Excerpt from the Preface to Becoming an Ally, Fourth Edition, 2025

The first edition of Becoming an Ally was published in 1994. By then, I had been teaching about structural oppression — racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ethnocentrism, colonialism and its many other forms — for almost ten years as part of workshops and courses on community development. These learning opportunities were organized in partnership with grassroots organizations and co-led with experienced community facilitators. The program culminated in the Henson College Certificate in Community Development, which I co-taught with Jeanne Fay. Most of our participants were leaders in struggling communities. Each knew all too well their own experience of oppression — as African Nova Scotians living in public housing or the historic Black communities on the outskirts of the city; as single mums struggling for their own and their children’s survival on social assistance; as Mi’kmaw people dealing with intergenerational trauma and ongoing colonialism; as 2SLGBTQIA+ young people homeless after rejection by their families; as Deaf people working hard to follow our rather unstructured discussions by lip-reading. It took longer for them to see each other’s oppression. An African Nova Scotian participant might look at a single mum on social assistance and see someone with white privilege, while the young mum would look back and see someone with a job. We occasionally had to stop discussions from going in the direction of “my oppression is worse than yours.” 

In the 1980s there was language, theory and teaching resources for discussing structural oppression viewed from the oppressed side but almost nothing to help us explore the privileged side. I hadn’t grasped the concept of privilege when I started teaching community development. I had a keen sense of my oppression as a woman and as a Lesbian and had a vague idea that men and heterosexual people benefitted from it. It was my Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotian colleagues and students who taught me that racism works the same way; it gives me advantages.

We quickly found ways to discuss these issues in class and started experimenting with learning exercises. Participants began building powerful networks of solidarity, understanding and actively supporting each other’s campaigns, projects and demonstrations and joining forces on their common issue of poverty. These discussions and teaching experiments led to the first edition of Becoming an Ally, and here it is now, in its fourth edition and still relevant, unfortunately. 

There has been great progress in thirty years, certainly. Most towns fly rainbow flags during Pride month, and there are rainbow benches in front of schools. Same-sex couples can marry. Public events open with recognition that the land was never ceded by the Indigenous Peoples who have lived on it for tens of thousands of years. Even in our small, rural community, 400 people came out to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Along with others across North America, we heard the names of hundreds of other racialized people who died at the hands of police and began to learn about the shameful rate of incarceration of Black and Indigenous people. Women, albeit mostly white women, are entering advanced education, employment and the professions at a rate my generation finds surprising and my mother’s generation couldn’t even imagine. Who could have imagined any of this in 1994? 

On the other hand, each of these struggles has met resistant, structural bedrock. Progress on 2SLGBTQIA+ issues has run aground on issues of gender diversity, with battles over gender-neutral washrooms, young people having the right to choose their pronouns at school, and Drag Queens reading stories to children. Draconian anti-Gay measures have been put into law in Hungary (2021), Uganda (2023), Russia and Lithuania (2022), Poland (2020), Ghana and Bulgaria (2024) and the United States (2024), giving permission for growing violence against 2SLGBTQIA+ people. 

Racist treatment is still something Indigenous Peoples face every day. Indigenous women and girls are murdered at six times the rate of non-Indigenous women and, when Indigenous groups try to claim sovereignty over the resources of their lands in the face of industrial mining, fishing and forestry, the battles become difficult and violent, with some involving police surveillance, arrests and harassment. 

Anti-Black racist backlash is obvious, with unapologetic hate and violence in word and action all over the world, the rise of violent white supremacist groups and the open participation in public life of white supremacist politicians and leaders, able to draw many votes. 

Women, especially white women, may be involved in postsecondary education and the workforce in unprecedented numbers, but women still earn 89 percent of men’s income on average, with the figure falling to 59 percent for racialized women. The proportion of domestic labour done by women and the number of women at high levels of institutional leadership have not changed. Gendered violence, trafficking and the feminization of poverty are growing, with racialized women much more vulnerable and lagging far behind on education, employment and institutional leadership. Decades of gains in women’s and 2SLGBTQIA+ people’s right to control our own bodies, particularly access to abortion, is under attack.

Forty years into the rise of neoliberalism and in an era of extreme backlash against the progress we have made since the 1960s, sadly, this book is still relevant, although I think it has a new role. When I was working on the first edition, I found nothing written about allies in the sense of people working to end forms of oppression that give them privilege until, after the book was published, I found a small pamphlet of a speech by lawyer and 2SLGBTQIA+ activist Barbara Findlay, published in 1991. Thirty years later, the word “ally” is everywhere in anti-oppression work — used, misused, embraced, rejected and interpreted in many different ways. I can’t keep up with all that is being written. It does seem like a good time to sort through the flood of information and opinion and try to boil it down into a new summary of how we can all contribute to justice by fighting our own oppression and, when a form of oppression gives us privilege, acting in solidarity as allies.