This page was created by Brandi Hanna.
Performative Allyship
To think about allyship and what it means to be an ally, a true ally, is to think, in part, of sacrifice on a number of levels—sacrifice of personal interest, sacrifice of comfort, and most significantly, sacrifice of power.
Indeed, allies are not only a welcome presence in any fight for justice but also a necessary one. Crucial social movements throughout history have been built on the grounds of allyship and won through a concerted effort to do battle against the malicious and divisive forces of the world, regardless of the stake one holds in it. An ally, in the purest sense, is one who approaches instances of inequity as an unaffected party and remains as a fervent participant—willing to relinquish whatever power they posses in the name of justice. In addition to joining a movement, an ally is prepared to take a back seat, actively and meaningful contribute, and, most importantly, check their egos at the door.
As with all things, though, regardless of all the good a structure, like allyship, is able to accomplish, the perversion and misrepresentation of its intentions are never further away than the shadows surrounding it.
Performative Allyship and Modern Social Rights Movements
As we are currently living through a series of social movements, on local and global levels, we are constantly and consistently seeing our lexicon expand to contain vocabulary which provides us with a fresh and critical understanding of the many moving parts that are turning around us. The perversion of allyship, performative allyship, is one of them.
To think of allyship as performance is to think of a fire engine with no water arriving as a building burns to ashes. To think of allyship as performance is to think of a doctor with a PhD in English arriving as a person chokes to death.
It is available sentiment with no applicable substance.
In thinking about and discussing performative allyship, though, it is pertinent to keep in mind that while the term is a fairly new one, its sentiment is not. In her book Scenes of Subjection Saidiya Hartman covers much ground in her conversationslavery and the covert terror it brought to the black population trapped in it. Her discussion on liberal ideals as it related to the black body and its contradictory relationship with both granting and controlling the liberties and freedoms allowed to the once enslaved speak directly to the role performative activism plays in society today.
In this era of Black Lives Matter (BLM), specifically, we witnessed the coining and rise of this term in conjunction with the great display of support from individuals and businesses alike—both within and outside of the black community for the black community. The thing about performative activism, though, is that it attempts to make it easy, and somewhat comforting, to take the actionless gestures—social media posts, black squares, BLM social media bios, stock quotes and empty promises—that are offered at face value. But the doubt around it is always present.
It has to be.
As is present in our everyday life, in many ways, we see performative allyship operating in A Gathering of Old Men despite the term not being coined when Ernest Gaines penned and published the novel back in 1983. In this vein, it is important to discuss how this pervasive structure has endured across centuries and generations—permeating through the novel, and existing long before it, unnamed and all.
Jumping back to Hartman, I find it necessary to take a moment to thinking through her framing of and discussions about staging wherein she, put simply, discusses the many ways the black body is staged, by themselves and the other. In thinking about this, it becomes easy to draw parallels to performative allyship generally, as well as its function in A Gathering, specifically.
The way I am coming to understand Hartman’s description of staging as Hartman describes it is as a kind of dual power dynamic where both the white oppressors and the oppressed blacks alternate between new ways of creating and dissembling ideas of blackness, black humanity and, perhaps, most pertinently, black pain. In recounting John Rankin’s account of slavery’s atrocities, Hartman makes note of Rankin’s supposed embodiment of the black slave’s pain criticizing the implications such an action.
“Beyond evidence of slavery's crime,” she says, “what does this exposure of the suffering body of the bonds.man yield? Does this not reinforce the "thingly' quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the powerless?” (Hartman, 19).
This quote and the ideas it imbues segues us nicely into a deeper conversation about performative allyship as is seen in Ernest Gaines' A Gathering of Old Men.
Candy's Allyship
Zeroing in on the novel, as we read through A Gathering of Old Men, the character that most fervently embodies these qualities is none other than Candy Marshall—overseer of the Marshall plantation and white savior to the men on it—specifically Mathu, a black sharecropper on her family’s plantation who played a pivotal role in her upbringing, practically raising her from childhood to adulthood.
When we look to Candy and the manner in which she handles her affairs and position of power we see not only the way she cares but also, and importantly, how that care is so tightly bound to control. The grand plan that is carried out from the beginning of the novel to roughly the middle of it was devised by this white woman who, with all the power she wielded and knew herself to be entitled to, expected these men to follow her blindly, without question and without rebuttal. Despite whatever good intentions she may have had going into the situation, mainly to save Mathu’s life, it becomes difficult to justify her actions and line of thinking when she, at a moment’s notice, proves herself capable of kicking (or at least threatening to kick) the men off the land they tilled and called home for daring to oppose her.
"But remember this" she tells the men, "Clatoo got a little piece of land to go back to. Y'all don't have nothing but this. You listen to him now, and you won't even have this (Gaines 174). In this moment, Candy’s concern quickly shifts from the well-being of the men to her position as their superior, and this alone sums up the heart of the issue—the danger of performing allyship without a genuine dedication to it.
It’s easy, tempting almost, to see the work Candy is doing as necessary and important. It could be, it should be but as it is being carried out in the novel it is the exact opposite. What Candy is essentially doing throughout is centering herself and privileging the ideas she holds about how these men should handle their affairs, based on her position as a white woman in society, over the lived experiences of said men.
As a whole, what A Gathering does and does well is demand its readers to not only consume the events as they unfold but to actively become a part of them in a way that makes them (the reader) aware of how each part of the journey to racial freedom and equality both comes together and falls apart, over and over.
In the process of reading the novel, we are made to not only see the performative allyship on display but to witness and reconcile how the harm it brings is not always cut and dry nor is it easy to detect and call out. It often appears thinly veiled by the guise of good intentions. And as we look at Candy in this way, with a critical eye, it is important to keep in mind that we are not doing so with the aim of vilifying her nor of undermining the love and care that she could have and, indeed, must have felt for these men, Mathu specifically. It is to say, though, that for all the good that can and does come with being an ally, there are opposite and stronger consequences which can hinder any meaningful progress slated to be made if that position of allyship is not regularly and adequately put in check.
Candy's desire to have Mathu around love enough becomes a perfect example of this. She professes her love love for him in a way that is at once endearing and off putting.
"You raised my Daddy” Candy says to Mathu. “You raised me. I want you to help me raise my own child one day” (Gaines 176). She continues by reaffirming her needs by saying "I want you to hold his hand. Tell him about Grandpa. Tell him about the field. Tell him how the river looked before the cabins and wharves. No one else to tell him about these things but you" (Gaines 177). In this moment, Candy's want for Mathu exceeds his value as an individual, as a human in his own right. He, instead, becomes a conduit--a library to house and dispense all the important history and stories and information down the lines.
Reconciling the Affects
What becomes interesting in the delineation of performative allyship, confusing even, is making a determination of when and how it is harmful. Thinking about performance on its own, it can be argued that we are always in middle of it. To live is too perform. So when is the performance of allyship dangerous, and when is it simply human nature? There is no simple answer to this question, I don’t think. There are many lenses through which we can view this phenomenon—altruism, maybe.
In thinking about allyship and what it should look like, perhaps an accurate way to gauge its authenticity is to consider the 5 Ws and 1 H: what is it doing, who is it centering, why is a particular action being taken, how is this action directly and productively helping those who are being harmed and when the road gets hard or the attention goes away, will you still be prepared to travel the distance?