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I am Always Going to be Wrong
Accepting my shortcomings as an ally.
Let me start off by telling you that I am a white, cis-gender middle-aged straight male.
Why the hell does that matter? Because there comes with that a certain level of privilege that I need to acknowledge right off the bat before I get into the meat of my topic today.
The topic? Being an ally for women, LGBTQ individuals, people of color, immigrants, and most other minority groups, I hope that you can overlook my shortcomings and accept my desire to be an ally and help where I can.
I believe that being an ally, and generally working to advance the causes of these people that I am not one of is a good thing. However, I am increasingly seeing posts and commentary about how some members of some of these groups find the desire to be an ally from the likes of me less-than-useful.
Basically, everything I have to offer is wrong because my experience, skin-color, gender, and/or sexual orientation disqualifies me from understanding, and thus being much use to these groups.
I accept that as a white, straight, middle-aged male, I am unable to fully comprehend what it would be like to be a Hispanic, transgendered, gay immigrant. Your experience is not something I fully comprehend because I am not capable of having the same.
