Racial Capitalism Isn’t Enough: Mutual Aid as Solidarity in the Wake of COVID-19

• In Event: Dynamics of Racial Separation and Solidarity

Abstract

Within the context of COVID-19 and racial uprisings, the nature of cross-racial solidarities have often been created within the context of state neglect and exit with respect to the threat of eviction, lack of adequate medical care, and the threat of police violence. In their place have been mutual aid collectives, springing up sometimes as direct responses to the pandemic and sometimes as long-standing pillars of communities around the country. Focusing on Oakland and New York City, this paper asks how does participation in mutual aid efforts during the pandemic shape subsequent engagement in politics? Moreover, what does the presence of mutual aid organizations tell us about the nature of racial capitalism in American cities—with state neglect creating cross-racial solidarities out of social, practical, and material need? Drawing from a wide range of discussions by scholars within and beyond the discipline such as Cedric Robinson, Fred Moten, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dean Spade, and others, we detail how mutual aid serves as divestment in the violences of racial capitalism by forging racial intimacies and developing new formations of cross-racial solidarities between communities of color in the wake of disaster and dispossession. Our paper will ask both empirical questions about the spread of local mutual aid organizations in the wake of COVID-19 and more theoretical questions about how these organizations are bellwethers for the nature of racial capitalism and how mutual aid serves as an important outlet to build community power and activate new forms of political participation and direct democracy.

Authors

• Christian Hosam, New America

• Diane Wong, Rutgers University-Newark