BECOMING | "Quit Being An Ally"
Good morning everyone, my name is Sarah Ngu, all pronouns are okay with me and I’m the newly installed executive director of Forefront. Those of you who are new here – and I know Jen Krist’s mom, is here today, welcome Nancy – but those of you who are new here are looking at me now and you might be thinking, this person looks kind of young to have this job, and I know you’re wondering, What kind of church is this that would employ a 15 year old boy as the executive director? Well, despite what TSA thinks I am not a 15 year old boy, I’m relatively young but I am much older than 15, and we can save discussion of my gender for another day.
I want to spend this sermon unpacking ally-ship and what it means to be an ally. I’m thankful, as a queer person, for my cis and straight allies in this church. As a person of color, I'm thankful for white allies in this church. And I myself try, but fail in many ways, to be an ally as well to black folks, to people who are differently abled, to people who aren’t documented, etc.
A common mindset that I think most of us have, as well-intended, progressively minded people who are trying to be allies, is something like this: As an ally, I’m supposed to cheer you on from the sidelines, and support you and your fight and your struggle. So when there’s a discussion on racism and let’s say I’m white, I’m going to shut up and listen because that's not my struggle. And if there’s a fundraiser by an LGBTQ organization open to everyone, I’ll donate, but I won’t go to the event, I don’t want to take up space if it’s not my cause.
We have a tendency to try and demarcate differences between groups of people, to create space just for certain groups of people, and stress how each person’s experience is uniquely different and I totally think that’s important—there is a need for spaces just for people of color, and there are huge material differences between the lives of poor black trans women and rich cis straight white men.
But I do want to probe is an underlying assumption behind this mindset of ally-ship, which is that as an ally to you, this is your issue, your fight, not mine whatsoever, and our issues are separate. The assumption, for instance, that the struggle that queer people engage in are divorced from the struggles that cis-het people engage in. Cis-het, by the way, is short for cisgender and heterosexual.
When I think about what queer liberation is, it’s about questioning our modern basic assumptions around love, sex, gender and family and asking, “Are these assumptions helpful? Or harmful?” The assumption that there is a husband who is the breadwinner and a wife who is the caretaker is an assumption that queer couples are forced to question because it’s not clear who will be the “husband” and who will be the “wife,” so we create our own roles and write our own scripts because the old scripts don’t apply. What we discover is that the new scripts that we write are helpful not just for queer folks but for cis-het folks too.
I think of two cis friends of mine who are married, husband and wife duo. When the wife was pregnant, she researched blogs on how to help her husband feel as physically connected as possible to the baby while she was pregnant not just because that’s what they both wanted, but also because he was going to become the primary care-taker because his job was much more flexible than hers. But she couldn’t find any straight mommy blog that answered her question, because they were not following the traditional script of husband and wife.
Can you guess where was the only place she could get advice? Autostraddle, which is basically the #1 queer woman blog. She needed a new script. And now her husband is taking care of their child in Texas and it’s really sad because he cannot find any parent groups who will accept him, because the only ones that are available are mom groups and they don’t trust him—he doesn't fit their script. Maybe the moms in these groups have withdrawn from all their close male friendships because now that they’re married, they wouldn’t “look right” to hang out 1:1 with a person of the opposite gender.
I want to submit to you the idea that these scripts we’ve written around gender and family and love do not just hurt queer people, they hurt and restrict everyone.
My grandmother is the matriarch of our family on my dad’s side; she is basically worshipped by all her children because she worked three jobs to support her family. In addition to teaching full-time, she sewed and sold school uniforms on weeknights, and on weekends, she started a distribution business for anchovies or ikan bilis in Sarawak, a state in East Malaysia where I’m from.
She had a killer business acumen, but on paper, she was just a teacher. Her husband was the businessman, he was the one running a wholesale clothing store, but he wasn’t great at running it. He let his brothers take over at points and they would steal money, so he was just breaking even. His wife should’ve taken over, but that wouldn’t look right, that wouldn’t follow the script, so she had to start two businesses in order to make up for his business skills.
Today, we all worship her as a hero. But she didn’t have to be. She’s 81 years old but she looks much older than that. She didn’t have to age as fast as she did, if it weren’t for patriarchy. But to my grandma, that’s not patriarchy – that’s just life.
Now my grandma is very cute. She somewhat accepts my relationship with my partner and is as much of an ally as you can be when you’re an 81 year old Chinese woman, but she still struggles. She says things like, “I just don’t understand, a woman and another woman, how can you…?” clap hands together in Mandarin it’s like “晚上睡觉女的跟女的不能够在一起， 我想不懂”), and I’m like whoa grandma even if I could communicate this in Mandarin, which I can’t, I don’t want to have this conversation.
If I was fluent in Mandarin I would say, “Grandma, you faced so much unnecessary hardship because people said oh you have this kind of body, and we’re going to call it female, and based on your body we’re going to give you this script to follow where men run businesses and you can’t take over your husband’s business, because if you deviate from it then you’re being incorrectly female. And when I face homophobia, it’s basically the same thing: I have this body, that people call female, and if I marry a woman or cut my hair short, and I know grandma you hate my haircut, I’m deviating from the script, I’m incorrectly female. And when my trans friends can’t use public bathrooms for fear of getting harassed, it’s because people are policing them for being incorrectly male or female or incorrectly fitting into a gender box.”
Grandma, do you see how it’s all connected? I wish you can see that what you struggled against is what I’m struggling against now, and we’re fighting the same fight just on different fronts.”
So since I can’t talk to my grandma about this stuff for a million reasons I’m going to talk to you all instead. And I want to ask our church: I want us to quit being allies and become comrades / co-conspirators in the fight for justice. I’ve talked about LGBTQ justice but this applies beyond that, to race, class, legal status, and so on. This is the end of our Becoming sermon series for the season of Epiphany in which we’re talking about the things we need to quit, and I believe quitting allyship and becoming comrades will get us closer to our vision of ushering in a new paradigm of Christianity for the next 500 years.
Here is how I am defining the difference:
- Being an ally is about helping someone else out of the goodness of your heart, out of charity, out of sympathy because you want to be a good person.
- Being a comrade or co-conspirator definitely involves all of those things, but it’s also about understanding that your liberation is linked to another person’s, that you cannot be free until everyone else is free. Becoming a comrade then is not something you choose out of benevolent generosity; it is something that is necessary for yourself and others.
If this is going over your head a bit just bear with me. I’m going to give you another example, this time from the book of Exodus in the Bible. In the narrative of Exodus, the Israelites have been living in Israel for generations – they’re third or fourth generation immigrants at this point, they speak Egyptian, they’ve culturally adapted – and at some point a new king arises and starts looking at the Israelites suspiciously. He starts wondering: What if they grow to outnumber us and we become a minority in our own country? Who are these Jews really loyal to? What if they join with our enemies to kick us off our land? We need to round them up. This logic sounds familiar today, doesn't it?
So the king decides to enslave them and it lasts for roughly four hundred years – which is an incredibly long time, as reference, Europeans and Africans arrived to this country 400 years ago. And according to the narrative, the Israelites are treated badly.
Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
Fast forward a bit, throw in the 12 plagues and Moses, and finally the king decides to let the enslaved peoples go. And they leave Egypt in a haste, but before they do so, they make one request from their Egyptian neighbors and former masters.
The Israelites had done as Moses told them; they had asked the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and for clothing, 36 and the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And so they plundered the Egyptians.
What’s quite extraordinary here is that the Egyptians are going along with their requests and giving them whatever they wanted. We don’t know why, maybe some of them were just scared of the God of the Israelites and did not want another plague and so they said please just take everything and leave; or maybe some were allies who took pity on the Israelites and sympathized with their plight, and gave charitably to help them. Regardless, that’s one group of Egyptians: the scared or sympathetic allies who gave charitably. There is another group, which is subtly mentioned in the next passage:
37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children. 38 A mixed multitude also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds. 39
Now who is this mixed multitude, which in Hebrew translates to erev rav? It doesn’t seem like it would be referring to Israelites because why would there be the word “also.” Jewish commentators from medieval times until now believe that the mixed crowd most likely includes Egyptians from several different clans and various oppressed groups. They were most likely Egyptians near the bottom of society, they were just one step above the enslaved Israelites. And maybe they left Egypt because they realized that once the Israelites left, they would be next, they would become forced labor. Maybe when they listened to their Jewish neighbors demanding freedom and equality, and critiquing the systems that exist, they started to wonder, “Hey this resonates with me too, this kind of applies to my family as well.” They moved from sympathy – which is about feeling bad for someone else – to empathy, which is about seeing a connection between what someone is going through and your own life.
So unlike what is commonly believed, the Israelites did not build the pyramids. The pyramids were built by paid workers recruited from all over Egypt, but these workers were not consistently treated well. In fact during the 12th century BCE, workers staged a sit-in in one of the temples and refused to leave until they were given their promised payment of grain. They were treated better than the Israelites, but they were still near the bottom of the same system where the elites ruled and lived luxuriously lives and commanded everyone else to work and make religious offerings.
And so maybe some of them joined the enslaved peoples to form this mixed multitude because they realized that the system that was forcibly extracting labor from slaves was also doing a similar thing, to a lesser extent, to them. Maybe they joined because they wanted to take a risk and join forces with the enslaved peoples to pursue liberation together as comrades—they recognized that their liberation was collective and intimately intertwined.
And this was a big risk they took—yes the first group of Egyptians did give up a lot of gold and silver, although one could argue that was just reparations that was owed to the enslaved Jews, but this group was doing much more than that: They were risking their lives, their bodies, to join the fight, because as soon as they left, they knew they would immediately become enemies of the State. They moved from sympathy to empathy, from being an ally to being a comrade. They went from let me help liberate you to realizing, Hey this liberation is for all of us, it’s collective liberation.
We see this movement towards collective liberation in pockets not just throughout our bible but also in our history. One of the most prime examples of this is an event that we call Bacon’s rebellion, which takes place during 1676 in Virginia.
Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia, 1676
This event is extraordinarily important in American history as it dramatically impacts how race was constructed in America. According to most historians, before 1676, the Chesapeake area was a multi-racial society where you had native people, people of African and European descent working together, marrying each other; you had black land owners and black slaves, and you had white land owners and white indentured servants which far outnumbered African slaves and who were treated very badly. These white indentured servants were desperately poor Europeans who were given a free ride on a ship across the Atlantic in exchange for 7 years of labor and service, after which some of them were promised a piece of land. But they were treated so badly that many of them died before the 7 years were up, which works out for their masters because now they don’t have to give away their land. Only people who owned land could vote, and if you did not, didn’t matter if you were white or black, you couldn’t.
Bacon’s rebellion is an armed rebellion led by an British dude named Nathanial Bacon who essentially unites enslaved and indentured Africans along with indentured Europeans to fight against the British Governor to demand greater compensation for their labor. It’s an incredible moment where this “mixed multitude” comes together and says, Let’s focus on our common enemy here, we want to be collectively liberated from this system that oppresses all of us. Let’s risk our lives and become enemies of the state together.
Unfortunately the rebellion gets stamped out by the British government and many of people are executed. I don’t want to romanticize this event because one of the things that Bacon’s rebellion does is massacre a lot of Native Americans. But I don’t have time to fully get into that dimension for now; what I want to say is that this event would just be a blip in history if it weren’t for the fact that the ruling elites started to freak out.
They started thinking, Whoa, these servants and slaves currently outnumber us. If they unite as this “mixed multitude” against us, we’re screwed. So, they passed a law that made it illegal for European women to marry non-European men. They passed laws saying that if you are of African descent and you were born here but your parent was a slave, you were a slave too meaning slavery for the first time could be inherited, and they start shifting their labor force away from Europeans to Africans. They passed laws making it legal for the first time for white men, regardless of land ownership, to vote, and illegal for Native and African-American men, regardless of land ownership, to vote, hold public office, to gather in public places, to own weapons, and to testify against a white person. Both slavery and freedom were created at the same moment.
Before this, the major distinction between people was religion – are you protestant or catholic – or nationality. Now, the major distinction became: Are you white or not. It becomes the color of your skin. What was a mixed multitude is now segmented into white and non-white segments. This is one of the seminal moments in the historical invention of race.
And this strategy basically pays off. White indentured servants start to feel superior to their black counterparts because all of a sudden they see that they are given certain freedoms than African Americans don’t have, and they don’t recognize they are still dirt poor. They are too distracted on making sure they are better than the people below them that they are not asking, “Who benefits the most from this creation of race? This dividing of the mixed multitude?” They’re not focusing on the people on the top who are benefitting the most from oppressing everyone.
We see this dynamic play out in so many ways today. For example, I want you to imagine a person who receives government benefits, like food stamps or public housing. Who comes to mind? You might be thinking of a black woman, a so-called “welfare queen,” because since the 1960’s there has been a concerned campaign to depict black people as lazy and dependent on government aid. Or you might think of a Latino immigrant because of how hard this current government has worked to convince you that immigrants are draining the federal budget. Just last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the current administration’s policy that would make it almost impossible for legal immigrants to get green cards if they “likely at any time” to access public assistance.
These racist stereotypes have worked so well that it’s convinced many white Americans to stop supporting welfare programs. A pair of Berkeley and Stanford researchers published a study last year that confirmed what many of us knew, which is that white people are significantly less likely to support welfare programs when they are told that black and Latino people might benefit from them. In one experiment, some participants were shown statistics about how America is going to be majority non-white or how incomes gaps between white people and black/Latino people were decreasing. The white participants who were shown these statistics were then more likely to support cutting millions of dollars from federal welfare.
Does anyone know the actual statistics on who receives government welfare? Any guesses?
In 2016, 43% percent of beneficiaries of Medicaid were white; 18 percent black; 30 percent Hispanic. For food stamps: 36% were white, 25% black, 17% Hispanic.
So here’s the question we have to ask: Who benefits from the racist images of black welfare queens or welfare-sucking Mexican immigrants? Who benefits when we divide the people at the bottom and pit them against each other? It’s not the large number of white Americans on welfare. It’s the one percent, the people at the top.
So what do we do? I think we look at the story of Exodus and Bacon’s Rebellion because they give us a glimpse, even if distorted, of what it looks like to unite across identities and backgrounds and come together as a “mixed multitude” to take up a shared struggle, to fight together as comrades in solidarity. To move way beyond ally-ship in which we are just helping from the sidelines, giving gold and silver as charity, and we are jumping into the fray and risking our bodies and making sacrifices.
Libby Watson is an Indigenous Australian who does a lot of work in aboriginal studies and activism. She’s famous for this quote:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Here is something concrete you can do. In a few weeks, we will be launching the two small groups: A group that is just for people of color who are discussing decolonization and white supremacy, and then another group that is for white co-conspirators or comrades who are exploring decolonization and white supremacy. These are separate groups and there are very good reasons why we are keeping them separate, but my hope is that as the people of color group get together and talk, and the white people get together and talk, each group will start to see ways in which the work each of you are doing in separate groups is intimately linked together.
You can sign up for them by writing down your name on the Connect Card, or chatting with us at the Connection Point in the lobby.
Here is something concrete you can do now. In the Christian tradition, particularly from the book, First Corinthians chapter 12, the church is analogized to the body of Christ, who is the head of the body. Here is Paul writing to the early church:
13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many… there are many members, yet one body. 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you…
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
In a little while, we will be taking communion together, which is open to anybody who wants it. And as we line up to take the bread and the juice which is, in our tradition, the body and blood of Christ, I want you to take a step back and look at everyone who is getting up and getting in line. Really look. They might look different than you in many ways—you may not even like some of these people. But by consuming the body and blood of Christ together in this ritual, you are collectively becoming part of the body of Christ. They are your brothers and sisters and siblings in Christ; your liberation is tied to theirs, and their liberation is tied to yours. You cannot say to another person: I don’t need you, I’m self-sufficient. We are, together, whether you like it or not, bound together as one body, as a mixed multitude—within these walls, and also outside of them.
Let us pray.