If nothing else, I appreciate the honesty of this article. You can certainly get deeper into the idea of what an 'ally' really is; no doubt ally is a word who's meaning has changed over the last few years. To that end, it now means different things to different people.

But in terms of its 'purpose', I agree that there certainly seems to be a sense of self gratification that stems from it. You can quietly support a cause without labelling yourself an ally, or you can loudly proclaim yourself an ally without doing anything for the cause. There is something to be said about the loudest people often doing the least, perhaps because they desperately want to be accepted by the movement but lack the drive to actually do anything meaningful (maybe this is too cynical, who knows).

On the whole though, I definitely agree with the sentiment. But I can try to provide a counter point too:

You could certainly argue that simply calling yourself an ally *is* a form of activism in certain contexts. For instance, regarding BLM, for a vast majority of America's history black people were either slaves, second class citizens, or segregated from the rest of society. The legacy of that still lives on in many ways in portions of the country. So, while calling yourself a white ally in Portland OR might not be a big deal, saying the same thing in some neighbourhoods of the deep south certainly would be. Similarly, homophobia is still very common among certain social groups as well. In these spaces, calling yourself an LGBTQ ally would not be an easy task and bring about a certain amount of backlash and possible isolation.

Not true in all places of course, but if you are a marginalized person seeing these shows of support, in some places, that could in of itself be fairly profound!