Honestly, the prevalence of these inane, and frankly embarassing, rituals even on the left make me think there's some shared underlying cultural factor controlling for the success of over the top evangelical conservatives in the US.
The US is a society whose superego ran away with the proverbial ball and people of different backgrounds just look for different flavours of theatrical excess and moralising charlatans to deal with the debilitating trauma that this causes. This is my professional diagnosis.
Submissive gestures, renunciations, ritualised apologies, sacred vows and self-flagelation are both unbecoming for free beings and also easy and useless. They may relieve the unwarranted guilt of neurotics, but they don't change any social system or anyone's social position in it
If you want to do something useful and, indeed, morally required of you, you need to cut this vacuous garbage out, stand next to each other as equals and fight together for their freedom and for your freedom, even at the expense of your short and long-term interests.
The person forming a chain with you before the police does more in the fight for racial justice and police reform than a thousand of these yahoos publicly chanting that they have so checked their privilege and they are gonna be, like, the most attentive allies now uwu.
Talk is cheap. This talk is also cringe. Do better. Cut the theatrics, and start acting like equals fighting together for a common cause. If their justice isn't your own personal justice, if their injury is not felt as your own injury, you will never be genuinely anti-racist.
Politics of difference will never produce anything but inequality. They can not make sense of solidarity, a practice of equality prefiguring the social equality it is aiming for. Their conception of allyship is just a fragile ideal of benevolent concession in a rigid hierarchy.
And what does this get you? The free and equal strengthen each other through their solidarity. The dignity of one is the pride and self-respect that shields the dignity of the other, and vice versa. Servility weakens them both. What use is an ally that won't stand tall?
