This just in: It is now hip to be antiracist. Months of international civil rights protests and several high-profile cases of police brutality and racial violence have left hordes of non-Black Americans scrambling to get onto the “right side of history.” To be sure, there are many such “allies” with noble intentions, but there are just as many, if not more, with selfish and theatrical ones.
I recently came into contact with the term “performative allyship” through two articles by Katherine Morgan and Angela Maria Spring, where they tackle the topic on which I am writing in far superior fashion, but through the lens of the publishing and bookselling industries. To Morgan, the surges in sales for the year’s antiracist bestsellers, chiefly White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, are indicative of the general trendiness of the novel antiracist fervor I am writing about. It must be acknowledged that even well-intentioned, legitimate activists who felt called to action after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and company have much to answer for. Their outrage, after all, is dreadfully late. The only thing original about the case of George Floyd was how many people saw the video.
In the words of Morgan:
“I had multiple customers ask me why their particular order of White Fragility was now back ordered, even though it had been in stock when they originally added it to their cart. “Oh, it’s because white people saw a Black man die at the hands of police, and even though Black people have been talking about police brutality for years, it took seeing him take his last breath as that officer kneeled on his neck before many white people felt as though it was time to finally have that talk,” I wrote as a reply. Then I took a deep breath, erased that message, and simply responded, “It’s a popular book right now.”
The performance of performative allyship is never too hard to trace. Morgan quotes other booksellers who had identified the same patterns as calling purchases of antiracist literature a “chance to put their order confirmation on their Instagram story to show off to their friends” and “a case of ‘look at this on my bookshelf, I’m a Good White™.’” One of my favorite writers working today, Lauren Michele Jackson, also wrote earlier this year about the way antiracist literature has functioned as a pro-Black badge of honor. But if books of this sort are badges of honor, the approval of a living, breathing Black person is a golden ticket to said “right side.” This has introduced an interesting double status for the modern African American, for they still suffer the dark reality that the protests have been speaking out against, but are also liable to receive exceedingly obsequious and very often microaggressive behavior by the antiracist trend seekers.
Sutton Griggs remains correct in his 1899 assessment that “the Negro finds himself an unprotected foreigner in his own home,” but in this era where it has just now become politically incorrect to be openly racist, he finds himself doubling as an indispensable commodity. In a way, this was already happening through cultural appropriation, but the recent past and the present have found the commodification of the Black body taking a new form.
Months ago, my best friend recounted a frustrating albeit hilarious anecdote from his experiences working at a car wash to me. He, a Black man, and one of his Black coworkers were approached by a white female patron, who told both of them, among a few other things, that “Black lives matter.” Now, I can guarantee you that this woman returned to her car believing her record of activism had just reached the neighborhood of Nelson Mandela and Angela Davis for telling two Black men that their lives mattered. She saw her chance at a golden ticket, struck without hesitation, and secured her placement in what she believed to be the annals of allyship, but what was really a tragic sinkhole of delusion, selfishness, and privilege.
In spite of it all, we must remember that Black Americans have never been anything they did not want to be. True, they were once forced into slavery and continue to be hunted, either with the goal of persecuting them, stealing from them, or using them as a bargaining chip to prove one’s commitment to antiracism. But in their minds, they are their wildest dream. Irrespective of the murder, rape, economic, political, and social subjugation, they have prospered. As long as Africans have existed, they have fought tirelessly to assert their humanity and achieve their aspirations. The challenges they face now are only the latest in a seemingly endless series of obstacles that have, in the greater scheme of things, never succeeded.
The crucial divide between the trend seekers and the majority of the African American population is that the former believes themselves to be witnessing a novelty. In reality, there has always been violent racism in America and there has always been protest to meet it. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and John Brown asserted that Black lives mattered long before the phrase became a Twitter refrain or an opportunity for that woman to embarrass herself. Though Blackness will continue to be hunted, plundered, and commodified, it will never be what so many would prefer it to be, which is a natural resource ripe for the picking. It will forever remain the very spirit of resistance, of perseverance, of prosperity under duress. It is that which can never be killed, even after the killing.