We began this week of the Spring semester by commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 15. This day is a federal holiday and national day of service—a “day on, not a day off.” It’s a day that offers a time to reflect and start your year in the spirit of commitment to making just changes in your communities. However, these changes cannot be made with a one-time commitment, hence, allies should consider pursuing long-term and sustainable efforts for equity by establishing habits of allyship. The definition of habit is “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.” A habit is a daily action that makes you who you are; thus, sometimes, you do it even without realizing that you are doing it. Furthermore, you do not feel stressed by the habit because it’s natural to you. In today's ally tips, we will provide ideas and suggestions to help you explore daily actions for equity that you can develop as habits.
Allyship as a habit
There are countless sayings to suggest that establishing healthy habits is challenging but pivotal to making a significant change. In particular, to bring about a lasting change in one’s life, it becomes crucial to develop new habits that align with one’s life vision . From the neuroscience perspective, “habits are the automated behaviors that our brains like because they save time and energy”. In other words, when our brain recognizes that a specific action is beneficial, it becomes a repeatedly used shortcut – an ingrained habit that one does without any extra effort.
As allyship is a life-long journey for promoting equity and social justice, practicing allyship can be more sustainable if we think of it as analogous to developing new habits. If allyship is extra work, you will constantly feel burdened by doing it, even though you know it is important for promoting equity. Thus, to help promote habits of allyship that are routinized, we suggest reading about Bryant D. Nielson’s strengthening habit circuits work. Nielson writes, “To break habits, merely using willpower to resist temptation is often inadequate. We must actively rewire the brain’s habit circuitry by strengthening new pathways. This requires repetition and consistency in the early stages to encode new routines.”1 This can be translated into the fact that we have to identify and practice regular actions for allyship that we can repeat consistently.
8 steps to establish habits of ally ship
Here are some steps and examples you can follow to develop your own allyship habits. Feel free to print this out, try to write your plan for each step, and put it up near where you can see it often to put them into practice throughout this year.
Weekly Resources
Web: 21 Day Challenge – Continuing the 21-Day Equity Habit-Building Challenge originally initiated by Eddie Moore Jr., Debby Irving , and Marguerite Penick-Parks, this website offers various 21-day challenge kits and tracking sheets to help individuals develop habits of allyship in their daily lives.
Article: 7 Ways to Practice Active Allyship – Towards the end, this article provides a list of examples individuals take for granted—privilege. These tangible examples help you identify your sources of privilege and ask to use them to lift others.
Video: Our Whitewashed History – In this short video, Debby Irving effectively explicates how inequity has spread widely in the U.S. and offers insights into what histories allies can seek to learn more.