Myrl Beam: How did mutual aid come
to be a framework that
you were thinking and writing about?
Did it come in those conversations or did it come later?
Dean Spade: Well, that whole conversation
about what I mentioned before,
about the Black Panther Party
and their breakfast programs,
that is the conversation about mutual aid.
Why do social movements always
also meet people where they're at and provide
what people immediately need as part of a framework and
a program for trying to get
to that nobody's in that need,
that's what I would consider
the framework of mutual aid.
But I have more explicitly recently,
and that's always what I've been
writing about doing, whatever.
But since Trump was elected in 2016,
I have felt a stronger desire to make
a 101 visible about
that because what I'm noticing,
especially in the age of social media and Internet,
I noticed there's a lot
of people who are mobilizable right now.
A lot of people are really angry and scared about
all the really intense things that are happening
and a lot of people who weren't mobilizable before.
There's also those of us already
in social movements, wonderful.
Then there's actually a lot of
people we haven't reached who are really
suffering under these conditions and
are newly scared and pissed.
What I noticed was that those people are being
systematically demobilized
by the nonprofit industrial complex.
The ACLU is going to post,
"You should sign our pledge that
you'll protect the Constitution."
That's one of the things they
did after Trump was elected.
It's like, that's telling people
that they've done something when they've done nothing.
What does that mean?
A, all this stuff happens under
our Constitution all the time.
Constitution that turns out has
not saved us yet and will not.
It's helping people deify the US legal system again,
which you can't access or do anything about.
It just means all you can do is click.
Then also was just like,
the only thing you're supposed to give money
to planned parenthood and ACLU.
Those groups don't have
a plan that will actually undermine Trump.
We can see this most obviously from the Muslim ban.
It's like legal fight
against Trump's Muslim ban until he
figures out a way to write it and it gets through.
It's just like the idea that we'll win in court,
and the ACLU had
this picture of Trump and it said, see you in court.
I was like, this was the thing
people were saying after the election.
I'm like, there's no place for ordinary people to
participate in saving
each other's lives in that framework.
Part of it is that in the United States,
we have a story about social change that's just
like a big lawsuit was won,
a single charismatic leader came to the surface,
and then we passed a piece of legislation.
People think that's how social change happens or vote.
None of that has any room for actual participation,
which is really what's threatening
to the system is if we
all actually help each other survive and
refuse authority and say we won't live this
way and help hide
each other or whatever is we need to do.
That's what mutual aid is. That's part of
social movement work that is so
prevalent throughout all social movements that is
invisible in the story about social change.
Now, you got suddenly a million more people
being like, "How do we get change?"
They're getting these bad answers that are like, click,
give, click, give vote,
click, give vote. That's it.
Maybe go to women's march once a year,
very limited levels of
public protests that are surrounded by
police and with messages
that are not necessarily at odds with the status quo.
I wanted to start
talking mutual aid more right after the election,
I made this website called
Big Door Brigade it's just like a
mutual aid toolkit like
what are all the different mutual aid
projects that you can model in
case you want to start one in your neighborhood or town?
Do you want to start a prison transportation project
where you drive people's families
to visit their families in prison?
Do you want to have
a childcare thing where you take care of
people's kids, would they go to court or go to school?
Do you want to give away food in your neighborhood?
Do you want to do disaster
preparedness for people on your block because
there's a lot of storms and
floods and fires coming to everywhere we live?
For me, it's a question of mobilization.
People want to help with something immediately.
Then once you get into doing work on conditions,
you find out more about the conditions than
you knew and you grow new solidarities.
You get there and you still are holding on
to racist or xenophobic ideas,
and then you find out that, if
I care about people being evicted,
this also relates to these
other politics around migration
around anti racism or I think I care about the whales,
but then it turns out that I have to find out about
indigenous resistance because that's who's taking
care of whales or whatever.
You get there and you learn from
your fellow participants
about more and bigger ways to be in solidarity.
Then theoretically, we get a lot of
mobilized people who are
mobilizable for whatever we need to rise up against.
When I look at the 60s and 70s period,
it's like in every community,
people are starting different radical health clinics
because there's women are getting the care they needed.
Black people are getting the care they need.
Gay people aren't getting care they need.
Everyone was just starting
stuff all the time to meet each other's needs,
and that made people really
mobilizable and really threatening
to fight against the war,
to fight against whatever was unfolding.
For me, mutual aid is
the missing piece of
the conversation about how social change works,
that also I think academics really under theorized.
They just look at what's happening
like often, what the media reported about I think
or what the elites who wrote something
down or said about it instead of what just lots
and lots of ordinary people were doing.
That to me, mobilization.
The way I think about it is our opposition
has all the money and the guns.
The only thing we have is people power.
The literal only thing that we have is people power.
That is enough to win 100%.
That is the most threatening power
because there are so many more of us
than there are of them but we have to be organized.
If you can keep people
at home behind their screens or only
giving occasionally the ACLU or
believing the answer is going to come through
the next election or the next lawsuit,
then you have kept everybody under control.
Mutual aid is a way,
people want to help each other.
They see suffering.
They're like, "I suffered that,
I want to help or I'm
suffering that now, and I want us to help each other.
I care about they are suffering that."
That is so deeply beautiful,
human, radical, anti capitalist
and anti isolationist and we
kill that with these demobilizing
Myrl Beam: frameworks that are like,
Dean Spade: "Let the experts at ACLU
take care of it and you send them your $10."
I think that's numbing and harmful
and there's something so
healing and beautiful about finding
out that we can do stuff together.
That's what I'm talking
about when I'm trying to push
this mutual aid thing and I made
this cartoon animated video
with this wonderful artist that's trying to describe
what mutual aid is and we
maintained this website and
teaching class about mutual aid
and just trying to have
that conversation in my very small way.