I think the way that rules for allies are expressed in criticism can make them sound more universal and more unfair than they are, like when someone’s criticising rules like, “go educate yourself”.

I don’t deny they’re often phrased like that. But because oppressed people as a whole have very limited powers to enforce rules past the point where people in privileged classes can just walk away, I don’t think in practice our rules actually take those forms, regardless of how they’re phrased.

I don’t even see them as rules, because I don’t think we can set rules. The way I see them is:

I don’t recognise the right privileged people feel to demand that I stop what I’m doing to educate them.

I recognise the right of other marginalised people to refuse to provide education to privileged people for any reason.

I don’t recognise the right privileged people feel to demand praise/special treatment for not hurting me, or to set the terms of how marginalised people should treat them based on a currency model of activism (“I deposited two good deeds so you must forgive two bad ones”).

I support other marginalised people in their exercise of physical, emotional and spiritual self-defence and in setting their own terms for acceptance, praise and forgiveness of privileged people.

I offer practical solidarity to all marginalised people who have a similar set of principles to these, and ask for solidarity in return.

That’s all it can be, really. My focus is on objecting to invasive/oppressive behaviours of privileged people and in supporting marginalised people in taking steps towards, at our own discretion, self-care and self-determination.

None of that says that marginalised people can’t provide education - it’s not in my power to say that, I wouldn’t want to say that, and anyway there’s both a tonne of education out there already and a huge body of people who are perfectly happy to provide it at appropriate times.

But I do see privileged people demanding education in situations where, to provide that education, everybody else would have to stop what they were doing and re-center on the privileged person, then enter into a long and painful discussion which will likely have an unhappy ending. Women of colour have said again and again that the requirement to explain their oppression to the oppressor is a key component of oppression itself.

And I think that, among marginalised groups, there often is a huge appreciation for people who recognise us and treat us as human beings and who take on some of the political work. But I also see a keen awareness among my sisters of the difference between “helping” and “taking over” as well as a weary suspicion born of experience.

I think much of it comes down to, “If you ask you don’t get”, when “ask” is transformed by systems of privilege into “demand”. It is sad that the long history of behaviour in bad faith by privileged people means that many individual marginalised people choose to set our barriers so high. But it’s not our fault for setting our barriers where we need them.

The people to hold accountable are every white person who’s ever derailed a meeting by refusing to allow it to continue until somebody explains to their satisfaction why something was racist while completely lacking any understanding of structural racism, and every man who’s ever used his history in feminist or leftist organising to excuse his mistreatment of women.

And even if you usually feel comfortable educating, praising, forgiving, understanding and endlessly repeating, maybe there’ll be a day when you just don’t feel like doing it one more time. When that happens, you can say the magic words, “I don’t have to educate you”, or, “That’s not good enough, I’m still angry”; and when you say them, I’ll have your back.

Please have mine when I do the same.