How Not to be an Ally
by Courtenay Rogers, Guest Writer
This is a personal retelling of trying to do anti-racism work and making some mistakes along the way. The intent is to normalize that allyship can provide opportunities for learning from mistakes and once you know better, you can do better.
I was raised in a conservative, southern, military, Christian white bubble.
Everyone I hung out with looked like me. I didn’t have any non-white friends in school. I went to college in Mississippi and all my friends still looked like me. I can honestly tell you, I never thought twice about it.
I started my professional career as a U.S. naval officer and led a division of sailors who didn’t all look like me. I still never took the time to understand what it may feel like to walk through the world as anything but white. I got out of the Navy to get married and continued to live in a bubble of whiteness, and not until I became a mother did I consider that I was broken. I got divorced and realized it was time to do some serious work on myself.
I had to raise my daughter to be kinder to herself and to her fellow humans.
Once I understood that my insecurity was leading me to be hateful, ignorant, and judgemental, I started reading about racism, specifically around the history of our country.
Let me tell you, what you learned in school is most likely inaccurate. The history we learned in school was taught by the oppressors — the colonizers. America was built on the backs of enslaved humans. As a white person, I realized I have to unlearn the whitewashed history I was taught and relearn the truth.
When you come to terms with this truth and the truth around racism, you will be better equipped to start your own journey of unlearning and relearning the real truth — a journey I’ve been on for nearly 14 years now.
For the past few years, I’ve been openly sharing my journey with allyship and anti-racism and I started thinking that I had beat my racism; that it was gone. I was one of the good ones now. I was the white lady my friends asked for advice because I had done so much work on myself and knew the “right thing to say.” I would gladly “help.” I’m a fixer, and I wanted so badly to do something to help my friends, my community, and other humans. And guess what, I was still centering myself and falling right into the trap of being born into a white supremacy culture while being protected by my whiteness.
For example, at the end of 2020, I started an accountability group called Calling All White Women (CAWW) with another white woman. Our goal was to actively dismantle white supremacy from the inside by gathering other white women for accountability conversations and workshops. We need to fix ourselves without putting that responsibility on our Black friends, right?
Guess what we didn’t do that we should have?
We didn’t pay a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) expert to guide us nor did we pay anyone with the lived experience of not having white privilege to hold us accountable. My white privilege allowed me to think I could fix a bunch of racist white women without the guidance of someone without this privilege.
I shared an event called Action over Allyship in a Facebook group for progressive women in Tennessee and received a landslide of feedback and callouts from a group of Black women that was very well-deserved. It took me about 24 hours to figure out the best way to apologize to the BIPOC women that I'd harmed by making them do emotional labor, yet again.
Y'all, I didn't mean to do harm (intent) BUT I DID (impact), and this situation is a perfect example of how allies and "woke" white people can do more harm sometimes than overt racists. My white privilege allowed me to think I could teach a workshop on how to move from allyship to action without a true expert.
So after learning this hard lesson, we canceled the event and indefinitely suspended operations of CAWW.
With the help of some really smart friends, these are my takeaways on allyship now:
We (white people) are not really here to be right or win; we're here to learn and do better.
We (white people) are not put on the Earth to save Black and brown people as some kind of savior.
We (white people) have to do deep and tough work on ourselves before we are equipped to have this conversation with other white people.
We (white people) are protected by the white supremacy culture we were born into. Read Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad to dig deeper into this very important truth.
We (white people) don't get any brownie points for trying, and we absolutely shouldn't.
Being publicly called out sucked and it hurt my ego and my feelings, but it’s not about me. This work isn’t about me.
Allyship isn’t about words but rather is about action, and it is up to me to keep working on myself and using my white privilege to bring awareness to systemic and structural racism in our country and our world.
Can you relate?
What hard lessons have you learned while trying to be an ally, and how have they shaped your actions moving forward? Let us know in the comments.
Even though it sucks to make mistakes, it’s important to learn the lessons and keep doing the work.
Author Bio
Courtenay Rogers is an operations and technology executive with more than a decade of experience leading brand-building efforts for organizations across multiple industries. She’s the owner of CDR Consulting where she provides under-resourced small business owners with operational tools to scale and succeed.
Courtenay is a U.S. Navy veteran, having served as an officer aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Grace Hopper after earning degrees in Naval Science and French from the University of Mississippi. She has played an active role in the marketing industry and her community throughout her career, serving as past president of the Nashville chapter of the American Marketing Association as well as running an inspiring campaign for the Tennessee State Legislature in 2016. Her campaign bid serves as the foundation for her ongoing commitment in motivating and recruiting women to run for public office and she currently serves as the treasurer of the Williamson County Democratic Party in Franklin, TN.
Her biggest inspiration is her teenage daughter who reminds her daily that one person truly can make a difference in the world.
Update Aug 2024: This story was originally published in 2021. See where Courtenay is now, three years later.
