Performative Allyship Didn't Start in 2020
The Call From Inside the House: Spectacle, Sacrifice, and the Altar of Whiteness
It’s easy to believe that hollow declarations of solidarity, hashtags without action, and public tears without change are a new problem. But if you look at the Gilded Age—the time loop we’re still trapped inside, you’ll see that this performance has always been part of the script.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white newspapers routinely condemned lynching as “tragic,” only to frame the violence as “a necessary lesson” in the very next breath. Politicians denounced mob justice in speeches while quietly empowering the mobs in policy. The Ku Klux Klan cast itself as a guardian of morality, documenting whippings and raids as “discipline” rather than terror. Even then, white America wanted to appear virtuous while maintaining the very structures of violence it pretended to oppose.
That double-speak is the ancestor of today’s allyship theater. It’s the same mask whiteness has always worn… performing righteousness while feeding itself through ritualized violence. Which is why when Charlie Kirk said death should be “televised” as “initiation,” he wasn’t speaking innovation. He was echoing an old tradition: public punishment as spectacle, initiation, and enforcement of whiteness.
Yesterday and Today of the Media
The media has always been part of the performance. In the Gilded Age, newspapers condemned lynching in one line only to defend it in the next as “a salutary warning” or “a lesson not soon forgotten.” That wasn’t reporting; it was justification. And today, we see the same double-speak. White political violence is softened as the act of a “lone wolf,” a “troubled young man,” a “mental health crisis,” while Black protest is criminalized as a threat. Then and now, the press has staged violence as unfortunate but inevitable, tragic but instructive. This is not new. It is on brand. What has changed is not the script, only the stage, no longer in shadows, but in primetime.
So we must tell the truth plainly:
This isn’t only about racism. This is about whiteness consuming itself to preserve its own hierarchy. It is about internal policing, who is the right kind of white, who is disposable, who can be sacrificed.
Black folks cannot continue to be the scapegoat in this cycle. Our oppression becomes the juxtaposition that allows white people to avoid looking inward, to avoid reckoning with the violence in their own house. The threats to HBCUs show how quickly the spectacle is redirected toward us. But the reality is this: Kirk’s death is not proof of Black danger. It is proof of whiteness eating itself alive.
You’ve seen the performance. Now it’s time to strip away the mask.
Behind the curtain of allyship theater is the long history of how the Klan policed whiteness itself, how the press turned violence into morality plays, and why Kirk’s death is part of a ritual older than any soundbite.
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The historical receipts the media doesn’t want to revisit.
The parallels between yesterday’s lynching spectacles and today’s calls for televised executions.
The extended Practice Your Praxis guide with journal prompts and actionable steps for white men, white women, and Black/POC readers for embodied (un)learning
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