The advice offered is similar to ideas I’ve run across on a number of college campuses. And seeing them summed up made me realize how emphatically I disagree.

Here is the full text:

Being an ally is not a badge you wear or something that you can call yourself; it is a verb, not a noun. Enacting a life of accountability and ownership over your own domination and privileges is the only way you can exhibit allyship. In order to be reflective on the ways in which you collude with systems of domination, you must look within. We cannot look at the world and say it is messed up and fix it without working on ourselves. The whole point of coming to college is to learn and grow. What's a better way than to start by looking inward?

To be clear, I don't object to college students looking inward. They ought to reflect on their privileges, their flaws, and their place in the world.

But the surest path to being a good ally is looking outward; it’s possible to look at the world, say it’s messed up, and help fix it without “working on ourselves;” and there are many ways to “exhibit allyship,” most of them more important than inwardly claiming “ownership over your domination,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

The high school volunteers mentioned above and the special-needs community with whom they allied are both better off for the fact that service to others through outward action was emphasized, rather than inward reflection on privilege. What a pity it would’ve been if someone would’ve discouraged the counselors from going out into the world to help people until they “worked on themselves.”

* * *

A few miles from the Claremont Colleges, there is a soup kitchen that serves the homeless; a large community of immigrant laborers who would be better off with a bank account than patronizing the Checks Cashed establishments that proliferate nearby; and plenty of people, many of them black or Hispanic, who’ve filed excessive force complaints against the L.A. or San Bernardino County sheriff’s departments. Even modest effort to remedy any of those problems would, it seems to me, be more valuable than turning inward to reflect on one’s privileges.

Because I attended Pomona College as an undergraduate, I've known and interviewed a lot of people at the Claremont Colleges who regarded themselves as good allies. Some began a campaign to unionize dining-hall workers and to raise their wages. Others pushed the City of Claremont to investigate the death of a young black man named Irving Landrum, who was killed by the Claremont Police Department. Still others volunteered at that soup kitchen in downtown Pomona. Some of my peers who fought for those causes were inwardly reflective. Others not so much.

All were all better allies than many people I've known who frequently made mention of their privilege, or "owned" the legacy of oppression perpetrated by other people who share their race, gender, or religion, but never lifted a finger to actually help anyone, or fight any specific injustice in a concrete way beyond "calling it out."