“Our abilities to practice social solidarity despite the realities of the political present exist because of our strong relationships and commitments to collective liberation.” -Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson
In the past decade or so, there’s been an increase in the use of the term “self-care.” What was once a medical concept focused on supporting healthy practices for mental health patients, has shifted into an 11 billion dollar industry. The term, as we know it today, feels eerily suspicious given that it relies on capitalist notions of care. This emphasis on commercialized care detracts from what self-care actually is: the practice of doing what matters for our own health and safety.
While I understand the pull of self-care, and think it’s necessary, I don’t believe in approaching care from a place of individualism. I also acknowledge that for many people, caring for one’s self and/ or loved ones is monumental, especially in the midst of anti-Blackness, classism, racism, poverty and transphobia.
COVID-19 has had devastating impacts on Black communities and the overwhelming push for retail therapy as a means to feel more in control is real. Feelings of hopelessness coupled with a sense of collective isolation are experiences many folks are having, myself included.
Those feelings of hopelessness have given me time to re-examine the ways American, individualistic values have seeped into Black life. And perhaps those values have prevented us from acknowledging that we’ve always prioritized and practiced communal care in our families, neighborhoods and relationships.
If we’re being real, community care isn’t a radical, innovative, or marketable trend in the Black community. We’ve been taking care of our own for centuries, and that care doesn’t end during a pandemic. Cultural attitudes in the United States have been deemed overwhelmingly individualistic in terms of parental care, relationships and community action. And yet, twenty percent of Black folks are providing care for a loved one at an external location from the home, and 34 percent of us are partaking in home-based family caregiving. We’re most likely to care for non-relatives as well.
The narrative that Black folks are not capable of providing specialized care is supported by state sanctioned violence, corporate greed and anti-Blackness. These systems often pit Black folks against each other in order to determine who “deserves” aid. But we know how to take care of each other.
Sharing our resources, supporting our folks with childcare and food are ways we’ve continued to aid our communities. We are the original grassroots organizers who’ve normalized non-corporatized assistance that’s mutually beneficial and doesn’t rely on outside sources.
Mutual aid networks don’t make it a requirement to perform who is most deserving. They support marginalized folks getting their needs met while acknowledging that we rarely are the intended recipient of aid or grants from outside sources.
Creating a network of trust and solidarity in the local community is a necessary component in building resilient mutual aid practices. While the government currently appears as if it’s willing to support us with it’s offer for stimulus checks, I’m skeptical that it will actually do the work to ensure our communities are safer and more economically free. I don’t trust it to finally prioritize the needs of Black poor folks.
In the midst of mutual aid offers, GoFundMes and requests for financial support, it’s even more important that if we are able, we give money for folks to buy what they need without requiring that they prove it. When we rely on unnatural preferences for individualism and false narratives that poor people are lazy, we limit ourselves and further perpetuate anti-Blackness.
When Black folks with higher incomes combat this narrative by actively looking for ways to get plugged into our communities, we begin to realize that classism has never served us. And while it takes some of us way too long to get here, my hope is that we commit to distributing those resources we so actively hoard as a measure of our worth. We begin to give back, not as a representation of our goodness, but as an indication that none of us have ever been more “deserving” than others.
Mutual aid is not transactional, but it does require us to examine our assumptions and the things we’ve been given based on where we live, what jobs we have and where we went to school. The imagined reality that we all have the same struggles is a lie meant to maintain the standards of living for those who have more. The people that are the most marginalized on any given day outside of a global pandemic are going to be the ones most impacted by this reality.
Structures that rely on oppression are not astoundingly different right now, and starting our own mutual aid network or donating to an already existing one can circumvent merit-tested aid.
While many of us are probably already practicing some lesser form of mutual aid in our daily lives, it’s imperative that this aid extends past our innermost circles. And that we never approach it from a sense of charity.
Here’s a list of resources to support identifying or creating mutual aid networks, as they look and operate differently from state to state:
- You can head to this website for a fairly comprehensive list of mutual aid networks organized by state and type.
- On a micro-scale, if you have the time and mental space, you can even start your own network with the help of other friends and support systems. I recently read this thorough and straight-forward toolkit from AOC and Organizer and Educator Mariame Kaba.
- The key to ensuring that a mutual aid network is beneficial is making sure people know that the resources exist and they can donate, or continue the distribution to people who can. You can reach out to neighbors to see who’s interested in being a resource or distributing, and can build from there.
We can’t make a government see us and value our lives, or rely on them to effectively provide for us, but we can encourage one another and create a grassroots movement of folks for the common good. We’re in this state of survival together, and the “after this is over” that everyone keeps referring to relies on our actions in this very moment.
Suggested Reading:
How Sex Workers Are Using Mutual Aid to Respond to the Coronavirus, The Nation 2020.
NYC Immigrant Communities Fight Hunger, Exploitation & Invisibility Through Mutual Aid, Democracy Now! 2020 Feeling Powerless About Coronavirus? Join a Mutual-Aid Network, The New York Times 2020.
Nakia is an organizer from Virginia, who writes about pop culture, entertainment, culture and sexuality and how the digital landscape ties us together. Nakia has a Bachelor’s in Psychology and in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and loves writing, bad reality tv, romantic comedies and telling people to get off Twitter and organize their friends and family for the cause.
