally” in political work with a focus on race, though clearly there are parallels through and across other experiences of identity.

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“Police officers responded to a dangerous situation and had to make a split second decision about the best course of action. Reading the report, it strikes me that mental illness and drug addiction killed Aura Rosser.”

To whom is this quote attributable?

1. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette

2. Mlive.com troll

3. Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice CEO Chuck Warpehoski

4. Colonel Kriste Kibbey Etue, Director of the Michigan State Police

Black Woman Shot Dead by Police: Where Is the National Outcry?

Terrell Jermaine Starr

The day before Aura Rosser was shot and killed by Officer David Ried of the Ann Arbor Police Department in November, she was on the phone making plans for the holidays with her sister, Shae Ward. They were considering cruise destinations far from the frigid Michigan weather that was bound to arrive in December: Florida Keys, the Bahamas, anywhere south. They communicated throughout the day on social media, but that phone call was the last time Ward heard Rosser’s voice.

The next day, Officer Ried and his partner, Mark Raab, responded to a domestic disturbance call around 11:45 p.m. at the home of Aura Rosser, 40, and her boyfriend, Victor Stephens, 54, in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and a liberal bastion about an hour from Detroit.

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