Episode 4: When Allies Go Silent | Auntea-ology: The Antidote Dialogues

Have you ever had someone claim to have your back, only to realize they were just using you as a shield?

In Episode 4 of Auntea-ology: The Antidote Dialogues, hosts Sobia Ali-Faisal and Mueni Mutinda spill the tea on conditional solidarity. We're talking about the allies who post the right things, say the right words, and show up to the right meetings, but who vanish the moment your situation becomes complicated or standing with you might cost them something real.

In this episode:

• Sobia shares a story that will hit home for any leader who has been caught in the crossfire: as Director of EDI and Human Rights, she attempted to mediate a toxic workplace dynamic where bullying was being mistaken for vulnerability, and paid the price when her so-called allies went silent.
• We break down what happens when identity becomes a shield from accountability rather than a frame for understanding.
• We explore the moment an ally tells a leader, "Your feelings aren't important here" - and unpack what that really means.
• We ask the question nobody wants to ask: How often does performative allyship actually enable harm by refusing to see complexity?

Reflection Questions for You:

• Have you ever been the ally who went silent? What were you afraid of losing?
• Who have you essentialized - reduced to their identity instead of their humanity?
• What would it take for you to stay curious instead of choosing sides?
• If someone went silent on you, what would it take for you to trust again?

What You'll Walk Away With:

A clearer understanding of the difference between performance and practice. Permission to name conditional solidarity for what it is. And a framework for moving from optics to actual accountability.

Join the conversation deeper: www.seedroom.ca

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Music credits:

Intro Music from #Uppbeat:
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Break Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/hey-pluto/outlaws
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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:10

Have you ever had someone claim to have your back only to realize later they were just using your back as a shield? Welcome back to Ontiology, the Antidote Dialogues. I'm Mueni Mutinda.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

And I'm Sobia Ali Faisal.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Last time we talked about weaponized tears. This time we're talking about the allies who went silent when it cost them something. You know the ones. They post the right things, say the right words, show up to the right meetings. But the moment your situation gets complicated, the moment there's more than one marginalized person in the room and they have to actually think, they disappear. No message. No acknowledgement. Just nothing.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Sobia, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's uh it's a nice warm summer day. And um, yeah, I've had a restful morning, so I'm doing well. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, I'm also doing well. Thanks. It's raining over here. It's actually been quite humid. So blue sky and then gray sky, and then you know, the sky opens and rain falls and just that cycle. But yeah, I'm I'm doing well, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Okay, so tea's ready. Let's talk about conditional solidarity. The people who claim to be in solidarity with you until your existence becomes complicated, until there's more than one marginalized person in the room and they have to actually think, until standing with you might cost them something real. We're spilling the tea on the silence of people who said they had your back. Why essentialized allyship is just another way of avoiding accountability? And what happens when your allies were never really yours? Sobia, I know you have a story to share on this issue.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yeah, this is uh this is something that still sits with me today. So when I was the director of EDI and human rights at UPEI, and I've talked about that experience before in the last episode, I had multiple staff under me, but in one particular uh section of that department, I had four staff, three of whom were in their early to mid-20s and uh they were racialized, and the fourth person was in their 30s and they were white. And this fourth staff member was someone who was incredibly knowledgeable, but they were very humble about it. They were the type of person that, you know, if they saw something wrong, or if they heard someone say something that was problematic, or if they felt like there was a gap in someone's knowledge that they could fill, they would speak up. Not to show off, but just because that's who they are. They just felt like it's the right thing to do. Uh, the other three, they felt showing up every time the fourth person shared something. They would interpret it as an attack, you know, as if the person was trying to make the three of them look bad. I truly believe it was their own insecurities. You know, that voice in your head that says, You're not enough, you don't know enough. What are you doing in this space? And we're gonna talk about that topic in a later episode of this podcast. So I think that's what was going on, but they projected it all onto this one person. And what they ended up doing is they ended up engaging in workplace bullying through exclusion. I tried everything, I brought in outside help, and that person tried to facilitate conversations, but nothing really worked. I think they were just kind of stuck in their own positionality and stuck believing that they were in the right and they did everything right. Eventually they all ended up turning on me because they felt like I wouldn't take their side as another racialized person. They said decided I was the problem or at least one of the problems. Um, eventually they all left in some capacity or another. Then I was fired. No warning, no due process, completely unethical. And I spoke about that very particular issue in our last episode. So for those who don't know the story, feel free to go back and listen to that. But what happened next was that my so-called allies on campus disappeared. The thing is that some of the people on campus, specifically my white allies, they were close friends with those three young staff members. And even though when I was first hired, they were champions of me being hired. They were um very supportive of my work and my approach to my work, and very much supportive of my knowledge and all of that. When I got fired, there was nothing. No message, no acknowledgement. One of them even unfriended me on Facebook and then blocked me. But before that, before I was fired, when I was still trying to hold things together, I went to one of those allies to get some advice. You know, I told them about the tensions and what was happening with the three staff, and their response was basically, well, you know, you're the director, so it's your responsibility. Their safety is what matters, and your feelings aren't really important here. I mean, that's paraphrased, but that was basically the sentiment that I got. At that time, I just thought they were giving me bad advice. But then when I thought about it more, I realized they weren't trying to help me. They were just trying to get me to absorb the harm. So the three of them wouldn't have to be held accountable for bullying the fourth staff member. They wanted me to take it all, all of it, so that they wouldn't have to feel any discomfort, any responsibility, or any consequence. They were actively shielding the three of them from accountability and using me as a shield. They didn't know the full story, they didn't ask, they were not interested in hearing the full story. They'd already made up their mind and decided that they were right. When I tried to explain, they didn't listen. They just assumed, because the three staff were racialized, younger, and maybe in their mind more vulnerable, that they must be right. And I, the director, who's also racialized, by the way, must be the one to sacrifice. And this is what we call essentialized allyship. Reduce everything to identity. Racialized equals good. Whoever has the title is suspect. There's no curiosity in this space. There's no room for complexity, there's no actual investigation into what happened. My allyship was conditional on me performing the role that they assigned me. The selfless leader who absorbs harm so others don't have to. The moment I became complicated, the moment I said that I actually matter too, they went silent. And in the end, that is not allyship. That's an agenda of saviorism.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

So this is a lot. And I I'm just I'm just trying to process all what you just said, which is like so much happened in that last part uh of your experience with your colleagues, with your direct reports. You know, I think a lot of us have been on both sides of this. The person who went silent and the person who was left in the silence. And what I'm hearing you say is that conditional allyship isn't actually allyship. It's optics. It's people wanting to feel like they're on the right side without ever having to risk anything, without ever having to sit in the discomfort of not knowing who the quote unquote good guy is. Is there even such a thing as a good guy or a good person?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah, it's like they want to stay comfortable, right? Like they're still looking for comfort at the end of the day. They don't really want to be uncomfortable and they don't want to be in any complicated spaces. They want everything to be clear. They want like an ABC of allyship, you know, how to do allyship, step A, step B, step C, and so on. And they just want to be able to follow that. Just give me the map and I will follow the map. And that's something that I find to be very simplistic in allyship. It's it's conditional. You can't have a cookie-cutter approach to allyship because that kind of allyship is definitely conditional. And to me, this also speaks to the idea of trust. Like if your allyship is conditional, then that means you don't actually trust the people that you're in allyship with. Because being an ally is not speaking for people, not being a savior, it's being alongside people or following people's lead. But if you don't trust people, then you don't want to do that, right? You want to get in there and tell people what to do. In my situation, if they trusted me when I first started the job, and they trusted my ability to lead, they trusted my knowledge. Yet when it came to that situation, they didn't trust my ability to be able to understand what was going on. But the thing is, if you are a big supporter of me and getting the job in the first place, if you trusted me to be a leader in the first place, and the moment I do things in a way that you don't agree with me or you don't necessarily understand and you pull that allyship, that means you never actually trusted me to begin with, right? I recently heard someone say, if you only respect me when you agree with me and you don't respect me when you disagree with me, well, then you never respected me in the first place. And I think it's the same thing. If you only trust me when you agree with me, but then as soon as I do something in a way that you don't necessarily understand or maybe agree with, and then you pull your trust, then you never trusted me to begin with. You didn't trust me to be able to know how to navigate that situation or read that situation. And that's not real respect.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

No, it's not. And what it sounds like is in actuality, you can have that role, that director role, that leadership role. But as soon as you start exercising your agency within that role, oh, and if I don't agree with the direction of your agency, then I am justified in then engaging in this behavior where it's exclusionary, it's it's very small-minded in terms of, well, it has to fit within my frame of understanding and and my way of doing allyship.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Yeah, and I don't think they realize that that's just another form of white saviorism. Like that is literally just another form of saviorism because it's it's coming in and saying, I know the way to save you. You don't know how. You're choosing not to follow my way, so I'm gonna just abandon you. I mean, saviorism isn't just like going to another country and building, you know, wells or whatever. It's also in those daily interactions at work or in our personal lives. That's also saviorism.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yes, it is. Also, you can only be saved in the way that I say you can be saved.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Exactly. That just sounds so ridiculous. Like it sounds so you can only be saved in the way that I tell you to be saved, right? Like a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

It's paternalism in practice, and when people don't realize that they're they're reinforcing that. You talked about sometimes people go silent, and that is not an expression of them being villains, it's actually fear, it's confusion, and they're operating from a point of not having a whole story in view, they've only got a part of it. Can you can you say some more about that?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, people will go silent because they're scared, they're confused, you know, they've been told their whole lives that they just have to support the right identity groups and they'll be good people, you know, support racialized people, support queer people. But then a situation comes along in which there's a conflict between, say, two racialized people or two queer people or two marginalized people, and all of a sudden they don't know what to do because they've been told to support a particular group, but now both sides of the conflict are, you know, say racialized and they just fall apart. And instead of staying curious, what they do is they just pick a side, and it's usually the side that they're closer to or the side that they want to be closer to, right? I mean, in my situation, I think what happened was that they just picked the side of the people who they're just closer to and close friends with, and actively, you know, turned against me. I mean, one person even went to HR to complain about our department in their solidarity with their friends and never thought about the fact that you're you're going to HR to complain about the leadership of a racialized person, knowing that racialized leaders and institutions like universities are under way more scrutiny than white leaders. And I thought, here I am thinking you're supposed to be an ally to racialized people, but this kind of complexity is just too difficult for them to handle. And to just judge us based on that one particular marginalized identity is really reducing us. And it really doesn't allow for the viewing of the entire situation and the complexity of the entire situation and to take all the factors into account. Everything is reduced into something that is just so unidimensional. I mean, there's more to all of us than just being racialized, it's much more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yeah, as as you're talking, I mean, it also is becoming very clear to me that people kind of categorize and and they go further to kind of remove all of those other complex parts of all of who you are and go down, drill down to the one thing and then make a judgment, which in a sense is centering their comfort. And you know, you talk that you know, these people lack curiosity. It's not even, oh, I I let's let's have a conversation about what's happening. You know, it's somebody coming and saying, I feel justified in going to HR to report about another leader in another department where I don't have all the information, the full story. And I I somehow feel justified in expressing this, and that my judgment, my perspective is the correct one, it's the appropriate one, and what I'm seeing is the truth, it's the full story, and and that's simplistic, right? It's dehumanizing, as you're saying, and it hurts.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

It hurts people. Exactly. It's simplistic, it's dehumanizing. And on their part, it's arrogant and it's still saviorism, right? It's this idea that they know better. And you can't be an ally if you have that attitude, if you still believe that you know better, because at the end of the day, you will believe that you're going to enforce your views on people. Um, you can't be an ally if you believe that you have more knowledge and you're better capable of understanding systems of oppression or relationships. If that is your approach, then you're not an ally. You were never an ally to begin with. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

And one of the interesting traps I think we need to name is that according to this person's assessment, the quote unquote vulnerability profile actually captures this idea that the people that fit that category are incapable of doing harm. Which is anyone incapable of doing harm?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Nope. And that's that's that is such a good point because it it really makes it difficult for those of us who are within those marginalized communities to hold our own communities accountable when outsiders come in and say, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, that is not possible. That is not possible. You're you're interfering with our ability to hold each other accountable, and that's not fair. That's just not fair.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Yeah, it's interference. Again, going back to I feel the sense that I need to step in and save people because the people in those positions of power over there are, I believe, are incapable of doing the work themselves. And that is refusing to take accountability for even believing that you have the right to step into uh a situation um like that. There seems to be this move from somebody has to be blamed for what is happening. So you, as a director of this department, you are seen as the one that will have to take the fall for what is happening to your vulnerable staff, because fortunately or unfortunately, you don't fit in the quality qualification of you are vulnerable as well. I mean, we can unpack that term vulnerability, but for the purposes of this story, this is a category that's been placed on people because somebody determined that that's what was happening to these staff members was not fair and right, that's their own judgment. They don't know the full story. But what I'm trying to get at is this idea that somehow because they've decided to take on this judgment under the guise of allyship, they're actually removing themselves from being held accountable and they are wanting somebody else to take that accountability from them so they don't have to deal with it. Does it make sense?

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah, it does. And they put that on me because I was a leader in that situation. I was the director. And there's a certain responsibility, uh, certainly with being a leader in a position, you know, being a director, there's a there's certain responsibilities that you have to take on. But that doesn't mean that you dehumanize yourself. I mean, you are very capable of being harmed. And people who report to you are capable of harming. I think we have to understand that leadership isn't just a yes or no situation. It's not a dichotomous situation where you either are a leader or you're not. And if you're a leader, you have all the power, and if you're not a leader, you have no power. I mean, now if you're like, you know, a white man who's in a leadership position and you get paid really well, yeah. I mean, in that situation, you're pretty well protected. There's not a lot that can harm you, right? There's not a lot that can harm you. Even if you're a white woman in a leadership position who gets paid well, you know, you're you're pretty safe too. There may be a few more things that leave you vulnerable, but overall, you know, you're pretty safe. But I was in a leadership position and I was fired from that position. So I was certainly not safe. I didn't have that kind of power that people would assume that a lot of leaders do. And I always knew I didn't because I'm racialized. I was speaking out about Palestine, and so that always put me in a vulnerable situation. So leadership itself is not a yes or no dichotomous kind of situation. Certain populations who are in leadership positions are not going to be as protected as other people who are in leadership positions, mainly like white people. So leaders are not all the same. We do not certainly have the obligation to take harm and to accept harm to us. Certainly, those of us who are more vulnerable positions, I think need to protect ourselves more and refuse that dehumanization of ourselves, for myself, you know, as a Muslim woman in that role. And then to on top of that have others, especially so-called allies, asking me to dehumanize myself even further. So I think we need to question that idea that leaders are not capable of being harmed.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Yeah, and when you experience something like this, where like the rubber meets the road in terms of you going through something and experiencing something, something painful like what you went through, where you're a racialized leader. And because you're a leader, even though you're racialized, you are cast as the oppressor because of your title. And this is something that resonates with me because it has been my experience as well, where the conversation moves from looking at people as complex human beings and through intersectional lens into actually, this is about identity now. This is me versus you. This is who wears this hat versus who wears this hat. And we're not going to look at anything else. And, you know, when you think about it, the gifts, the breadth and depth of opportunities and, you know, richness of experience that we can exchange and learning from one another, that is lost when we lose the ability to look at people and appreciate them as complex human beings. Multiple things can be true at the same time and to learn to sit in that complexity even when we don't know what to do with that. And it's it's going back to your point about this lack of curiosity actually does a lot more harm for all of us. We all lose if we lose our sense of curiosity, especially when it comes to these complex human relations.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that is the antidote. Curiosity is the antidote to what we're talking about today, the problem of performative allyship. Don't reduce people down to just their identity. Understand that there's a lot more complexity to us all as humans and stay curious about that, right? Like really be willing to be wrong, be willing to be uncomfortable, but still have curiosity. Asking, like, what do I not know here? What am I missing? Um, who am I essentializing, right? And and whose complexity have I erased because it was easier for me to put them into a box? Those questions are incredibly important, you know, and it's it that's accountability. And if you were silent on someone, you have to name it. You have to go back and say, you know, I failed you. I was scared. I chose myself, and that wasn't okay. So that's the work. It's not performance of allyship, it's the practice and the willingness to be wrong and to feel that discomfort of being wrong and then learning from it and moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yes, that's the work. That's the unglamorous work. There's nothing glamorous about that. That's the internal work, and that's why we're here. So we have some messy questions to leave with you this week. And here is the first one. Have you ever been the ally who went silent? What were you afraid of losing? Who have you essentialized? By that we mean reduced their identity instead of their humanity? What would it take for you to stay curious instead of choosing sides? Yes. And finally, if someone went silent on you, what would it take for you to trust again? Not naively, but genuinely.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

So we started by asking about the allies who go silent. And here's what I'm sitting with. Conditional solidarity isn't solidarity. That's a fair weather friendship with better branding. The people who really have your back don't disappear when things get complicated. They lean in, they ask questions, they sit in the mess with you.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

Next time, we're talking about something that leaves scars. When you tell the truth and they bury your report. When power says, we value your voice while locking the door. If this episode stirred something, if you've been the one left in the silence, or you're realizing you've been the one who went quiet, we've built spaces for that work. Our Ontology monthly gatherings, the online course and coaching and consulting for those ready to move from performance to practice. And there are links in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

We also have many resources on our website, seedroom.ca. So please do check those out. And if you want to talk about what landed, reach out. We're at info at seedroom.ca. Free discovery calls, no pitch, just a conversation. Thanks for pulling up a chair. Come frustrated, leave naming it. Stay messy, stay curious, stay loving.