167: Healing and Helping with Mutual Aid with Dean Spade

In this conversation with Dean Spade we resolve a long-running challenge in my understanding: when we talked with Dr. john powell on the topic of Othering and Belonging a couple of years ago we discussed how volunteering promotes othering, because it perpetuates the idea that the volunteer is a person with resources to give, and the recipient has little in the way of useful knowledge or resources of their own.  Dr. powell agreed, but we didn’t have time to discuss what to do instead.   In this episode we finally punch out that lingering hanging chad of knowledge and talk with Dean Spade about the concept of mutual aid, which is the topic of his book: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And The Next).  In this conversation we discuss:  

• What is mutual aid, and how it’s more effective than volunteering
• How we heal in community with others from the effects that benign-seeming systems like capitalism have on us
• Ways to find and get involved in mutual aid projects

  As Dean and I talked, I also realized how applicable these ideas are to the work I do with parents in the Taming Your Triggers workshop.     It’s not surprising that parents feel triggered by their child’s behavior when you consider the trauma that we’ve experienced.  Even if you had ‘good parents,’ they still raised you to succeed within a system that told you to hide unacceptable parts of yourself so you could be ‘successful’ - which means getting good grades, going to college, getting a good job, buying a house, and raising a family.  And we’re supposed to do all of this by ourselves, without relying on others - because then we’ll need to buy more stuff along the journey.   Our culture uses shame to enforce these rules and keep us in line - that’s why we feel a sense of wrong-ness when we do something that isn’t socially acceptable - like asking for help, for example.   Because these traumas happened in community, they’re most effectively healed in community as well - just as these two parents did when they built on each other’s knowledge in the workshop earlier this year (screenshot shared with permission):     If you want to jump-start your ability to actually apply that knowledge in your interactions with your children by learning in community with others, then Taming Your Triggers will help you.           Dr. Dean Spade's Book

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) - Affiliate link

          Jump to highlights (01:30) Introduction to the episode and guest speaker Dr. Dean Spade (03:24) Definition of Mutual Aid and how it’s different from Charity (08:26) How the history of Social Movement was organized by Mutual Aid (09:54) Montgomery bus boycott is one of the most famous social movement work in the history of the US (15:35) The impacts of having problematic systems and structures in our society on parents (17:16) The challenges that the radical social movement is facing (18:29) How mutual Aid functions during a crisis (23:22) Why it's so essential to create a system of Mutual Aid in which we actually take care of each other and that doesn't destroy people's dignity and humanity (25:53) Why is it important to talk about Mutual Aid now (30:04) How capitalism worsens the condition of our society and why mutual aid is the only way to survive it (35:44) The importance of mutual aid in our well-being and in the society (40:09) What does Mutual Aid look like (44:53) How being involved in Mutual Aid can bring a sense of healing (46:43) Factors in our society that make us feel burnout (48:51) Dr. Spade’s way of recovering from burnout and avoidance (50:35) All powerful social movements for liberation have always been done by people who were living under the worst conditions (51:48) Importance of having a sense of urgency (53:13) Ways we should prepare for each coming emergency (54:37) How to find a Mutual Aid group in your community   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so Jen 00:10 Do you get tired of hearing the same old interests to podcast episodes? I don't really but Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen’s provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours Jen Lumanlan 01:30 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're going to close what has seemed to me to be a loose end for a very long time. It's almost like an uncomfortably hanging chad for those of you who are a certain age who remember the 2000 Bush v Gore election here in the US. So two years ago now we talked to Dr. John Powell on the topic of how to stop Othering and instead Belonging, and that was about the ways that we create separation between us, and at the very, very end of the interview, I squeezed in a question about volunteering, which seemed to me to promote othering because it encourages the person who's volunteering to see themselves as a person with resources and the recipient as a person who needs help, and who perhaps doesn't have anything useful to contribute to the relationship or more broadly. And so I came out of the interview feeling that volunteering wasn't really the answer to all of our problems but not having any idea of what to do instead. And so fast forward two years, and I actually can't remember how I discovered it but at some point, I heard the concept of mutual aid and when I looked it up online, I found the book called Mutual Aid building solidarity during this crisis, and the next, which is an incredibly short, bold, readable book by our guest today, Professor Dean Spade. And so Dean holds a JD and his professor at Seattle University School of Law and has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He's also the author of normal life, administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law, as well as numerous videos, book chapters and articles. Welcome, Dean, it's great to have you here. Dr. Spade 03:00 Thanks. I'm so glad to be here. Jen Lumanlan 03:02 Diving into this, I guess it's kind of a mark of my privilege, I think as a White middle-class person somewhere north of the age of 40, and I'm just now discovering what mutual aid is for the first time. And so for those who are listening, watching this, who are in a similar boat to me, can you please help us by understanding what is Mutual Aid? Firstly, and then how is it different from volunteering and charity? Dr. Spade 03:24 Yeah, so the basic way that I define mutual aid is that we think about all the work that social movements do, like all the kinds of tactics we use, you know, we have street protests, and we block oil pipelines, and we, you know, have lawsuits, we all these different tactics. It's the part of social movement work, where we provide for each other's direct survival needs. And it's only mutual aid if we do that, based on a shared understanding that it's the systems that have created the crisis that people are in, rather than that the people are blameworthy for being in crisis. And the third element is that mutual aid always comes with an invitation to collective action, so if we're doing a mutual aid project, and we're providing like, you know, food and bottled water and tents to people living in an encampment of unhoused people in our city, we're saying like, “Oh, yeah, here grab a tent, charge your phone.” And also, like, “Would you like to get involved in the group? Would you like to, you know, be part of this group just come to this protest? We're doing about housing policy? Would you like to be part of this participating in this landlord’s house? Like, do you want to be part of our housing justice movement?” and so you don't have to get this tantras bottled water, but like, it invites people who are guaranteeing the crisis to join the collective action against the crisis, and so, you know, the reasons that that's different from charity are several. Charities/social services it's another term we might use for that, that whole model is, you know, really originates in kind of a European model from a period of when like, really significant changes were happening in terms of the economy of like clearing land so that wealthy people could like graze tons of tons of sheep and use the new looms that were being invented to make textile, that whole period of kind of the shifting from mostly subsistence agriculture to different kinds of industry was a period where tons and tons of people were displaced from their land, and they became like roving bands of like poor people who had nothing at all had lost, like, you know, the 1000s of years of way of living and those people were like, you know, storming the towns and be like, “Hey, rich people” are like no way. And so in order to stabilize that situation where rich people can dominate those poor people and kind of keep them in mind they created like a charity system that included stuff like you had to go live in the workhouse and like, be worked to death, and included like alms to the poor type idea where like rich people give some amount of money to poor people in order to get to heaven, and all that always come with strings attached like, “Oh, we only give it to like the good poor people, not the bad ones,” like, not the people who are we see as morally loose, we just give it to the mothers with children whose husband died in the war, even whatever it is, right? So charity still has that model today. It's a model that is about stabilizing a system that keeps certain people rich and other people poor. It's a model that always has strings attached and a lot of like moral blame. “Oh, yeah. Like you'd get on the on the waitlist to maybe get a housing if you can prove you're sober. If you take the psych meds we think you should take, you need to have children or not have children,” you know, be a certain kind of person that's often tied to like ideas we have about who's moral and immoral and there's a fundamental idea in charity that if you're poor, or homeless, or whatever, there's something wrong with you, you need to get sober, you need to take this budgeting class, you need to take this parenting class. It's like the charity system or social services system kind of like really controlled and judges and sorts, poor people, which in the US specifically, especially like people of color, especially Black people have been targets indigenous people, migrants. So the charity blames the poor people mutual aid, blames the system basically like diametrically opposed ways of thinking about like providing people's direct needs. Mutual Aid work is about building huge resistance movements that could stop the conditions that make anybody have to be in crisis. Charity is about like kind of putting a bandaid on the existing crisis and, you know, most people don't get what they need out of it, right, people are still like homeless and a huge number, it's like, it's very minimal, it's like the least rich people can kick down or the government can kick down, its crumbs that have like strings attached that are stigmatizing, it's humiliating the ways that people are forced to go through like homeless shelters, for example, are a lot like jails, you have no privacy or being looked at, you know, just there's needless humiliation built throughout the entire thing, people at public benefits will know the same thing like this kind of like, you just turn your whole life over to these people, they're seeing whether or not you're good enough, they're looking for mistakes this kind of thing. So, turning mutual aid are really, really different, I think in the US, most people haven't, until 2020, haven't really heard of mutual aid, partly, charity is like, the idea of volunteering that you referenced in your intro is usually a reference to charity, it's like, “Oh, on Thanksgiving, I'm gonna go to the soup kitchen.” It's like kind of like, once a year, or once every season or whatever, I plug into this thing. It's not really about the root causes of the problem. It's about kind of moral gesture in which I give a little something to the disadvantage or whatever, and like you said, that feeling you had about it like, this seems like it's not a bad power dynamic. Look at me, I've got resources and I'm one of my luxury days off this week to help, you know, got this kind of vibe that feels very, you know, the Victorian, or, you know, these early European origins I'm talking about, and mutual aid it's something different. It's like we're in the struggle together, we are trying to build mutual aid projects where people who are directly in crisis right now are part of doing them and governing them instead of upper-class people coming and giving something to poor people. So that's really different. I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, mutual aid is also like written out of the history of social movements, so we think about how we learn about social change, like, you know, you learn about the history of civil rights movement is like probably the most famous sort of social movement in the US or the farmworkers movement or whatever. When you learn about social movements we often learn about speeches that were given by men or laws that were passed, or big cases that happened, like that's kind of the vibe and what's written out of that is that social movements aren't made of those moments, those are movements are usually happening towards the end, especially if it's like a law was passed or a court case, like those are like the concessions that happen after huge organizing by large numbers of people who are actually the people in crisis and that organizing is usually mutual aid. The on ramp that most people take to get into social movement work is mutual aid. It's either I didn't have something I need it and these people were giving it out and when I got there they were like, you know we don't think this is your fault. You shouldn't be ashamed. You want to join us? Do you want to fight? poor people getting because like I was so mad that was happening to others, like maybe because it used to happen to me or because it happened to someone I love or saw in the news, and I like the first thing people want is like, “I want to be part of helping others. I'm so mad this happening because it's the beautiful instinct that people have. I want to help.” And so is the typical honor people don't usually start by laying down you know, in front of the coal train or like some other really bold action, people usually start their engagement with social movements in mutual aid, and mutual aid is kind of bold. I'm reading this book right now for my gender sexuality in law class. I'm teaching this week, I have been teaching this wonderful book that I love teaching called at The Dark End of the Street, It’s by Daniel McGuire. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is a book about how most people think the civil rights movement was primarily about things desegregation and getting rid of Jim Crow, and what's written out of that history is that so much of what formed the civil rights movement was activism by Black women against sexual violence against Black women, by White men and against the framing of Black men for sexual violence as a way to like justify like lynching and criminalization of Black men. In the book, Daniel Maguire spends a couple of chapters talking about the Montgomery bus boycott and...