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Mutual Aid: Solidarity vs Charity

One of the headings of Mutual Aid by Dean Spade that stood out to me was “Solidarity not Charity!”. As I assumed it would, this chapter discusses how mutual aid is different from standard charity and the issues charities have as opposed to mutual aid projects. I think that the distinction that Spade made between mutual aid and charity is important because it allows people who are trying to create mutual aid programs to evaluate what they are doing and avoid self-sabotaging the work that they are trying to do.

One of the main issues that Spade has with charity is that it involves input of a few people instead of a collaboration of many people from a community. In the book, Spade explains that charities are usually run by so-called “professionals” who do what they think would be the most effective methods to help people, but also with other rules and governments in mind. People who run charities might be too methodical, considering public appearances and governmental approval more than they consider what would be the best way to help the people there who are affected by specific issues. Mutual aid, in contrast, involves multiple people in a local setting working on a common issue that they themselves have acknowledge and want to address. They do not necessarily break the law, but they do not try to depend on the government or other legal bodies or founders to help them; they organize relief themselves and gather resources by their own means. Self-leadership is also more productive because the people experiencing the issues can form a resolution and help themselves directly without going through hoops of approval with the government. Having more people to lead also provides more input for resolutions and reduces the possibility of someone taking over and leading the organization in a negative direction or changing its intent.

Another issue that Spade has with charity is that many people (and the government) engage with charities in a performative manner. For example, celebrities and other rich people can search for a charity that sounds like it is for a good cause and donate to them to make it seem like they are supportive, when they are trying to build an image and possibly get tax write offs. With mutual aid, people are trying to get real help and change, not any type of profit and recognition. They are trying to fix things for themselves and their communities, so personal gain is more likely to be off the table. Spade argues that both charity and mutual aid can make people feel good for helping others, since helping others can make you feel good, but there is a difference between the happiness you feel from charity and from mutual aid. Spade says that giving makes one happy, so that is the same, but as mentioned earlier, charity can be a very performative action, so those who give to charities often feels better about themselves for giving than they feel happy for those receiving.

I personally think that mutual aid and charities can be good in their own ways. I whole-heartedly support the concept of mutual aid. I think that organizing on a smaller level will lead to more effective change because those people within the communities see first-hand what is happening and know how their people are, and therefore have more insight on how to address the issues. I also think that mutual aid will be beneficial to specific issues that are often overlooked by the federal and local government. I think that charity would be beneficial when addressing broader issues over widespread areas, such as charities that help end child hunger. Child hunger can affect specific communities, and mutual aid can help address that, but I think that the extra awareness and resources provide more possibilities for people to get help. Of course, there are more issues with charities such as rules they make for who gets aid and how they distribute the resources, but I think that when it comes to crises, all available avenues to get resources should be used. Overall, although I do agree with Spade that charities aren’t as effective and righteous as they claim to be, I think that they should still be in place so it can be another resource for people needing help. Instead of reducing charities, I think their number should stay the same or that they should continue to address broad issues, and the number of mutual aid programs should increase. The government, as much as it tries or doesn’t try, can’t effectively address every issue within all communities. Knowing how to help yourself in a crisis is just as important as knowing how and where to call for help. The more people try to help themselves, the more the aftermaths of crises can be reduced, and the faster communities can be restored.

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Narratives on Bodies and Sexual Slavery

In the article “Relocation Revisited: The Sex Trafficking of Native Women,” the author Sarah Deer writes about “sexual slavery,” using sexual favors and violence to exploit people, and how it has and is still affecting Native American communities, specifically Native American women. She notes that this dynamic centers around the concept of a them vs us perspective, where white settlers saw the Native American people, their bodies, and their culture, and decided that they were different and weren’t entitled to the same rights and protections that they wanted for themselves. They also used the difference in culture to exploit Native Americans since they didn’t see thems as equals. Specifically in the text, Deer noted that white settlers took advantage of the culture of casual sex within Native American communities to reason that Native American women are not classy like white women and don’t carry themselves the same way and are therefore accustomed to such activities and may welcome them. White people used this difference to paint a narrative that Native American women are loose and dirty, and this narrative further put Native American women at a disadvantage because it justified violence against them and kept them from receiving justice when the perpetrators are tried in court.

This painting of narratives on bodies reminds me of the cholera outbreak in the Philippines. In this situation, white people went to a land that did not belong to them and began to judge and criticize the people there based on their own standards of society. Rather than sex, the subject under review in the Philippines was hygienic practices. They observed hygienic practices of the Filipino people and did not agree, so they began to project the “dirty” environment onto the bodies of the Filipino people and treat them as such. They also began to make major cultural changes to the Philippines for their own comfort. Once it is of popular opinion that one is dirty and lower than another, it is difficult to write that off and change the culture of how you treat those people. The same is true with Native Americans. Once they found an aspect of their culture to exploit, they took it and ran with it. They built a narrative around the women that became so strong and agreed with that people stopped questioning the violence and rape against Native American women.

Deer’s point about sexual slavery was the most striking to me. One usually thinks about slavery in the terms of labor, but to see it through the lens of sexual violence was eye opening. It is indeed slavery if a group of people are taken advantage of and one-sidedly used for the benefit of another in any way. The attention to the way that sexual slavery affects Native American women is lacking in this country throughout its history. The way that they are almost unrecognized and disregarded strengthens the claim that this violence is like slavery and makes the hold over the women in the Native American communities that it has is still happening today even more dispicable. 

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Environmental Nationalism

In Articulating Environmental Nationalism in Puerto Rico, author Catalina Maíre de Onís describes how environmental activists in Puerto Rico used the method of environmental nationalism to effectively argue for environmental rights and protections. Environmental nationalism is the concept of framing environmental protection efforts around preservation of the culture of the country and how the environment relates to the country’s character. Using this concept, environmental activists had another strong argument to go along with standard environmental protection that was hard to dispute or ignore.

Environmental nationalism was essential to the argument for environmental protections in Puerto Rico. To begin with, Puerto Rico has an interesting identity as it is a part of the United States but is not considered a state. Since the United States “owns” Puerto Rico, so to speak, they take advantage of the resources available to make a profit for themselves. Activities used to gain these resources come at the expense of the environment, such as deforestation and mining. The people of Puerto Rico spoke out about the negative effects these activities had on the environment, but their arguments were not strong enough to convince those who could make change to do something about it. In the text, the author noted that during the height of the environmental movement, the inland of the United States itself was also having an environmental movement itself. Puerto Rico saying “us too” while struggling to protect their home was not loud enough alone to reach the ears of the inland and make change. This was obviously a problem of ignoring a minority voice over one’s own self-interest, and Puerto Rico unfortunately fell behind in the interest of the United States regarding addressing harmful environmental practices and restoration. Although their environmental movement was not getting the results that they wanted, the people of Puerto Rico couldn’t stay silent or continue to do the same thing as they watched their home be destroyed, so they began to change the narrative of why they wanted change.

Using environmental nationalism, Puerto Ricans made the argument that the actions of the United States was destroying the environment and their beautiful home. They reasoned that nature is a big part of the identity of Puerto Rico, and to harm the environment is to harm their culture. Framing the argument around national character makes environmental protection more of an ethical issue. Environmental nationalism was effective because it makes the United States look at Puerto Rico as a place that people call a home and not just a land of resources and profit.

Environmental nationalism relates to the ideas of land and place in Indigenous Land, Lives, and Embodied Ecologies in the Twenty-First Century by Dian Million. In this text, Million connects the land to the people there, saying that the people on the land have a cultural connection with it. Those lands are not simply as a place of dwelling, but as a place with generations of history. Environmental activists of Puerto Rico also use this idea of land. In their arguments, they attach themselves, their culture, and their identity to the land of Puerto Rico to defend their position that their home deserves to be protected. Because people are becoming more aware of other cultures, they can recognize the significance of a cultural aspect others find important and try to preserve it. In practice, environmental nationalism gives the human qualities of identity and culture to the land to justify wanting to protect the land, which provides environmental activists with another tool they can use to advocate for environmental protections.

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Invisibility and Visibility

In Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman by Mitsuye Yamada and Weaponizing Our (In)visibility: Asian American Feminist Ruptures of the Model-Minority Optic by Shireen Roshanravan, the authors explore the meaning of visibility and invisibility as it relates to Asian American women. Yamada gives an anecdote about her experience as an Asian American woman and how her opinions were ignored, or people did not expect her to speak up or have issues. Roshanravan explored how visibility and invisibility is related to activism and how Asian American woman can use activism to make themselves more visible.

Visibility and invisibility are about how society and peers see Asian American women and treat them based on how they think they feel about social issues. According to the authors, most people expect Asian American women to not have a strong voice for or against issues and expect them not to say anything if there is a conflict. Their voices are perceived as weaker than their male counterparts, and they are regarded as mild or soft spoken. Some of these opinions are cultural, while others have been created through social interactions. For example, in Yamada’s text, she retold the story of how she was a pacifist and planned to marry a pacifist man. Her father did not care that she was going to be a pacifist regardless of who she married, he only cared about what her husband would believe. To reinforce the view that women’s opinions do not hold the weight of men’s opinions, her college kicked her brother out for his political opinions but let her stay because they did not view her as a threat. Her school did not even consider her opinion strong enough to be a possible influence on her peers. This example shows how the opinions of Asian American women do not hold the same weight as the opinions of men and are not acknowledged when considering the opinion of a whole. In this case, “invisibility” took the form of people ignoring whatever opinion she may hold because they did not think that it held weight.

One account in Roshanravan’s paper was about how a woman put on a “cry-smile” mask in response to a negative racial comment of a colleague. The colleague said that she wished that other Black people would be nice like the Black man who worked with them instead of being angry and bitter instead of being angry and bitter. In response, the woman did not say anything and instead put on the cry-smile mask, saying that while she did not agree, she felt forced to put on a smile and not correct the woman. The cry-smile mask behavior is a consequence of the “model-minority” mentality. Asian Americans as the model-minority means that Asian Americans conform to and do not reject the racial and social norms that have been established in the United States. In the example above, the woman was not able to respond to the woman because the resistance to going against the woman outweighed the desire to speak against her. By putting on her mask, her real opinion became invisible, and only a silent agreement remained.

Roshanravan also discusses how activists join movements to increase visibility. One example is of the female Asian American activists joining African American movements such as the Black Lives Matter movement. By including themselves in other movements, they learned about the struggles that African Americans faced and related them to their own. While sympathizing, they didn’t take them as the same and group all issues together. Instead, they used their presence in the movement to change the opinion that people have about the racial views of Asian Americans. While it might not be immediately apparent to the outside, the people on the inside of the movement would begin to acknowledge their presence and that they share the same opinion. This helps reduce the stereotype that Asian Americans only support the racial hierarchy that white people have established in the United States and show people that Asian American women can have strong opinions too.

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Imperialism and Entitlement

Anderson’s Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution highlights how Imperialism led to certain standards of ”civilization “ being forced upon the native people by an invading people. Anderson’s example follows the story of Imperialism in the Philippines and the cholera outbreak in the early 1900s. Scientists from the United States went to the Philippines and analyzed their waste disposal practices. They found that they did not have strict sanitation practices, and the feces that they analyzed had parasites and germs. Instead of determining why there were parasites in the feces or where it came from, they began to generally view the Filipino people as the germ itself, thinking that they needed intense cleaning and structural hygienic change. This perspective led to the stereotype that the Filipino people were dirty, germ infested, and uncivilized. Stereotypes like these hurt the pride of the Filipino people and made others view them with disdain.

Imperialism was negative because it led to people forcing their ideas of society and civilization onto others. In this case, they made people in the Philippines reform sanitation, change eating practices, change bathroom practices, and change marketplace activity and structure. For this to bring change, they had to use extreme force in any way possible. One way that they did this was through schools. Since they thought that change wouldn’t come for generations, they targeted the youngest generation that was in the process of learning. They made teachers strictly monitor the health changes of the students and alert authorities if something was not standard. They also tried to make these children bring the practices to the family. The problem with the heavy teaching to the children of these strict hygienic changes is that older generations don’t practice it the same, so it creates a divide between the cultural practices between generations. While they had other ways of enforcing hygienic practices on adults such as fines, they still didn’t endure the intensity of the teachings the children received, which makes it harder for adults to teach children since the children are learning more.

Another issue with Imperialism is the entitlement involved in changing a society to fit one’s standards. The Americans who went to the Philippines did not tell them to change primarily because they thought that it would be beneficial to them as a whole; they wanted them to change simply because they found them appalling. They felt that if they could not live in such an environment, it needed to change to be suitable for themselves. An example of their ideas of rightness is with a festival that was held. After they saw the festival held by the Filipino people, which they found unsanitary over anything else, they created their own version of what they believed to be a proper festival. Of course, while showing the Filipino people how a festival should look, they also had to include an example of how their houses should look and the sanitary standards they expected of them. This breech of culture and entitlement shows the lack of understanding they have of other people and cultures and the power of their unrelenting ideology of proper civilization.

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Animals and Therapy

In Erica Tom’s Humanizing Animals, Tom compares the experiences and the positions of racehorses with prisoners. She juxtaposes these two as two different types of animals: a nonhuman animal and a human animal. She emphasizes the fact that human are indeed animals, but instead of making the argument that negative human behavior can be justified due to animal instinct, she highlights how the care and nurturing that animals receive can be applied to humans to benefit them emotionally. In the essay, Tom gives the example of an inmate named Noel who cares for a horse. The horses that are cared for by the inmates are usually ex-racehorses who are no longer useful to their owners, much like how people see the inmates in prisons who no longer benefit society. He notes that he was always angry inside, and verbal human intervention did not help him; the understanding and the acceptance of the horse, however, did. He said it was the “actions” of the horse that helped. In a way, it was a mutually beneficial relationship: as he cared for and nurtured the horse, the horse gave him reassurance and calmed his anger and unrest. This mutual assurance between animals is therapeutic because both can benefit from being cared for by the other. The notion that “human animals” need to learn to care for other animals so that they can help themselves could be because taking care of a being “lesser” than humans makes one feel as if they are needed. The relationship between the human animal and the non-human animal also becomes one of mutual trust and security, making both animals feel better.

Tom also mentions how sometimes, humans are dehumanized by comparing them to animals based on a hierarchy. The use of these comparisons has been used to justify the negative treatment of humans based on characteristics they claim to see in animals. Tom twists this rationale a bit. She acknowledges the fact that humans are animals, but she doesn’t see this as negative; she sees the relationships of humans to animals as a method by which we can analyze the most basic needs of humans. The one she finds human animals to be lacking in the prisons is this sense of comfort and reassurance. Even if it is not achieved through animal contact, human animals still need to feel a sense of security, reassurance, and acceptance from another being to feel comfortable with himself. Thinking about Noel, perhaps if the people around him tried to embrace him, accept him, or gently stir him in the right direction, it would have been more effective.

Human animals need more accessible comping mechanisms and therapeutic outlets. The fact that animals are often a go to, even in the cases of animals such as therapy dogs, shows that there is a lack of accessible and effective support for people who need therapy and are going through things. Even if it is with the increase in access to therapy animal sessions, there needs to be an overall increase in the access to therapy and mental health resources and an increase in advocacy in support of mental health care to increase the wellbeing of the population. For instance, if prisoners like Noel had been told about mental health resources earlier, or had been directed towards stress relieving outlets and activities, they could’ve gotten the help that they needed without having to go to jail to find it. As we grow more conscious of how our mental health is affecting us, it is imperative that we support finding resources to help ourselves and others without it being the last resort.

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Prison beds and Compansated Man-days Discussion

In the reading Prison Beds and Compensated Man-Days: The Spatio-Temporal Order of Carceral Neoliberalism, author Lisa Guenther describes the start-up of a private jail in Trousdale County, Tennessee. Trousdale County has the smallest population in Tennessee and has a majority white population. The county is the site of a former nuclear complex, whose construction was heavily protested as it was built. The land of this site was later used to build a private prison, which did not receive as much backlash as the building of the nuclear plant. The purpose of the article is to explain how this private prison system started and how the prison makes its profit by incarcerating as many people as they can. The author explains this using the terms “prison beds” and “compensated man-days,” which means that the more prison beds that are occupied, the more profit people can make from prisons.

In the private prison system, the prisons are backed primarily by those in government, since they have an influence on laws, which determine what the prison population looks like. The prison in turn funds the campaigns of those in government who will back them. Two notable officials mentioned were Lamar Alexander, a current US Senator for Tennessee, and Bill Haslam, former governor of Tennessee. The notion that lawmakers can gain profit from prisons is terrifying. They oversee making the laws that govern the area, so they can make laws stricter and enforce more rules so they can gain more profit. As it is a known fact that BIPOC make up a large percentage of the prison population (it is briefly mentioned in the text but not explained that minorities are affected more by the prison system), these laws are most likely to target crimes that these groups are more likely to commit and make the punishments harsher. One way that I see this coming into play with current events is the criminalization of Black Lives Matter protestors. These protesters are sometimes rounded up in groups and sent to prison with high bail. This means that even if they do not stay in the prison long, the prison still profits from the high amounts people must pay to get them out of prison.

The conditions under which they run the prisons also show that they are strictly for-profit. The facilities are built as cages covered in concrete, with just enough living space and other necessities to meet state standards. These buildings are barely suitable for living and barely take care of the prisoners. The way they build prisons reminds me of how manufacturers push out products. When they know a product can sell, they build it as cheaply as possible and make as much as they can to get maximum profit at the lowest expense to themselves. Like manufacturers, owners of private prisons have them built to allow the maximum capacity at a cheap cost to them. Some people don’t see what they’re doing as a problem because prisoners are seen as beneath regular people, and many think they deserve whatever treatment they receive in the prisons. This is rationale is most likely the reason that the citizens of Trousdale County didn’t protest the prisons as much as they did the nuclear plants; since it didn’t hurt them and it made them a profit, it was okay. This reasoning is wrong because it undermines the justice system and exposes people to inhumane living conditions, which no one deserves.

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The Racial Contract

The Racial Contract is a social structure that arose in some countries due to the creation social hierarchies based on race, with the white race being at the top and other below . This social hierarchy is the result of pre-existing attitudes from people who were identified as “not us” to Europeans, or as barbarians or savages. These terms usually meant that the people in the lands they wanted to conquest did not look like them (by skin color mainly), did not talk like them, and did not have the same style of civilization as them. They believed that this verdict that they made was true and justified their practice of racism using philosophical reasoning.

One philosophical work referenced in the Racial Contract: Details by Charles Mills was Politics by Aristotle. In this work, he said that some people are inherently inferior and are meant to be in subservient positions such as a slave. Many rulers and explorers have used this logic to justify why they forced different groups of people to become slaves or positioned them at the bottom of society once they established an order that they wanted for themselves. Another source that they use to justify taking over the lands of other nations is Locke’s definition of property. Locke believed that for land to be defined as “property,” one needed to put in “labour” to the land and work on it. This labour could mean farming or building on the land. Once a person did that, no one could deny that the land belonged to the person who performed that labour. By this reasoning, he stated that the land used by Native Americans was not their property because they were using it randomly and not domesticating the land.

Using the logic of philosophers such as Aristotle and Locke, rulers of countries could justify why they were entitled to lands and why they deserved to exert authority over others. They went to other lands, imposed their own definitions of property and ownership on the native peoples of those lands, and took it for themselves. Since they could take those lands and the people who inhabited the lands did not manage the lands how they saw fit, they labeled those people as savages and inferior, and they have continued to treat them as such for generations.

The Racial Contract really came into play once white settlers started to live in foreign lands where the previous inhabitants still lived. For example, in the United States, settlers created a society where all people would be considered equal, and everyone would be provided equal protection under law as long as they followed the social contract. This became a problem because they had African slaves and Native Americans who they did not think belonged to their society and who they had marked as inferior, but these people were still a part of the country. They tried to take on this problem by forcing these groups to assimilate into their culture and follow the social contract, but it was impossible because they still viewed Native Americans and former slaves and their descendants as inferior. As they continued to try to force distinctly different people to follow their societal rules, tensions grew as feelings of superiority and physical differences remained. As a result, the racial hierarchy that they established hundreds of years ago still affects us today.

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What is liberal democracy, and how can it be put into practice in the United States?

The concept of liberal democracy in the United States is one that is very idealistic and has little success in implementation. Throughout history, lawmakers and officials have tried to redefine and clarify the origins of this concept in the founding of the country, but the actions that the country takes don’t reflect the intentions of what they put on paper. To analyze at this concept and explain how we can truly practice liberal democracy, there needs to be a standard definition for liberal democracy, and the origin of the fault in the system must be addressed.

To be liberal means that the state embraces the diversity of its people, and the state has been made to accommodate those who exist inside the state. A liberal state should encourage equal rights and opportunities for all people within the state regardless of their identification, be is sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. The liberal state should embrace the differences within it, and not punish those who do not fit some standard identity inside it. To be a democracy, the people within the state should have equal representation in government and opportunities. The decisions made by the government should reflect the feelings of the general populace, ie. majority rules. One could argue that in the Constitution, the phrase “all men are created equal” applied to all human beings, but we know that they did not mean that. The problem with this statement is while people have tried to make this statement mean something like “all human beings,” some stuck in the past still use the old interpretation of this phrase, and this old interpretation is weaved into the laws and policies that govern the country.

It is clear that the United States was not an “equality for all” type of country from the beginning. Although people first fled to the United States for religious freedom, the religion they wanted the freedom to practice was only one. They immigrated to foreign land, but only wanted to see people who looked like themselves. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, “all men are created equal,” doesn’t apply to everyone; it didn’t even apply to women. It meant that all land-owning white men are equal and deserve equal representation and the rights enumerated in the Constitution. Because this is the premise upon which the country was founded, there can be no real resolution if to enforce the concept of liberal democracy you patch whatever holes you can or scratch out and fill in changes that need to be made; there needs to be real change to the foundation in order to achieve the pure essence of a liberal democracy.

To address what is wrong with a centuries old document for a centuries-old country with centuries worth of atrocities with respect to the current sociopolitical climate of the country and to try to change this document little by little is inefficient. If there is going to be a real change, there needs to be a new and clear definition and clarifications of the principles of this country and how it wants to treat its people. After that, the only way to achieve the goal that the new principles want to reach is to enforce in all aspects of life that they affect with no wiggle room. This would be extremely difficult, but in order to solve the issue of the embedded racism and bias within the system, the foundation of the system needs to be addressed, and heavy cleaning needs to occur.