Community Care
Dear Community,
How is your heart?
I’m not going to lie — mine is a little broken. There is so much heaviness and cruelty in the world right now (the explosion in Beirut, the deaths from COVID, and voter suppression are front of mind), and I am feeling deeply affected by it. Like many, I resonated strongly with Michelle Obama when she opened up on this week’s episode of her new podcast about managing depression induced by the current state of the world: the pandemic, the violence against Black people, the questions about what kind of world we are creating right now.
As a person who has been very public about managing my mental health as a survivor, I am very accustomed to thinking constantly about self-care, and not the bubble bath kind. I mean: exercise regularly, get enough sleep, take my meds on time, go to therapy, practice boundaries, take caring actions towards myself that bring me joy like reading and hiking, so on and so forth.
For the most part, I feel like I have my own self-care down. I’ve invested deeply in it. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about something that hasn’t been talked about as a critical aspect of caring for oneself and living out socially just values: the necessity of community care.
In pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-America, we’re taught lots of ways that we can take care of ourselves, by ourselves. But leaning on your community as a function of individual and collective wellness simply isn’t talked about in the same way. A deep community is seen as a bonus, rather than a necessity, of one’s life. Suddenly, as we find ourselves facing dual pandemics of deadly racism and COVID-19, community care seems to be one of the most critical keys to staying healthy, and to achieving the antiracist world we hope for.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the power of mutual aid — a tool that oppressed communities have used to help one another live and thrive — began to get a lot of new attention. And when the response to peaceful protests in DC was violent, I watched my neighbors put values of mutual aid into action: massive community organizing for food, water, and first aid supplies for protestors, my neighbors taking cordoned protestors into their homes, people bringing more snacks for their fellow protestors than we could eat, and massive donations to bail funds for protestors.
At the protests, we cared for one another so that our basic needs were met, and we could all keep our collective focus on showing up to protest racist violence. Our community care enabled us to focus on more than just ourselves.
Mutual aid and bringing first aid supplies to a protest are obvious examples of community care. This dark time has reminded me that consistently and vulnerably showing up in our relationships is also community care. The way my friends and I have shown up for one another this year has been one of the strongest expressions of love I have felt in years.
But beyond how love and care for others enables us all to focus on justice, I’m also thinking about how accountability and a community space to safely turn failure into growth is one of the most powerful, and least talked about functions of community care.
During last night’s book club, we talked about how having an honest, vulnerable space to do this work together has been really meaningful, and helped us face some of the harder truths of our own internalized white supremacy. Personally, my reflections in our groups have been much more vulnerable and far less performative than my prior anti-racism work, and as a result, I’m starting to get at the deeper roots of my own internalized whiteness.
The more I think about it, the more this makes sense to me. As we discuss in book club this week, white supremacy and internalized whiteness promote perfectionism and being right, and train us that our mistakes must be kept to ourselves. White supremacy tries to isolates us and encourages us to deny, rather than dismantle, our own racism — but we can take away white supremacy’s power by speaking to its affect on our internal lives, and collectively making our mission us vs. racism, rather than us vs. our public image of goodness.
Restorative justice processes, where a person who causes harm is both held accountable *and* is supported in learning and growing from their harm and moving beyond it, are a powerful and radical commitment to caring for communities and putting people first when harm occurs. I am in awe thinking of the better world we could build if we focused more on restoring communities’ well-being after harm.
As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in this New Yorker article about mutual aid: “We can buy into the old frameworks of, when a disaster hits, it’s every person for themselves. Or we can affirmatively choose a different path. And we can build a different world, even if it’s just on our building floor, even if it’s just in our neighborhood, even if it’s just on our block.”
I have no real pithy anti-racist education to offer you this week. The newsletter is more of a meandering of what has been on my mind lately.
But what I can offer is this meditation: If community care were prioritized as a necessity in building an anti-racist world, how much more vulnerable, accountable, honest, and loving could our work to uproot white supremacy in ourselves and our communities be?
What kind of different world will we build?
We are grateful to be accountable to you, vulnerable with you, and learning and unlearning together. If you have thoughts about what community care can look like in this space, or in your life, We’d love to hear them — drop us a line at learnunlearnbookclub@gmail.com.
In community,
Jess
This Week We Are….
Taking Action By
Donating to support the Lebanese Red Cross, and to Islamic Relief, which specializes in food aid and emergency response and is helping implementing a supply chain for emergency aid in Beirut. You can donate to Islamic Relief here.
Additional resources to support Beirut and the Lebanese people can be found in this roundup from the New York Times.
Reading
Book Club Schedule: How to Be an Antiracist, Introduction - Chapter 3
Book Club Schedule: Days 12-14 of journaling for Me and White Supremacy
This article from our fave Jia Tolentino, on What Mutual Aid Can Do In a Pandemic, in the New Yorker
This toolkit and guide to Transformative Justice and Building Accountable Communities from Project Nia, the organization founded by the prison abolitionist and leader we’ve recommended to you before, Mariame Kaba.
This powerful guide from VAWnet to understanding the connection between state violence, gender-based violence, and Transformative Justice work. More than just teaching about this work through the lens of gender-based violence, this also gives a great primer on many parts of Transformative Justice, and its power for communities. Trigger warning for domestic and sexual violence.
Listening To
This podcast episode from Brené Brown on what it looks like to confront shame to be accountable for one’s racism.
And, as we start How to Be an Antiracist this week, we are listening to this episode where Brené and Ibram X. Kendi talk about his work, and what it truly means to be antiracist.