I have taken to using the term “shit-eating allyism” to describe these sorts of emotional display. Shit-eating allyism has two main manifestations. On one hand, it consists of simpering declarations of deference, testaments to the oppressed groups’ superior and hitherto historically unexampled virtue, or laments about one’s own privileges, even when these have barely been enough to keep one alive. In its other form, shit-eating allyism names those occasions when a person of privilege suspends, at least rhetorically—most of the time it is only rhetorical—their own, or their family’s and community’s, claim to basic self-respect or human rights. (Consider, for example, a woman who regrets that she is bringing a white baby into the world and is willing to be quoted in Vogue to that effect.) Shit-eating allyism is often but not always associated with the more extreme forms of what Matt Bruenig calls “identitarian deference” and Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls “epistemic deference”: the idea that whiteness, maleness, or some other form of privilege has so corroded one’s ability to assess reality that any judgment marked as coming from the oppressed community in question, however outlandish, unsupported, or unrepresentative, would automatically be better than whatever judgment this person reaches after research and careful consideration.