We Begin By Helping Each Other

How do you build the Mutual Aid Muscle?

When I texted my friends in Minneapolis in the hours after Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, they were already mobilizing. “Trying uselessly to work, planning to be out protesting later in the day,” one wrote. Another reported the next day that she’d been at a vigil with about five thousand others and was now focusing on delivering food to immigrant families afraid to leave their homes. A few days later, I mentioned to someone from the Twin Cities how impressed I was by the community’s response. She nodded. “The mutual aid muscle is very robust here,” she said.

The phrase stuck with me: the mutual aid muscle. Hearing it, I felt that I’d been telling myself the wrong story about how to respond to the rise in authoritarianism and repression. I’d been talking to myself about “protest” and “resistance” and “standing up,” all of which are good things to do but which also feel a bit overwhelming and abstract when you’re sitting at home looking at the news on your phone. Stand up where? Stand up how? Does any of it really make a difference?

Mutual aid, on the other hand, is tangible. It’s about helping people who need help, and it creates community in the process. Yet it’s the piece of successful movements that doesn’t ever feature in the stories we tell. We hear about the marches and the boycotts and the strikes, but not about the people (usually women) who made sure that the marchers and strikers had food and childcare. We don’t hear about the people who chipped in what they had to buy supplies or bail folks out of jail or pooled resources to carry each other through the hard times. It’s these small acts of selflessness that sustain political movements, and I’m becoming increasingly convinced that they are a necessary precursor to building them.

America’s mutual aid muscle, unfortunately, is pretty weak. The structures that used to keep the muscle toned ranged from trade unions to churches to social clubs, places where you connected with people who were outside your immediate circle and forged ties of obligation that were understood by all concerned. Our fragmented, atomized, and technologically-fortified lives have made us out of practice when it comes to helping each other. Just asking a friend for a ride to the airport feels a bit like a faux-pas—why wouldn’t you just take an Uber? You could deliver meals to a sick or bereaved friend, but they could also call DoorDash and get exactly the meal they want.

That’s not true everywhere, of course, and it’s particularly not true in Minneapolis. As reporter Lyz Lenz wrote in a recent dispatch, this is a city where people are used to stepping up to help:

When ICE came to Minneapolis, rapid response groups got to work. Some were splintered off from a neighborhood Facebook group, or a Buy Nothing forum where moms swap used baby equipment and kids' clothes in a suburban barter economy. Others grew from a group that organized protests after the killing of George Floyd, or food pantry deliveries during the pandemic, or door-knocking for the election, or to call lawmakers after the shooting of State Sen. Melissa Hortman or the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School.

That history has made them strong, and, more importantly, it’s made them willing to keep stepping up and fighting back, despite exhaustion and despite fear. As Heather Cox Richardson observed on Wednesday, the pushback in Minneapolis has required ICE to pull in resources from other cities, and those resources are not infinite.

“The administration does not have the personnel power to impose its will on a country that is not compliant,” she said.

So, how do we build that muscle? How can we all summon our inner Minnesotan? I’m a big fan of writer and organizer Garrett Bucks’s White Pages newsletter, in which he continually exhorts his readers to host potlucks. The idea is simply that we are stronger in community and therefore building community is building strength. It feels small and silly to me, often. I’m a grand gesture kind of girl. People are being killed and abducted, I feel like shouting, and you want us to host a potluck?

Here’s Bucks in this week’s newsletter, answering that very question:

To the rest of us, whose hearts are also bursting but who might worry that we’re not doing enough: I honestly don’t think that’s the right question. Until we arrive at beloved community, the question of “enough” is only useful for inculcating shame and burn out. The more important question— if you’re noticing your heart today, what does it make you want to do? To reach out, to make life easier for somebody you love on the front lines? To lead a fundraiser in your community? To carry on an activist project that was alive before these particular headlines and will still be needed long after the troops move on? Or to get to know your neighbors now, so that you don’t have to wait for the worst to come your way before you do so?

It’s important to remember that resistance doesn’t always take place on bridges or streets or in the town square. Sometimes resistance takes place quietly, in acts of care. We will learn how to fight not just by fighting, but also by strengthening our bonds with one another. I’m still puzzling out how best to do that, and I’m interested in what each of you thinks. Leave your thoughts, ideas, and anecdotes in the comments.

With a sigh,

Dashka