Being an Ally Online

Last year, when particularities of my living situation prevented me from heading out to protest against anti-Black racism, I was struggling to best manifest my allyship. Without the option of joining in person, I considered expressing my allyship on social media sites. Activists have argued that showing you ‘care’ online often leads to fake allyship or allyship traps, actions which seem helpful but are too facile or ineffective. Still, staying quiet in these critical times sometimes led to schisms in friend groups when people were not outspoken online, because this silence signaled indifference. Bolstered by an urge to perform care, many of my non-Black friends succinctly communicated their support for Black Lives Matter on their social media accounts.

In a June 2020 ethics column, Kwame Anthony Appiah claimed these symbolic posts could be effective in changing public opinion, even if they appeared to be “virtue signaling,” or making points to show off your virtuousness. Online talk can contribute to a “moral revolution,” he argued, which can be completed by non-symbolic action. There is research, however, that can lead us to question the effectiveness of buzz-driven social media posting, or what I will call urgent sharing. There is some polling data to support the conclusion that social media changed people’s minds on Black Lives Matter, both positively and negatively. Looking at greater research on the dispositions with regard to information, we see that social media trap people in echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Further, as social media users, we develop bad dispositions regarding knowledge, specifically the epistemic vices of closed-mindedness and unreflective thinking.

Since it is unclear whether online speech succeeds in changing public opinion, we should consider how this “virtue signaling” on social media might contribute to, and reveal, a misunderstanding of allyship. Urgent sharing props allyship up as a social position, rather than a practice. As a result, it gets in the way of developing epistemic vulnerability, the disposition regarding knowledge and information that allies need to become allies. Supposedly innocuous, the speech acts we take to ‘spread awareness’ contribute to a false idea of allyship which prevents the real work of allyship.

We can call those who want to be allies aspirational allies. It is common to critique viewing allyship as an identity, or a social position of allyship. Indeed, this is wrong as it neglects the action that makes allyship. Yet, taking up this wrong idea is nearly irresistible on social media sites. Their purpose as fora to craft identities and the culture of affirmation that permeates them buttress an identity-based conception of allyship, leading aspirational allies down the wrong path. We see this when aspirational allies perform a speech act I call urgent sharing, or buzz-driven social media posting. They post or repost content that signals support for a social justice or political cause, like the fight against anti-Black racism. From my own window into the online world, I observed people who hadn’t posted on social media for years return just to share the viral illustration of George Floyd, or the same few anti-racist reading lists.

Urgency comes from the culture of affirmation on social media networking sites, which are themselves environments of experimenting and playing with who you are and understanding how you relate to people. These features of online environments cause some commentators to identify social media networking sites as technologies of the self. A concept developed by Michel Foucault, technologies of the self enable people to do work on themselves “in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” Urgent sharing is a speech act that uses social media as a technology of the self. As defended by J.L. Austin, speech act theory holds that utterances do not merely convey information; rather, they do things. Each speech act can have locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions. The locutionary dimension refers to the utterance itself, while the illocutionary dimension is what the utterance does, such as promising, complaining, requesting, describing, and so on. Correctly identifying the illocutionary dimension of a speech act depends on knowing the speaker and context. The perlocutionary dimension refers to the effects of the speech, an online example being eliciting a ‘Like’ or a ‘Follow.’

Urgent sharing employs social media to produce an utterance that takes a stand on a political issue (locutionary), succeeds in creating the speaker’s self-identity as an ally (illocutionary) and may result in the speaker receiving affirmation (perlocutionary). The online culture of affirmation and practice of online creation of the self are the conditions needed for this speech act to succeed. Consider an aspirational ally who tweeted #BlackLivesMatter in the wake of last summer’s protests. The illocutionary dimension, or what is enacted by the utterance, is different than that statement of fact that Black people’s lives have value. Since social media sites are technologies of the self, and their climates create the expectation of affirmation, the illocutionary dimension of this urgent sharing must be on the level self-creation. An urgently shared post is the self-identification of the speaker as an ally. This can be validated by affirmation from others, though succeeds without such affirmation, because the expectation of such affirmation is all that is needed. While one could think that urgent sharing’s illocutionary dimension is ‘spreading awareness,’ this can only be a perlocutionary dimension of urgent sharing, an effect which is not guaranteed.

Instead, what urgent sharing does is create the speaker’s self-image as ally. But that’s just the thing—allyship is not a self-image because it is not an identity. By creating the speaker’s ally self-image, urgent sharing is an act that prevents them from taking on allyship as a way to be in the world, as opposed to an identity that can be affirmed by others.

To enact allyship is to be in solidarity with oppressed groups. This is a way to be in the world, composed of actions and dispositions—but it is not a social position. Some of these acts we might call material and real, rather than symbolic. Focusing solely on the right actions, however, risks obscuring the relational dimension of allyship, which is captured in the ally’s enduring work in the world and on themself. This dimension is captured by the Anti-Oppression Network, who define allyship as “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group.” Redistributing wealth, attending protests, or sharing anti-racist reading lists are necessary but not sufficient acts to participate in allyship. In short, allyship also requires changing your relationship to information and beliefs.

Acts of allyship necessitate knowledge beyond the actor’s own and their awareness of the structures that have (not) contributed to forming their knowledge. The ally admits that the world of the group they are standing with is opaque to them, and that they must learn how to change their worldview to join the cause. It also follows that they may not even know, or know how to find, the limitations of their worldview. Such obliviousness is a systematic distortion of epistemic relations. As what we call knowledge and who we deem knowledge-bearers are both inflected through racism, racism reduces the variety of knowledge sources, and thus closes off avenues for discovering the limitations of our knowledge. Holding the right information about or awareness of oppression still leaves the ally lacking the right disposition regarding that knowledge to put it to work.

For that, it takes a kind of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the general condition of being both dependent on and open to the influence of others. Though it is often taken to mean a susceptibility to harm, this conception of vulnerability as susceptibility is derivative of the general condition. Epistemic vulnerability, which is a disposition one can develop, is self-reflexive in that it requires recognizing that you need to be vulnerable. This disposition includes the commitment to the idea that your knowledge is incomplete without being shaped by and in dialogue with other worldviews, notably those of the people you want to ally with, and thus also that you see yourself as depending on these other knowers. You are open to having their limitations judged by others.

The ally self-image leads the aspirational ally away from allyship as a practice. Thinking of yourself as having an ally identity prevents you from questioning your orientation to your own outlook on the world. You take yourself to have an ally-outlook, when you need to adopt the self-reflexive attitude of epistemic vulnerability. Because holding an ally self-image prevents a person from recognizing that they need to be vulnerable, urgent sharing impedes them from becoming an ally.Once you think of yourself as being the kind of person who stands on the right side of history, you need not be self-skeptical in the way necessary to work against distorted epistemic relations. The ally self-image that assuages the aspirational ally who is uncomfortable at the thought of being racist also prevents the kind of self-questioning an aspirational ally needs to explore and understand, and therefore truly see, the ways they may be racist in their worldview. Having crafted their identity as an ally, the aspirational ally has not worked this through.

In closing off this line of inquiry, urgent sharing makes the aspirational ally an invulnerable knower. When knowers are invulnerable, they disavow other people who should be nodes in their knowledge network, who they should rely on for building and checking their knowledge. Urgent sharing can even be a way to remain ignorant, willfully. Ignorance is willful when the knower consistently self-deceives because it is to their advantage. For example, under the shield of an ally self-image, a non-Black person can gain ease and the comfort of living as usual by staying uninformed about systemic anti-Black racism, which enables them to have no substantive opinions on such racism and little to offer to combat it. To the extent that urgent sharing is a refusal to be epistemically vulnerable, it is a willful act to remain ignorant about one’s own limitations as a knower, thereby reproducing racist ways of thinking.

Though it is tempting, and normalized, to focus on the virtue of using our online reach to change minds, we aspirational allies should be sensitive to how what we say might work against our own intentions to change our orientation to the world. We should neither overstate the power of our online show of support, nor let the urgency of a political climate let us engage with oppression unreflectively. Until our online discursive spaces encourage self-questioning and epistemic vulnerability, we should reconsider participating in acts that symbolize allyship but perpetuate our own invulnerability.

Jules Wong

Graduate Fellow at Pennsylvania State University

Jules Wong is a Graduate Fellow at Penn State University and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship holder beginning Fall 2023. They research the ethics and politics of need with a focus on gender.