I found the zine: SO YOU WANT TO BE AN ALLY! A zine on anti-oppression, allyship, and being a less shitty person – online around 2013, and I think it is excellent. Below is the part that has been posted in my quotes collection under its author Wombat Cascadia here for many years because reading it gave me an important perspective on being an ally.
Ally? Says who?
You do not get to call yourself an ally. I don’t get to call myself an ally. No one gets to bestow that title upon themself. If certain people of color wish to call me an ally in order to identify me as a safer person who is actively confronting racism, that’s great. But I still don’t get to use that title on myself. Calling oneself an ally takes away the agency and denies the expertise of targets of oppression in that particular oppression. I’ve seen various cisgender people spout really terrible transphobic bullshit, then try to cover their asses by saying “No, it’s ok, don’t worry! I’m an ally!” Trans people (including me) are experts in what it’s like to be trans. By extension, trans people are experts in how to not be oppressive toward trans people. For someone to call themself an ally to trans people is to say that they know exactly how to confront cissexism/transphobia. Unfortunately, when we act in solidarity with targets of oppression, we are bound to screw up occasionally. This does not mean that we are bad people, it means that we live in an oppressive culture and unlearning oppression is a lifelong process. If I call myself an ally to people of color, I’ve in effect said that I’ve reached a state of perfection and I don’t have any unlearning left to do, which is blatantly false. Allyship is a state to work toward, with the understanding that we may never actually reach it.
— on page 5 of: SO YOU WANT TO BE AN ALLY! A zine on anti-oppression, allyship, and being a less shitty person
Notes:
I do not know who Cascadia Wombat is. If you share the zine or its content, please credit them. They did the work of putting it together, though they wrote in it:
“None of the ideas in this zine are original or new. Please copy and distribute at will. I care more about making the world a less shitty place than about receiving credit for ideas I didn’t come up with on my own in the first place.”
I have the zine that the quote above is part of on my website here as a 1050 KB PDF file so you can read it and download the whole of it.
The zine is also posted on pdfcoffee.com here in PDF format without all but one of the images, but that has the text from the zine on the webpage outside of the PDF file.