Dear Ms Understanding,
My white friends have become increasingly comfortable with labelling people as racist in an offhand manner, even when the person isn’t racist. It makes me uncomfortable as it feels as if they are trivialising racism and ignoring actual racist issues. I’d like to know how to tell them to stop without them instantly getting defensive and saying they’re an ally.
Dear Friend,
It is deeply frustrating when people casually throw around the term racism as though any slight is racist, particularly when the people doing it have no lived experience of racist humiliation or discrimination. And you’re right: this sort of behaviour abstracts racism and reduces it to a term that is absent of meaning. It trivialises the very real experiences of people who have to live with racism, especially since, as you know, there is absolutely no reason to make stuff up about racism – it’s rife. These sorts of low-stakes takes on racism aren’t just annoying; they can also be detrimental to fighting racism because those who are wrongly accused of racism are less likely to take racism seriously moving forward.
The fashionable term for what your friends are doing is virtue signalling, but I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of this label because it obscures what is really going on with the casual and frequent invocation of racism in contexts where it is not at play. We all have virtues and we signal them on a daily basis through how we dress, the people we associate with, etc.
I think a more direct way of describing this behaviour is what academics Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke describe as “moral grandstanding”. They argue that people who grandstand use moral talk to promote themselves and to be seen in a better light in the eyes of others. They use topics and conversations that are intrinsically important – the environment or racism, for example – to boost their standing among others. In other words, the topic is manipulated to enhance their status rather than to genuinely make an intervention around the important issue at hand.
I suspect your discomfort with your friends is related to the sense you have that their comments on racism aren’t grounded in what others may be experiencing and are instead about their own egos. Genuine solidarity is impossible if people who call themselves allies act on behalf of the aggrieved. If your friends were following your cue they might have noticed your disquiet by now and demonstrated some curiosity around it. The fact that they haven’t is a fairly good indication that they are indeed grandstanding; that they are more interested in showing how clever or moral they are than in genuinely addressing racism.
In terms of managing their responses, you can only be responsible for what you do and say; you can’t control how they will react. You’re going to have to have a direct conversation that confronts their behaviour. The next time they accuse someone of racism, use it as an opportunity to ask them, “Why do you think that?” Having to justify themselves challenges their assumption that everyone agrees with them – a big part of what the grandstander seeks is approval, so breaking the illusion of consensus might be enough to shake them out of their bubble.
If your friendship is close enough, then don’t wait; address it with them before another incident unfolds. If you proceed from the standpoint that the moral grandstander wants to be liked, it is worth explaining to them that their grandstanding is having the opposite effect; it is making you withdraw from them.
If they respond by using their “allyship” as a defence, you might want to point out that you never asked for this. I have to admit that I find the trend of forced allyship incredibly patronising.
I don’t know anyone who has asked their white friends to be allies, and yet so often allyship is used to hold us hostage, trapped in a set of interactions (like those you are being forced to witness) in which the needs of white people to appear to be doing something about perceived racism take centre stage. Ironically, of course, when real racism rears its head it can be hard to find allies to come to your assistance.
My wariness about racially preoccupied white people was provoked a few years ago when I moved into a new neighbourhood. I was looking for a local network as I settled my kids into a new school, and at drop-offs and pick-ups I often found myself talking to a well-dressed, quick-witted woman who had friendship potential. We agreed to meet for coffee.
As soon as we sat down, she began talking about her Black friends and listing incidents in which she had assisted them in relation to racism. Her preoccupation with race made me uncomfortable. I felt like an extra who had wandered on to a stage and given the lead actor material for their monologue.
She wasn’t seeing me at all – she was only seeing my race.
While no one wants their friends to ignore their race or to ignore racism, it is equally uncomfortable when your friend can’t talk to you about anything but race; as though that is the sum-total of your existence. That woman (who will never be my friend) would probably argue that she was offering me allyship and racial support. Maybe she was, but that wasn’t what I was after. Instead, what she offered me was a sense that I was an object; not a person, but an accessory. Needless to say, I got away from that coffee date as quickly as I could and I’ve never regretted it.
I’m not saying you should ditch your friends, but I think it is worth it to interrogate whether they are indeed friends, or, more transactionally, whether they are mere allies.
All the best!
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Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
