They are everywhere at the protests, handing out masks, squirts of hand sanitizer, bottles of water, energy bars. They don’t have a name, really, the people who decide to come to the marches prepared to keep others around them safe, fed, and hydrated.
But while medics are intentionally visible, there are care workers at the protests who go unnamed, and often, unseen.
There are protest medics with red-taped crosses on backpacks full of eyewash and bandages—anything that could treat minor wounds or help neutralize tear gas and pepper spray. But while medics are intentionally visible, there are care workers at the protests who go unnamed, and often, unseen.
They seem to be more common now, in this post-pandemic wave of the Black freedom struggle.
In Philadelphia, I walked behind a group of women pulling a wagon of pre-prepared plastic bags of goodies while holding a sign declaring “FREE SUPPLY PACKS 4 PROTESTERS.” The packs held a mask, gloves, a bottle of water, a snack, and some first aid supplies. The wagon was big, and by the time I saw it, about half full.
One group of marchers strode behind a banner reading “CARE NOT COPS” in big black block letters, and that is as good a description for the entire movement as I can think of (not that I would presume to tell protesters what to call the thing that they have built). They are not simply saying that Black Lives Matter. They are putting it into practice, making sure that protesters are as safe as can be from police or the coronavirus, from a slow death or quick one.
The reproductive labor of the movement takes place outside of the streets, too. It is in the donations that have overflowed the coffers of half a dozen bail funds and Black-led community organizations doing work around policing—the donations to Ramsey Orta, who filmed the death of Eric Garner six years ago and was hounded into prison for it, as well as to the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old who filmed Floyd’s killing.
These donations are coming at a time of historic unemployment. They are small concrete acts of solidarity coming in $5 and $10 and $20 at a time, remembering the dead as they fight like hell for the living. Such solidarity is also in the food and supplies that overflow the buildings of organizations like Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) in Minneapolis, where staffers and members of the worker center pass out food to the neighborhood. And it is in places like Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia, where activists made sure that the curfew and police crackdown—which shuttered more businesses than the pandemic—didn’t mean that anyone went hungry.
Mutual aid and caring work have a long history as part of the prison and police abolition movement. “We keep us safe” isn’t just a slogan, it’s praxis. Jail support—waiting outside for arrestees to be freed with food and water and hugs and care—is a long-standing part of protest movements, whether arrests are planned or simply the result of an oversized police force.
Mutual aid and caring work have a long history as part of the prison and police abolition movement. “We keep us safe” isn’t just a slogan, it’s praxis.
But abolitionists also do a variety of other mutual aid work, from “copwatching” (filming police interactions to let officers know they are being observed and to provide a record of any violence they may commit) to providing food for the community.
In Philadelphia, on Saturday, June 9, when thousands of protesters flowed from the art museum to City Hall, a row of people stood behind a table with hot food in catering dishes. Above them, on a platform outside the Municipal Services Building, stood a row of heavily armed riot police and National Guard soldiers.
While “Defund the Police” has suddenly caught on as a slogan, its roots are in the divestment/investment framework that has been developed over the past several years within the movement, particularly by groups such as BYP 100 and the Movement for Black Lives policy platform. It is not just austerity logic, but a demand to shift money away from policing communities and towards providing what those communities need.
It is a recognition that police “reforms” have only resulted in throwing more money at a system that has proved itself capable of absorbing all reforms tossed at it without shrinking the toll it exacts on Black communities. And it is an understanding that more harm results from unmet needs—hunger, illness, homelessness—than from most of what is made criminal in America.
In this moment, as schools and even hospitals face budget cuts, the proposal to divest from policing and invest in public services has a special resonance. When states and municipalities are facing revenue shortfalls, calls to “defund the police” might finally be realized by an actual lack of money.
And though budget fights are often prosaic exercises in horse-trading at state capitols and city halls, politicians now confront an energized movement that has seen its government take quick action both to respond to the pandemic—though in that case, not quick enough—and to send in police and soldiers clad in billions of dollars worth of equipment to put down protests that began as an expression of grief.
Americans have just been reminded of what the state is capable of doing to them; they will be asking next what it is capable, if anything, of doing for them.
Political scientist Amy Schiller described the protests in New York City as a “relentless, exuberant, nonstop affirmation of human worth.” Everywhere, they have been spaces of joy as well as grief and rage. They are spaces where “Black Lives Matter” is a declaration of the value of the full spectrum of humanity, where people are something other than just sources of labor power.
In those spaces, people take care of one another as best they can, even now when simple proximity to others is a threat to our health. The movement puts care into practice in real time; it demands that we create a society that affirms that human worth, that care, every day.