CW: mentions of suicidality. Abeni Jones discusses with us her articles for Autostraddle and workshops regarding community care and avoiding performative allyship. Abeni Jones is currently Managing Editor at PushBlack, a non-profit media organization for Black Americans, using the power of narrative to educate and activate readers. She is also a writer for Autostraddle.
Transcript
Nikki:
Welcome to Radical Futures Now. On this podcast, we connect with social justice leaders around the world to talk about how to organize, how to be in movement, and how to build radical futures now.
Rhiki:
I’m so excited to have the opportunity to talk with you, Abeni. But before we get started, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Abeni:
Yeah, hi. I’m really excited to be here. I’m Abeni Jones. I’m a writer and editor and educator, and a trans woman of color based in the Bay Area of Northern California. I think that’s it.
Nikki:
Abeni, I was actually the one that contracted you to do your workshop at Arcus.
Abeni:
I loved doing my workshop there. Thank you so much for having me.
Nikki:
I am still giddy at the fact that you said yes. It was a programming highlight for everyone. In your workshop, I remember you talking about self-care versus community care. Your workshop was about community care specifically. Can you talk more about the difference between the two and why community care is so important?
Abeni:
Yes. The first thing I want to say up top is that self-care is good, or it’s neutral. It’s not bad. I’m about to get into a critique of it, so I want to say from the jump that it’s not a terrible thing that we need to get rid of or anything like that. I just think we need to expand our understandings of care. Maybe expand a number of tools we have in our toolbox if that makes sense. Something like that. I wanted to say that from the jump. I was thinking this week about this analogy, because I was driving in traffic and it actually made me think of something that I think might help get to the root of why I think we need to be thinking about community care as an alternative and extension of the concept of self-care.
Abeni:
Let’s see if this analogy works. I was driving the other day through San Francisco, which I generally hate doing because there was so much traffic. It was really bad. I ended up lining up to get back on the freeway to head towards Oakland. I was about a mile from the on-ramp, and it took almost an hour to go one mile because of the bumper to bumper traffic. Now, once you cross Market Street, there’s a straight shot to the freeway on-ramp. It’s four lanes all going in the same direction. The far left lane is a left turn only lane. The far right lane is a right turn only lane. The two middle lanes go forward and they’re totally jammed.
Abeni:
I get in line and I notice, as I’m sure you can predict, that some very smart, or very selfish depending on your perspective, people are using those turn only lanes on either side not to turn, but to speed up ahead to get all the way to the front of the line. And then cut in at the very end so that they don’t have to wait in the traffic like the rest of us dweebs there, sitting there while they are like, “Oh, well you didn’t think to do the smart thing and just cut ahead.” That happens in almost every type of situation like this. I was thinking about that partially because I watched a YouTube video about traffic, so I’m an expert. I’m just kidding. I sometimes wondered, why is there sometimes traffic on the freeway when there’s no car accident or anything? If everyone is just going forward, we should all just keep moving, right? How would it ever get to where you’re bumper to bumper unless there’s some big incident or something like that? But it happens.
Abeni:
I watched this video, and it explained that essentially traffic is formed by unnecessary merging and changing of lanes. Every time you merge or change lanes without a much larger than you’d think amount of space between you and the cars in that lane, you’re going to cause another car to slow down in order to make space for you. Which causes a ripple effect, which creates traffic. Because one car slows down, the car behind them slows down. It actually ends up creating “traffic,” right? The lesson there is, stay in your lane. No, but the actual lesson is that the thing that you do to try and avoid traffic, changing lanes to go to a faster lane or whatever, that’s actually what causes traffic.
Abeni:
Back to my situation. The people who were cutting the line by skirting around the sides, up the wrong lane to avoid the backup, are actually the ones who are making the backup as bad as it is. I was thinking about how what they’re doing is an individual solution to a collective problem. What it ends up doing is, that individual solution ends up making the collective problem even worse. I sometimes think about self-care in that way. There’s also an easy analog to COVID-19 too, right? We don’t have to get into that, but I don’t think that or this traffic situation or any of it is surprising, because America is built on this foundation of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency. It’s a core part of the American dream even, the self-made man. I do say man because it’s almost always a man. There was this little kerfuffle a while back when one of the Kardashians or Jenners was called this self-made billionaire. I think it was Kylie or Kendall. One of them, right?
Nikki:
Kylie, yeah.
Abeni:
Okay. People were like, “She’s not self-made.” Which, sure, but they didn’t actually critique the idea of the self-made rich person. They just said, “She doesn’t qualify.” Which doesn’t really make sense because nobody is actually self-made. Why is even being self-made even enviable? Why is that even a thing? I think about often how I’d rather see 10 people come together as a community and build something that makes each of them $100,000, which they can then take care of their families and support their communities with, than one person makes $1 million on their own. Isn’t that other one such a better story than the self-made millionaire?
Nikki:
Yes.
Abeni:
At least in my opinion it is, yeah. That’s the dream of America. You can come here, you can work hard, you can whatever. On your own effort, all on your own with no support or help from anyone else, you can lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and you can become a self-made millionaire. We have this individualist, capitalist, hetero, patriarchal culture. We’re suffering, in my opinion, from the logical outcome of that culture, which is isolation. We’re struggling. We’re struggling with our mental health. We’re stressed, we’re sick. Much of it is because we’re pushed to our own little boxes of apartments and cubicles. We can’t connect with each other emotionally, and we can’t ask for help because we don’t want to be a burden on others, so we just suffer. Especially now during the pandemic.
Abeni:
Then here comes this solution, self-care. But self-care is an isolated, individual solution to the problem of isolation, which is a collective problem. It’s like jumping ahead in a line of traffic. It might work for you maybe temporarily, but it doesn’t help with the collective problem. In the case of self-care, it doesn’t even often help you individually that much if you even have access to the things that self-care articles suggest or you can afford them. Similar to the traffic situation, it might just be making everything worse. I believe a better solution is what I call community care, which these days is more frequently known as mutual aid.
Nikki:
Cool. You were talking about that traffic analogy and it made me think that my… I’m just curious about how this would fit into your analogy. Take it or leave it. We don’t have to talk about it. But I actually learned forever ago that another way that we cause traffic is when we’re driving, and you speed up too fast and then you slow down. Then this kind of jerky driving mechanism is what causes further and longer backups. When in reality, if we all just slowed down and didn’t stop, and just kind of crawled instead of zooming up to that next car and then breaking and then waiting, that we could get traffic rolling slower, but it would stop the jam. I’m curious if that makes sense, this idea of speeding up too fast instead of going at the right pace fits somewhere into your analogy.
Abeni:
Yeah. I think it probably does. The whole reason why we speed up and slow down, and swerve through lanes, and get angry… I know I’m the angriest that I ever am in my entire life when I’m driving. It’s the worst part of myself. I hate it. That’s why I try not to drive as little as… yeah. I’m like, “What is this?” But it’s because I think the whole aspect of driving is so individual too. We’re in our own little box. We’ve got all our adversaries out there. They’re the ones that are keeping us from getting where we want to go. We speed up because maybe we’re trying to tailgate the car ahead of us so they’ll get the heck out of the way or whatever.
Abeni:
The point is, that doesn’t make it better for us or for anyone. I remember reading a statistic once that was like, for every 10 miles an hour faster that you drive over some certain long amount of… maybe 20 or 30 miles. You’ll get to your destinations like 30 seconds sooner or something. I totally mangled the statistics there, I’m sure. But think about the impact of the danger of driving 10 miles an hour faster on you and on everyone else on the road. You’re going 60, 70, 80, you might get to your destination five minutes faster. But if something goes down, that goes from dangerous accident to fatal accident that fast. I think the analogy holds. It’s like we have these individual solutions where we’re trying to help ourselves out, and it totally makes sense.
Abeni:
Look at the culture we’re in. Look at the stress and pressure we’re under. I don’t fault any individual who is making these kinds of decisions. The people who cut in line, I’m not going to do it, but I understand why people do it. I wish they didn’t, but I get it. It really doesn’t help, just like changing lanes and speeding up and slowing down. It might help you, but it makes the problem worse for everyone, including yourself. That’s the thing about self-care, is it can be great. If you have access to meditation, do it. If you can afford a massage, get it. If you live in a place where it’s safe to go for walks or whatever, or stuff like that, if you have a bathtub and you can take a bubble bath, I’m here for it.
Abeni:
It’s not like those things are bad for you. But the problem is when that’s considered the solution. It’s when we say, “You have everything you need in your own person individually without needing support or help from anyone in order to feel better, or to thrive, or to be mentally healthy, or to survive the crushing experience of life under capitalism.” I think that is a false solution. I think that’s being oversold. I think that we need to talk about other ways of… I think about it like Audre Lorde talked about how the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. It was just her birthday yesterday I think. They both just had birthdays I believe, yeah. I don’t know if I am 100% on board with that idea that Audre Lorde talks… I’ve got some critiques of that concept. But in this sense, if your problem is isolation, then an individualized solution might not be the best solution. We need to think, well, what’s a bigger solution? In my experience, and literally actually in my own life, the life saving solution was community care.
Rhiki:
Abeni, I remember when you came to Arcus. It was pre-COVID, so prior to COVID. In what ways had your framework or your analysis of community care shifted from being in the pandemic? Have you made any tweaks to it, or do you think it still works in the pandemic in the same way?
Abeni:
That’s such a great question because I haven’t, I think for maybe obvious reasons, I haven’t done the workshop in a year or so. Although there’s ways that it can maybe happen over Zoom or things like that. I think what’s really interesting is the original genesis of the concept of community care was an article I wrote many years ago. It was called Community Care. How to Take Care of Each Other: Community Care in Times of Crisis. I was having an individual or a personal mental health crisis at the time. That was kind of the framework that I came from. It came from a disability justice framework, which I’d love to get into.
Abeni:
That was early in the Trump presidency too. I was also kind of thinking, or I actually might have been in 2016 actually, when I first was putting together some of these. I thought we were in crisis then. Then this year happened and it’s like, wow, now this is crisis. I think it’s just even more relevant. The issue is that it’s just much more difficult because so much of my framework was built around building community IRL or in person. And connecting with people in your neighborhood, in your town, things like that. A lot of it has got to shift, but I think that it’s possible to conceptualize or to take the urgency of the current moment and have that really I guess animate or… I don’t know what the word is. Really making it even more necessary and build even more creative, interesting solutions.
Abeni:
To fully answer your question, I would love to go back and talk a little bit about what the concept of community care was, and then how it might shift in the present moment and in the future. Because originally, I had a mental health crisis. I was suicidal and I was incredibly depressed, incredible anxiety. It was early in my transition. I didn’t know what was going on. I had just left… a friend of mine passed away from suicide and I quit my career was a teacher. I had no idea what was going on. I was really in crisis, and a friend of mine saved my life by asking me how she could help me out. She drove me to the ER. I went to the psych ward. I got some help.
Abeni:
I eventually realized that for people in situations like that, it’s literally impossible to take care of yourself. And that I needed to think bigger beyond self-care. Because a lot of the weeks leading up to that incredibly difficult moment, I had read a lot of articles about how to get my mind right, or self-care for activists. Self-care if you’re in a funk. Self-care for queer people. I was reading these things, and it was saying stuff that you’re like, “I take a bubble bath. I don’t feel better. I eat healthier food. I don’t feel better.” Because those weren’t the actual issue. The issue is that my own mind was telling me that I was worthless and should die. I couldn’t rely on my own self to take care of myself, because my own self was the one telling me that I should not live anymore.
Abeni:
In that moment, I had to figure out, how the heck am I going to reach out and get help from someone else? Because I can’t do it myself. But then we get to the whole American culture thing of, it’s a bad idea to ask for help. You should be totally reliant on your own effort. You don’t want to be a burden on other people. Which I found too is even more difficult for a lot of queer and trans people, and people of color, and immigrants, and folks whose communities are suffering and struggling. It’s like, I really don’t want to ask. They’re already dealing with so much. How can I ask and put another thing on my friend’s plate? They’re trying to do X, Y, and Z. They’re just trying to survive too.
Abeni:
I really needed to figure out how to overcome that barrier. I eventually was able to. I was able to figure it out. Like I said, my best friend broke that barrier for me by offering help. Then that helped me to realize that she wanted to help, and that if I were to ask, it would be something that she already wanted to do. We figured out some solutions, then that had got me thinking. I eventually built this framework. It’s centered in this concept of disability justice. At the time, I considered myself disabled by my mental illness, but there’s a lot of folks who are disabled by all different kinds of things. Whether it’s physical, mental, or whatever, that literally rely on other people to survive. That also helped me to think that self-care is not the answer for folks whose existence is predicated on the support of another human being. Whatever kind of care that you need.
Abeni:
It helped me to realize that to some degree, it’s likely that all of us need some kind of care in order to survive. Interestingly, it’s becoming more and more clear during the pandemic as people talk about things like touch hugger. People talk about a lot of the arguments to get kids back into school. It’s like they’re missing out on their socialization, or people talking about how that’s the reason why… There’s all these articles about how the messaging around masks or around social distancing was problematic, because it was either too strict and then some people weren’t willing to not see any other human being for months, so they would just not do it. Or it was too lax for this or that reason. A lot of it is around human people, what we’re realizing about human nature. I don’t want to say we’re realizing. We’ve known it for thousands of years that human beings need each other, that we’re interdependent, not independent.
Abeni:
A lot of that is coming out now, which is awesome. But that was kind of the genesis of it, was some of us absolutely… A lot of us can move through life without relying on other people or without being independent, but most of us can’t do it happily. Most of us can’t do that without being miserable in some way or another. But some of us literally will not even survive if we don’t have care of other people. Interestingly enough, while I’m on the topic, I just read some article. I wish that I had prepared it, but I just read this article. It was an archeologist. They were showing how in some of the very early… not homo sapiens, but one of our earlier versions of humanity. There was evidence of people or humans, protohumans with disabilities, who were in their 40s, 50s, 60s. Which to this archeologist that was writing this article indicated that there were people with disabilities in the ancient past who were taken care of by their community. Indicating that that kind of activity is human nature.
Abeni:
A lot of people want to talk about Darwinism, or survival of the fittest, or whatever. We’re too soft. I don’t know, whatever. But the truth is probably closer to, we’ve always been an interdependent species. Anyways, all of that stuff is kind of the origin. Then the workshop and the articles I wrote about it were about, well, how do you actually do that? I talked about building community online. Social media can be a blessing or a curse. I got a lot of great, amazing support in Facebook groups. I also left social media because it was toxic. It could go either way. I talked about a lot of cool ways that people have used technology to get care.
Abeni:
A friend of mine, her mom died. She was so close with her mom, like best friends. Every year, on the anniversary of her mom’s death, she knows that she’s going to be a mess. Just total… she says like sliding down the wall is the words that she uses. She created a spreadsheet with every hour of that 24 hour period of her mother’s death day, and put in what she needs. Either sleep, or to be driven somewhere, or to be reminded to eat, or just words of affirmation, or a massage, or this, that, or the other. Then in every single column of that spreadsheet, she shared it as a Google Sheet. Shared it with all of her community. Then everyone can sign up for an hour or two or three, and be just on call to provide that thing for her during that period. So that she would know in advance that all of her needs would be met that day. I just thought that was so beautiful, and they did. They were totally met.
Abeni:
That was one of the other things that I learned in doing the work on this workshop and thinking about community care is, we have this belief that asking for help puts a burden on other people. But one of the things that I ask people to do in my workshop is to think back to the last time that they were able to help someone that they love out. The last time that someone you loved, you were able to give them a hand up, or provide them with something, or talk them through a struggle, or be there for them, or give them support. And to think about how that felt. Universally, when we think about it that way, we realize it felt great.
Abeni:
It’s such a pleasant experience to be able to provide support to someone that you love. For some reason, we don’t realize that when we’re asking someone for help, we’re giving them an opportunity to experience that pleasure of helping us. That I think was a radical transformation in thinking for me. I share that in the workshop, and I share some other tools. It’s a lot of tools. One of the big kind of theses of the workshop is that in a moment of crisis, this is again because it came… the genesis was a mental health crisis. I was thinking about a panic attack. When you’re having a panic attack, you’re not going to be rational. You’re not going to be like, “Oh, I’m going to text this person and call this person. I’m going to get the support that I need in this way.” No, you are literally in fight or flight. You believe that you’re in danger. You’re not thinking rationally.
Abeni:
The idea is to set up structures for community support in advance so that when you are in a moment of crisis, it’s so easy and seamless to get the help and the care that you need. I talked a lot about these support card ideas that I came up with. I talked about some of these apps. Again, using Google Docs and other technology which again, to your actual question, I think what a lot of I’ve seen so much of in mutual aid networks over the last year is using things like Google Docs, Google Sheets, to organize mutual aid. I think technology can be leveraged in really powerful ways to build community. But like anything, I think it’s neutral, like self-care I think. It’s neutral. You can use it and it can be very beneficial for you, or you can rely too hard on it and then it can be detrimental to you. Technology I think is neutral.
Abeni:
Anyway, that’s kind of the concept of community care, is that we have to figure out how to take care of each other. It’s that the only way we’re all going to survive and thrive is through mutual aid, is through built in community. The thing about it, the reason why I was like, “This could be a workshop,” is because we’re not taught how to do it. In fact, we’re encouraged not to do it. Like I was saying, America encourages us to be independent, and to not build community, and to not take care of each other. We have to be counter cultural in that way, and we have to figure it out on our own. We have to figure out how to break down the stigma around asking for help. We have to figure out how to give support to others. We have to figure out what we even have to offer, what we need. We have to figure out who is around, who can give what. We have to really do a bunch of work.
Abeni:
It has to be really intentional because there’s not a ton of structures for this. It’s been really cool over the last year, seeing how so many mutual aid systems and networks and pods and organizations have sprung up, and are doing this incredible work, that it makes me think about how people talk a lot about how once the pandemic is over, we can go back to normal. That’s a false premise in some ways. There’s never a go back to normal. But also, there’s a lot of things that have sprung up during this time out of necessity that in some ways, I wish we had been doing all along. And also, in some ways we did used to do pre-colonization, a lot of our peoples. A lot of interdependent stuff. Anyways, that’s kind of the big idea of community care. I think that all of that is a better way forward and a better solution than self-care.
Abeni:
The final thing I’ll say about that, because I’ve been talking a lot, is that I love Adrienne Maree Brown’s concept of fractals. I actually learned that there’s a very, very similar concept kind of in ancient African philosophy. It’s called something along the lines of “As above, so below.” It’s the same thing. It’s that what you do on a really small scale ripples out and can eventually be repeated on a large scale. That’s also why I think community care is powerful.
Abeni:
Self-care doesn’t challenge that culture of individualism in America, but community care, we can do it on a small scale with our loved ones in our little communities. We can take care of each other. It eventually will build out into larger networks and larger networks that eventually will challenge the systems of capitalism, independence, and things like that, that thrive on isolation. Not only does it work to take care of us and to help us survive crisis, but it also is a project of dismantling a system of oppression. Whereas self-care, it helps you individually maybe, but it doesn’t do anything to actually solve the larger scale problem. That’s another reason why I think community care can be so powerful.
Rhiki:
Yeah. I remember being in that workshop too, and my mind was just being blown the whole time. Especially when you talked specifically about the de-stigma…
Nikki:
Destigmatization.
Rhiki:
Yes, so being able to ask for help. I think prior to your workshop, the way that I went about that was, I wouldn’t ask for help. Then when it got really bad, I would finally ask for help, but I would put everything that I was dealing with only on one other person. I would identify that best friend, or that parent, or that significant other at the time. Everything that I had, they were then expected to deal with. Not only was I going through something, but by putting all my shit on just one person, they eventually needed care too. I really like the fact that your model is about identifying multiple people within your community. And having a conversation about what you need, but also what people can offer you so that you know who to go to for what things, and you’re able to spread that out. People can contribute what they’re able to, and they don’t feel like you are a burden, and you are still getting what you need. I love that you talked about that framework and you broke it down on this podcast.
Abeni:
I think that’s one of the major problems in aspect of this, of our culture, is this concept of either the nuclear family or the romantic couple, or significant other, is because that does happen. Those are often the only two groups of people that we do feel comfortable asking for help, or maybe if we have a professional like a therapist. It’s a great idea. Everyone should have a therapist if you have access to it. It’s such a good, important thing to have a therapist, but we often turn significant others into our therapists, or our children frequently usually if we’re a parent, or sometimes our parents. I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing, but like you said, if they’re the only person that you ask for help from, especially if you’ve been neglecting getting the care you need for a long time to where it becomes this massive thing that’s now a crisis, yeah. That’s probably not the best way to handle stuff.
Abeni:
In fact, I think, I don’t know if I shared this at the workshop I did at Arcus, but I read this article about how men especially are some of the ones who suffer the most in this way because of our culture of emotional close off-edness as part of masculinity. There’s this study that showed, I want to say that men who have either been divorced who have had their wife die, either have extremely high rates of depression, suicide, and early death. The reason is, you realize that their wife was often their only friend. They might have some dudes out in the world, but you realize that when shit goes down, those are just acquaintances because they’ve never actually built deep, emotional bonds of intimate friendship and connection with those people.
Abeni:
They definitely don’t have any women in their lives that are close friends because heterosexuality is bizarre. That would be a problem to have a friend. It just means that their wife was often the only one sending Christmas cards to all of their family, was managing all of the get togethers around holidays, doing everything. Was the only real connection to all of their extended community. That once she’s gone, they just kind of suffer and die. It’s really tragic, but that’s often another aspect of it. That’s part of why we need to build community. It won’t feel as burdensome if everyone in the community is giving and receiving care from others as a part of the culture of the community. When you have to lay all of your burdens on one person and just put so much on one or two people, honestly, maybe it could be burdensome. It’s not like being a burden is the worse thing in the world. We all need to be carried sometimes. But it can often be, like you said, so much more effective to spread it out.
Nikki:
I’m thinking a lot about… I had a conversation with a friend recently about all the shit that just continues to feel like it’s piling on to this continuing crisis we have globally. She said something that really stuck out to me. She said, “Everybody needs more than what someone can give right now.” It makes me think about the solution to that problem, which is very honest. I think a really clear description of what’s happening in singular relationships like Ricky talked about, where it’s like, “You’re my person, so you’re the person I go to.” But we just don’t have it. I think community care, and mutual aid, and spreading this wide net like you’ve talked about, lessens so much so that I think we could solve… Everything that I need shouldn’t have to come from one person anyways. That community care is this kind of solution to this problem where even when we are attempting to seek out, it’s still in this very individualized, siloed, vacuumed way. I’m curious to hear you talk about how you build those relationships.
Nikki:
I remember you talking in your workshop that you said it’s important to be open minded and expansive about who you go to when you ask for help. I’m curious, can you talk about how you choose who to go to, when, why? And what does it look like to build networks of community care models? And to build these mutual aid groups that we’ve been talking about?
Abeni:
Yeah, such a great point. I think that it is really important when we think about romantic relationships especially. There’s this author, David Richo. He has this book called How to Be an Adult in Relationships that I think is a required reading for every adult who wants to have a partner of any gender, sexuality, or anything. He talks about, we probably shouldn’t expect more than 50% of our needs to be met by our romantic partner. I think the vast majority of people, queer and straight, it’s way closer to 95%.
Nikki:
Yeah.
Abeni:
The thing is, if you don’t get your needs met from that person… I don’t just mean… for some people, like relationship anarchists or nonmonogamous people, they even take it to the level of sex. You shouldn’t expect your partner to be able to fulfill all of your sexual needs.
Nikki:
Right.
Abeni:
I’m totally here for that. I’m monogamous, so that doesn’t apply to me personally, but it makes sense. But the needs of intimacy, closeness, connection, friendship. It’s so important to build deep, intimate, loving friendships, which I don’t think is a thing that is common in our culture. We’re always just on the lookout for our next partner. Then everyone has had the experience of a friend who meets their new boo and then they disappear. It’s like, “Oh, right. That’s more important I guess,” or whatever. We don’t really want to be doing that.
Abeni:
You asked, how do you do it? That’s the hard question. It’s a lot easier to talk about why it’s important than to actually talk about how. The only thing I can really say is you have to be intentional. You have to do it on purpose. It will not just happen, in my experience. Well, 98% of the time, it won’t just happen. Some people just happen to meet their best friend in third grade or something, then the become deep, loving, intimate friends for the rest of their lives or whatever. I guess that’s a possibility. But for most of us, you have to work at it. For me, as a very extra person, I am the type to just come out and say it. “Hey, do you want to be deep in our friendship? Can we take care of each other?” If you’re like me then, if you’re extra, then the support card, which is available on my article about community care at Autostraddle.com, and is available if you email me. But I would be like, “Hey, here’s a support card. Are you down to do this?”
Abeni:
You don’t want to do that with a stranger, but you do have to be intentional. The way that I frame it in my workshop is the kind of step by step is that you offer care first. Kind of like my friend who saved my life. She was like, “What can I do? How do I take care of you in this moment?” I was just vulnerable enough to be like, “Drive me to the ER.” Actually, I was like, “Can you go buy my cat some cat food first then drive me to the ER?” Because that was what had me stressing in the moment, distraught, was my cat was hungry. I couldn’t feed him. That was what I needed. I needed her to drive to the corner store, get some Kibbles, and then drive me to the ER. Her offering that let me know that receiving care was possible. We can be that person in our friends’ lives.
Abeni:
My framework is totally built around deep, intimate, personal friendships, and not building networks of mutual aid. I do not have experience doing that. There are so many incredible, amazing organizers that do. I’m sure they have great information and skills on how to build networks. My idea is, how do I make it so that me and my four best friends are all intimately caring for each other and loving each other, so that we’ve got our own little circle of care right here? Then because we’re not only friends with each other, but that also builds out to their networks and circles. Then maybe that builds out in those networks and circles there. It’s kind of really individualized. Not individualized, but small scale, like fractals. You have to offer care first in my opinion.
Abeni:
You could say, “Hey, I can tell that you’re struggling with this, that, or the other. Can we chat? What’s up? How can I support you? Can I provide X? Can I do Y?” I get into it in the workshop a bit some of the best strategies for doing that. But the big idea is, if you show that you’re willing and interested and able to joyfully support someone and be there for them, that gives them the permission to ask you. That’s kind of the basis of the support card is to be like, “Hey, here’s what I have to offer.” Then the workshop too. Write down everything that you have to offer. Do you have bilingualism? Do you look cis, straight, and/or white so that you can accompany someone somewhere and help them get more respect? Do you have writing skills or editing skills? Do you have money? What do you have? Because those are things you can offer. Then that helps people realize, “Oh, if you’re offering it, then I don’t feel bad asking for it, because you’ve offered it. It’s not going to be a burden to give something you’ve already offered.”
Abeni:
Once you’ve taken that step, then you can be explicit about, “I want you to know that I’m always available.” Or, “I’m available at this capacity.” Not always available. You have to know your capacity. “I’m available at this capacity to support you in this way, or this way, or this way if you ever need it. Just please let me know. I promise you I will joyfully… that I get pleasure out of supporting you because I love you.” I hear myself saying those words. I know that’s the kind of stuff I would say, but I know that sounds bizarre to a lot of people. Who talks to their friends like that? I do, and my life is immeasurably better because of it. You have to do that. Then once you’ve started building that kind of thing, you also ask for help from people and you ask for support, because then you can take care of and support each other.
Abeni:
Then you can start building out with other friends, and then you can be on social media, or maybe you can be in a Facebook group and building it a little bigger, but I like to keep it small. I have four best friends, and one of them is my partner. The other three, none of us live in the same area. My one friend lives in Brazil right now. The other one actually does live in Oakland, but was going to move to New York. The other one lives in Albuquerque. We all love and take care of each other, but in the age of… this was before COVID-19, but especially in the age of COVID-19, we’ve had to get creative on how to stay connected and still take care of each other. We actually have a bi-weekly Zoom call that we just chop it up. We have it on our calendars, and we make sure that it happens every time or as frequently as we can. I have calls with one of them in the mornings when I walk the lake in the morning. We do stuff like that to try and keep it together.
Abeni:
Also, one of my friends, their mom just had a stroke and was in the ICU. What was so cool was they were able to be like, “Hey.” They texted us three, our group chat. “I need support. It looks like this. Who can offer it?” One friend was like, “I can call you right now.” I was able to be like, “I can talk tomorrow.” The other person was like… We were able to be there. But they were only comfortable doing that because last time they asked for help when they were depressed, they needed someone to help come clean their apartment, because it had gotten messy because they were just depressed. I was like, “Yes, of course I’ll do that. I’ll be there for you. I’ll come tomorrow.” We spent three hours. It was right around the time the Beyonce video documentary, or Beychella came out. We put that on and we cleaned the apartment.
Abeni:
We had built that relationship. It had even gone back before because in my earlier crisis, when my friend passed away and I was inconsolable, they were there. They were there for me. It kind of is built over time that we know that we can rely on each other. Nowadays, we don’t even have to worry about it. I know that if I need something, I can call one of them. If they need something, they know they can rely on me. But it’s taken time to build that out, and it’s been incredibly intentional. We’ve had to do it on purpose. One final thing I want to say about that too is I mentioned in the workshop too that knowing people well and building intimate relationships also… it makes the asking for and receiving care so much more seamless too. Because I know who individual people are and who to go to for what. I know what they have to offer. I know what capacity they have, and I know what their current availability is like.
Abeni:
I talked about different kinds of intentional conversations, for example, in the workshop. There’s processing, there’s advice, and there’s venting. I know that if I want to process, I can go to… I feel like my friend who I’ll call T. Very critical mind, very thoughtful. Asks lots of questions. Helps me to kind of figure out how I feel about a certain situation and work my way emotionally through it. If I just want to vent, I know that my good friend B is the one, because she is just so positive. She’s just like, “Oh, I got your back. Do you want me to fight somebody? Oh, that’s messed up. Screw that person.” Is just in my corner. If I want advice, I actually feel like my friend A is the one who has the most similar worldview and goals for life, and I feel like can give me really good advice that helps me to stay really true to my values and my integrity. Because she has incredibly strong and admirable values and integrity, and lives her life exactly according to her own principles.
Abeni:
When I’m like, “I’m not sure what to do about this,” she’s really good at being like, “Well, what does your heart tell you? What’s important to you? Let’s dig out what it would mean for you to do this, that, and the other based on how it feels about whether you’re aligned with your value.” I know who to go to based on what. That also takes time to build. You have to be intentional about learning those kinds of things about each other. You have to kind of love people to really know that deeply what they’re about and what they have to offer.
Nikki:
Right.
Abeni:
But they also have to know themselves well to know what they can and can’t do. It all just takes a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. Oh, it’s like a lifetime of work, but it’s so important. I’m only alive because of it. That’s a long, very, very long answer to your question, but hopefully I answered it.
Nikki:
You totally did. I got to say, you saying you have to do it on purpose, that shit hit me in a way that I’m going to thinking about that for… yeah, you have to do this on purpose. The entire framework of our podcast. We don’t just stumble into radical futures. You have to do it on purpose. You have to be intentional. You have to do the work. You have to get a little uncomfortable. I’m just thinking, I met my wife the way that you were kind of just talking about. Walking up to someone or someone you know. Strangers would be weird. But just being like, “Hey, let’s be intentional in our friendship.” That’s how I met my wife. I asked someone if they wanted to be friends with me like I was in third grade.
Nikki:
The next thing they did was introduce me to the woman that I married. Now I live this beautiful life full of love and care because I did it on purpose. I really love that you said that. I think that’s something that’s going to sit with me for years to come, is that we have to do this stuff on purpose. We have to put intention into it. We have to be a little awkward. We’re going to make mistakes, but we have to do it.
Abeni:
And sometimes a lot awkward.
Nikki:
Right.
Abeni:
Often not even a little. Sometimes a lot awkward, a lot uncomfortable. Asking for help is always awkward and uncomfortable, but asking someone to be your friend, especially if you’re an adult…
Nikki:
It’s stay up all night thinking about it awkward.
Abeni:
Yeah. That’s the thing. It’s funny because there was that movie I Love You, Man a number of years ago with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. That was the whole concept. This man, like I was saying, he didn’t have any friends. He was always “a girlfriend guy” is what they said in the movie.
Nikki:
Right.
Abeni:
I kind of really love movies like that, so I’ve seen that movie a lot of times. But yeah, the whole concept was, how do you make friends as an adult? So many years later, there’s even apps for it. Bumble has a friendship app, and OkCupid has a friendship category. It’s so hard. There’s still no structure or culture for how to just be like, “Hey, do you want to be friends?” Like you said, we have to figure it out. We have to be intentional about it. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be real tough, but it’s worth it is what I’m trying to say.
Rhiki:
Yeah. We just have one last question for you because we want to be mindful of time. Since we’re on this theme of building community, when I was researching you, I mean, I came across your piece on how to avoid performative allyship. Can you just talk a little bit about what you mean by performative allyship, and ways that we can make sure we’re being intentional about, in movement work, how to really show up in solidarity with others across movements?
Abeni:
Yeah, hold on one second. Okay, yes. One thing that I really want to say, and I think I got into in that piece, is that kind of self-care. And honestly, kind of almost everything probably. Allyship is neutral. It’s not amazing. You shouldn’t get praise and benefit for it. It’s just being a human, but it’s also not probably harmful even when it’s performative. I think I got into it in the article. If a bunch of people made their Instagram a BLM thing around the George Floyd protest, a bunch of influencers and a bunch of websites put a little banner ad saying “We support black people” or whatever, then it probably has a net benefit to society.
Abeni:
There’s obviously problems with it. It’s interesting, we’re seeing that there is some movement happening. It just came out that Austin, Texas are defunding their police. They’re putting that money into affordable housing and stuff. That’s a direct result of the recent movement against police violence and the Defund the Police movement. Things are kind of moving and happening. I think what’s interesting about performative allyship is when people who don’t actually care feel the need to pretend that they do. That is evidence that caring about that issue has become so widespread and mainstream that they want to ride the wave. Honestly, I think it’s a good sign. Honestly, I think performative allyship is a good sign at large because it means the culture is shifting enough that it’s profitable for those people to seem like they support black people or Black Lives Matter or whatever. Obviously they’re going to only do what’s profitable. Either they’re a business or they’re an influencer, and their personal brand… their whole thing is making money off their personal brand.
Abeni:
I wanted to say that. I don’t have any problem. This is similar to the people speeding in their cars, or people doing individual solutions to collective problems. I’m not going to be critiquing an individual person, especially if they’re a queer or trans person of color, for how they survive the hellscape that we live in. If you have to do this or that in order to get ahead or get by, go for it, sis. I wish that you would do something different, but we’re all just trying to survive. Same with these influencers and people who… or whatever, that cared a lot about Black Lives Matter for a week and then went back to regularly scheduled business.
Abeni:
I’m not upset at them individually, but I think it’s an interesting phenomenon culturally. The idea I think, if we want to connect it to community building, which I think is one way to think about it. If people want to read the article, it’s kind of longer and more intensive. It’s also on Autostraddle.com. I think the best way to avoid performative allyship is just to live your allyship. You don’t have to perform it. You don’t have to let anyone know. You could just love the black people in your lives if you care about anti-racism and all the people of color in your lives. You could love the trans women in your lives if you care about stuff. You can love all your friends if you care about building community. You can try to create alternative economies amongst your folks if you care about anti-capitalism.
Abeni:
I think the social media age has made it so that it feels like… talking about issues feels like activism. Spreading awareness feels like activism, and maybe it is. In fact, it probably is. But a lot more powerful is what you’re actually doing day to day. I think something that really stresses me out is videos on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube of people doing kind things, like giving money to a houseless person or stuff like that. I’m like, “Why are you filming that?” It’s so strange.
Rhiki:
My friends and I were just talking about that. When you do acts of service or kindness but you’ve got it on camera…
Abeni:
Yeah, it’s almost like it doesn’t count. Actually, I had a Christian upbringing. One of the very few things, positive things that I will take away from that, is there’s this concept about the Pharisees or whatever who are very performative about their religiosity. Jesus was like, “No, that’s not what it’s about. You should pray in secret. You should do your good deeds so no one hears about it. God will know. No one else needs to know.” I think unless you’re a big power player, or unless you’re an influencer or you have a big social media following and you have power in that, I feel like it’s almost not useful ever to share articles or little images or whatever about activist topics. I really wonder if that’s useful because the people who follow you probably already know what you’re about and what your politics are.
Abeni:
The real way to avoid performative allyship is to stop performing it and to just live it in your day to day, I think. It goes back to the concept of fractals again. It’s like if you believe in some big political goal, like say you believe in the abolition of policing and prisons. Well, what are you doing in your day to day life to live that out? Do you hold grudges? Do you think that someone who harmed you years ago, you should hold that in your opinion of them for the rest of their life? Do you believe in punishment? Do you believe in retribution? Do you believe in retribution on an individual level? I think there’s no easy answers to that, but I think that it’s interesting.
Abeni:
If you see someone stealing from a store, do you call the security guard or the cops? I was just reading… because I moved into a new apartment that has recycling. They give you a paper that says “Here’s how to recycle” and everything. On there, it has an FAQ. It’s like, “What should I do if I find someone going through my recycling to get cans?” The answer is, “You should call the police nonemergency hotline.” I was like, “What? No you should not. Who does it harm to give this person 40 cents from my cans that are no longer of use to me?”
Rhiki:
Oh my God.
Abeni:
Right? Actually, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put all of my cans in a separate bag and put it out on the sidewalk, so that the old lady can come get it more easily. I think we really need to be thinking about integrity, and about integrity meaning sameness. Meaning like a building has structural integrity. Meaning that it’s secure and it’s strong, and it’s not going to get blown over by a storm or an earthquake or something, because it’s really so strong in its foundations. If you believe in black life, what kind of media are you consuming? What books are you reading? Are you reading black authors? Do you have no black friends? If so, it’s time to do a really deep, introspective dive into why that is. Is it because you live in a white town or go to a predominantly white institution? Well, why is that?
Abeni:
It’s time to go deep and really think, what does it mean? Where are you spending your money? I remember when I got carjacked, the first question that like four different people asked me was whether the people were black. I was like, “What the hell kind of question is that?” But it really made me think about where their minds were at. Are you afraid when you walk around downtown or something and there’s black people? If so, it’s time to do some real deep work to think about why that is. Anyways, the point is that I think we like to think… a lot of people are activists, or keyboard warriors, or they’re big on social media or something. They’ve got their analysis and they’ve got their critical perspective of this, that, and the other issue. But it’s not always that they’ve fully integrated it into their day to day life.
Abeni:
I think that we would do much better to think deeply about the way that we live interpersonally and the way that we live day to day, and integrate our politics into that, then thinking about… Do I care much of what Biden is doing? I mean, sure. It impacts me and my loved one’s lives to a degree. But do I really need to be reading the news about politics? Half of the news you read today is, some congress person tweeted. That’s not news. I don’t care if AOC dunked on Mitch McConnell. It has no impact. It’s not important. What is important is how I’m actually living and how I’m taking care of people in my community. How I save enough of my income that I can donate to mutual aid funds. The inconveniences I choose to undergo in order to try to manifest the world that I would like to see.
Abeni:
I’m going to stay in that middle lane even though it would be faster and easier for me to cut aside, go into the right lane, and cut ahead and get onto the freeway sooner so that I don’t have to wait in traffic an hour. But I believe that I want to live in a way that’s in alignment with my values. But also, I want to live in a way that if everyone lived that way, things would be pretty nice. I think that that’s a lot more important than what you believe politically or things like that. If you’ve got a vision for the future that’s beautiful and just and loving, what are you doing right now to manifest that vision? That’s how I think you can avoid performative allyship.
Rhiki:
That was such a great answer. I love the way you brought the analogy back around. That just made it so much better. It was so great talking with you today.
Abeni:
I’ll be honest, I was proud of that as well.
Rhiki:
I’m so glad that we actually got to [crosstalk 01:04:04] like that.
Abeni:
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Rhiki:
It went well. It was so great. Nikki, what is something that you took away from our conversation today?
Nikki:
I think it’s really easy to just kind of believe that we can fall into these kinds of things, or that it’ll just happen. I don’t know, I think there is something to be said about really naming and recognizing that radical futures and the work of liberation has to be done on purpose. I really love what she said about, just because it’s done on purpose, doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable. Intentionality doesn’t have to feel perfect or good. It just needs to be intentional. That’s kind of just the bottom line. I really appreciate that. I think I’m going to hold onto that truth for more than just community care and mutual aid, but just for the whole concept of radical futures. We’ve got to do that stuff on purpose. How about you? What are you pulling from it?
Rhiki:
I think the thing that I’m taking away is the article that Abeni brought up, that an archeologist found evidence that early… the earliest beings of humanity, early humans, whatever we want to call them, had infrastructures of community care. They took care of each other. They were disabled. They had beings with disabilities, and they took care of them. And how Abeni was saying that community care or interdependence is something that’s ingrained in us. It’s the way in which we’re designed to coexist together, and how individuality or independence, or whatever is the model that we have for a living now, is something that hasn’t been learned over time. But it’s not actually the way that we were created to exist with one another.
Nikki:
Right, I feel the same way. That was shocking to hear because I think we’re just taught that Darwinism, survival of the fittest, last man on earth kind of stuff is our true nature. I love to hear that that’s not the truth. The truth is that we’ve always taken care of each other. That’s it for our episode today. The Radical Futures Now Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College.
Rhiki:
Special thanks to Trevor [Lodiam-Jackson 01:06:38] for our music and Ellianne [Icunones 01:06:41] for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram @ArcusCenter. See you next week.
Speaker 4:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.