My Thoughts on Being an “Ally”

First I’ll admit that I instinctively recoil when I hear liberal buzzwords, but I think this is an idea worthy of exploring. :-)

Growing up, my parents had a pretty simple philosophy on education: School is your job; do your job. I did. I worked hard and made good grades. I thought that if I stayed at the top of my class, I could get a full-ride scholarship like my dad and go to college without burdening myself or my family financially. I can remember having this thought while sitting in my sixth grade classroom.

But what I didn’t realize is that the academic world had changed a lot since my dad was in school. It wasn’t enough to make good grades and a good score on the SAT. Now they looked more at the “whole person.” I needed to have extracurriculars.

This is where it gets a little tricky. When you grow up without a lot of expendable income, paying to be involved in activities that you don’t actually need to survive isn’t really on your radar. Combine that with the fact that most people who know what it’s like to need financial help are not quick to talk about ways they have helped others. It seems like an attack on their dignity, so you don’t necessarily feel right hi-lighting things that could be counted as community service. Not to mention the fact that Matthew 6:3 says not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing when you help the needy.

I really didn’t know how to interact with a guidance counselor or who to talk to about my college applications, which I mostly worked on alone. I can’t really remember exactly how it came about, but somehow one of my teachers realized that I had listed almost nothing on my applications as extracurriculars. She sat for a long time interviewing me about what I had been doing during high school and compiling a list that I never knew existed until that moment. I had been doing things, but I couldn’t see that for myself. I didn’t get a full-ride like my dad, but I did get some scholarship money, and more importantly I got into a college that I might not have if my teacher hadn't decided to spend the time reaching out to me. She was my ally.

During my senior year at State, my husband (then fiancé) and I spent some time tutoring kids at an after-school program in East Raleigh run by a black minister and his wife. They were lovely people who cared deeply about their community. They lived very humbly and poured everything they had into making a difference there. The kids we tutored were very bright, but they had a lot of life challenges that made it difficult for them to consistently make school a priority. The weight of feeling like these kids couldn’t see their own potential, or how possible it was for them to escape the traps that many of their parents and peers had fallen into, felt oppressive at times.

After getting the proper permission, I took one of the girls to State to help her type a paper in one of the computer labs. My real goal was to get her on campus, hoping that she would see that the ground under her feet there was just like the ground under her feet in her neighborhood. Despite my academic success, I knew what it was like to instinctively feel like I didn’t belong at such a place or like the people there must be some different class of human than me. I wanted the idea of college to feel less “other” to her. After that, we went to Dairy Queen and made sure we ordered something to take back to her dad, because ice cream is more exciting to a middle schooler than college and I wanted to make sure we honored her father. I have no idea where she is today or if that experience meant anything, but I pray that she is doing well regardless.

Liberals and Conservatives often get different mental pictures in our heads when we see and hear the same things. The worst part is that the phrases we use often come across as incredibly offensive to people on the other side of the aisle, widening the gap of understanding even if we might actually agree on a lot. Lots of liberals have performed quiet acts of kindness and service in addition to their louder activism. Lots of Conservatives have been “allies” to people of color or other disadvantaged individuals, but they would never label their actions that way. I wish we could spend less time arguing about semantics and more time actually being allies for people who need help navigating uncharted waters whatever they look like.