Ally or Abolitionist: Moving Beyond Performative Allyship to Structural Justice

“I think we need allies and I think we need abolitionists,” Angela Davis told the Indianapolis Recorder, and in that single answer she reframed a debate that has moved well past questions of inclusion. The civil rights scholar and activist added that an abolitionist’s vision “is not so much about tearing down as it is about building up,” arguing that reimagining society requires both protest work and the deeper labor of dismantling the systems that produce inequity in the first place.

As the national debate over race enters a new phase, communities are confronting whether efforts to address historic inequities constitute progress or preferential treatment, and whether Black identity, representation, and access to institutional power are being contested in the name of nondiscrimination. The Indianapolis Recorder posed Davis’s question — what does the “Black liberation” fight most require now, an ally or an abolitionist? — as the first installment in a two-part series, and put the same question to writers from Archiving the Avenue, a Mellon-funded case study on the cultural cornerstones of Indianapolis’s Indiana Avenue cultural district, part of a public humanities initiative led by GANGGANG.

The Moderate and the Cost of Silence

The series grounds the distinction in history. In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. named what he saw as one of the greatest obstacles to Black freedom: the white moderate more devoted to order than to justice, who preferred a peace without tension to a peace made possible by justice. That warning, the Recorder reports, still bites because injustice survives not only through open hostility but through delay, institutional deference, and the insistence that those demanding change do so without disturbing anyone else’s comfort.

Mariah Ivey, a writer for Archiving the Avenue, put it plainly: “We want to do a little something, but we still want to … go back to our home. … Go back to our comfort.” A moderate can be an ally, the series argues, but moderation is not proof of allyship. Manon Voice, the project’s lead editor, described performative allyship as the safe space “where you can say, oh, I’m an ally, because I voted this way … because I sent some money … because like I showed up.” Real allyship, she said, is demonstrated through conduct — using influence to confront discrimination and support the agency of those affected — and it becomes consequential when it carries professional, political, or social costs. Voice called that “when you put reputation, something of value on the line.”

“Because an ally, there is some safety around that. There is a choice there, right? Because you can still decide to disengage,” Ivey said.

Silence, the writers caution, is not always complicity — people face genuine risks, and disagreement over strategy does not make someone an opponent of justice. But silence from people with the power to intervene has consequences regardless of intent, and when those who profess equality stay quiet as protections are weakened, the people already most vulnerable are left to contest the changes with fewer allies in positions of influence.

Who Built the Table?

Davis’s answer points to two related but distinct responsibilities. An ally stands with people confronting injustice and uses whatever influence they possess to challenge discriminatory treatment. An abolitionist asks whether the structures producing that injustice must be transformed. Of abolitionism, Ivey said, “It’s not only more radical, but it’s a commitment to lifelong work.”

The distinction matters most when an institution presents a structural problem as an individual one. If a community lacks meaningful representation, an ally might advocate for inclusion within the existing governance system; an abolitionist also asks who designed that system, who controls its decision-making authority, and whether its structure permits equitable distribution of power. The abolitionist question is not simply who gets a seat at the table — it is who built the table, who sets its terms, and whether those invited have authority to change what happens there.

“Like, it means to grab something by the roots. … So, there is a dismantling process that comes with, I think, being an abolitionist,” Voice said.

Eunice Trotter, another Archiving the Avenue writer, added a historical caution: even the original abolitionists warrant scrutiny. “They’re anti-slavery. They’re anti-wrongdoing, but they’re not necessarily pro-Black,” Trotter said. “… They helped us get out of slavery, were they necessarily pro- us?” The struggle, she implied, requires people willing to thoroughly examine the help they receive.

Modern allies must prove they are not what King called moderates — people who challenge injustice even when it unsettles institutions and relationships they benefit from. And abolitionists must question the structures that make exclusion possible and imagine alternatives that distribute power more equitably, holding both accountable to the people whose freedom they claim to support. King understood that the demand for order can become a way of postponing justice; Davis’s abolitionist tradition asks whether the institutions being reformed can deliver the freedom envisioned at all. The series is expected to continue the examination.

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