image courtesy of Dr. Simi Kang
“Care is the antidote to violence.” - Saidiya Hartman, speaking at In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe
While I have left my hometown, Bde Óta Othúŋwe (the Dakota name for so-called Minneapolis), many times, I have never missed home more than in the last few months. Since May 25, 2020, I have cheered my chosen family on as they’ve paved the way for an ongoing local and global uprising in support of the Movement for Black Lives and for the abolition of policing in all forms.
I have also watched as already underserved community members are hit hardest by a political imperative to do harm, be it refusing to contain a deadly virus that overwhelmingly kills IBPOC, sending more police to shut down uprisings in major cities, or the ongoing horrors of the food system for migrant workers and refugees. When communities find themselves in crisis—for revolution, compounded by a global pandemic, presents its own crises—housing, healthcare, and food are most tenuous. This, in turn, means that maintaining all three requires our communities to build sustainable networks of care, or mutual aid, to help one another where the powers-that-be refuse to.
For me, doing mutual aid in the uprising has meant seeking ways to effectively engage in it as a part of my daily life. Since June 1st, I have been a part of the Twin Cities Mutual Aid Project (TCMAP), an online map of almost 300 sites providing food, personal care items, legal support, and so on across the Twin Cities metro. I contribute via zoom and slack from my home in Dionde:gâ (the Seneca name for what is called Pittsburgh), joining the hundred-plus volunteers who are working to maintain their communities’ health and futures through mutual aid. For many Indigenous, Black, and other folks of color, this work is neither new nor uprising-specific—what is being called mutual aid today is bone-deep knowledge we have undertaken out of love and necessity.
As COVID and the uprising have made people more and more tenuous, I have returned to the things my Dadiji (paternal grandmother in Punjabi, the language spoken by my Indian family members[1]) taught me about care; she showed me the value of making extra food for neighbors, that childcare is a communal project, and that everyone you share space with is family. Through unpacking these ancestral blueprints for care, I am realizing that while community care has always been imperative for our (colonized, immigrant, refugee, migrant) survival at home and in diaspora, it has also been the underpinning of our ancestors’ and our own rebellion in the name of survival. The Twin Cities uprising—and so many that have come before it—is such a rebellion, highlighting for many how mutual aid is imperative for and co-constitutive of all revolutionary movements, including the current US movement for police abolition.
Watching folks create new possibilities for themselves and their loved ones under explicit and rampant oppression has made me wonder what ancestral knowledge we can each bring to bear in this moment. More explicitly, what can our ancestors, as diverse and differently compelled as they are, tell us is the path forward in the impossible moments and the impossibly possible ones we continue to find ourselves in? For me, a white-passing mixed Sikh Midwesterner, this looks like unpacking Sikhism’s lessons for both rebellion and care.
***
On a cold night in October, 2018, I stood outside of Gandhi Mahal, my favorite South Asian restaurant in Bde Óta Othúŋwe, dancing to keep warm as I waited for my friend to join me. The plan was to eat as much onion bujia (fritters) and baingan bharta (stewed, roasted eggplant) as possible before heading to Hidden Falls for Barebones, an annual fall celebration in the spirit of Día de los Muertos and Halloween. After settling in, my friend took off their coat to reveal a deep green sweatshirt. I smiled, taking in the word “abolitionist,” which was stamped across their chest in big white block letters.
We’d met in the fall of 2017 at a convening called Abolish! Border Imperialism, where the abolition of policing and colonialism was at the top of everybody’s minds. At the opening plenary, Nick Estes presented his ongoing work for Native American sovereignty and demilitarization, and Ricardo Levins Morales, a local Puerto Rican artist and activist, talked about a collective that imagined a police-free future for Minneapolis: MPD150. For twenty minutes, Levins Morales stood in front of a packed auditorium and explained that police do not protect us. Rather, he said, we should redistribute the Minneapolis Police Department’s budget to schools, social services provisioning, housing, and other resources that fundamentally allow Twin Cities residents to care for themselves and one another without surveillance, profiling, and punitive harm.
At our dinner a year later, my friend and I talked about their recent involvement in MPD150 and abolition work. They told me about folks like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dean Spade, and Mariame Kaba, explaining that abolition was not disbanding the police in a single moment. Instead, it is a process of defunding them over time while reallocating their budgets to things that would actually keep us safe—things we have been fighting for for generations to safeguard our youth and elders against violence, trauma, and harm.
As we neared the end of dinner, my friend told me that the scariest part of abolition was that most folks couldn’t imagine what happens after policing[2]. This is because, according to Kaba, “as a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.” My friend rejected this notion. “We’re already replacing police,” they said, waving their index finger between the two of us emphatically. “We already know how to take care of each other. It’s called mutual aid.”
This was the first time I heard the term mutual aid, which refers to the collective, collaborative work that disabled, IBPOC, queer, trans, two-spirit, women, immigrants, migrants, refugees, colonized, and members of so many other structurally underserved communities do to keep ourselves alive. Scooping up more eggplant with a piece of naan, I thought about my Dadiji (paternal grandmother), who had made this dish for me so many times before. Savoring that bite, I realized that the concept of mutual aid and its corollary, abolition, were legible to me from my earliest memories with my father’s family: “I think Sikhs do mutual aid too, especially with food.”
***
My Dadiji (paternal grandmother) was a devout Sikh. As a child, I did not have other Punjabis in my daily life. But on annual trips with my father to our family farm in India, I learned about who we were—as Kangs, as Punjabis, and as Sikhs. On those visits, she took me along on her almost-daily trips to our local gurdwara, where Sikhs worship. Each ritual—-walking barefoot on cold white marble, washing my hands under a communal spigot, giving an offering in front of the Granth and eating prashad blessed by the gyanis—was precious to me. But my favorite part of going to gurdwara was when we took langar, the two times daily, vegetarian communal meal served free to all[3].
After praying, Dadiji and I would head to a long hall where we’d sit on the floor. Nestled next to other eaters at the pangat (long strips of cotton that serve as ‘tables’), she would instruct me to hold up my tin plate for the sawadars as they paced from person-to-person with efficient grace. As they walked down the line one after another, each dipped a large ladle into a bucket full of raita, channa, dal, or sabzi before gently placing its contents on our plates. As we ate, I watched this ritual repeated over and over as newcomers joined us and others ate second and third servings at the sewadars’ urging. Everyone got what they needed.
At my family’s gurdwara, langar was never a somber meal. My Dadiji would say hi and joke with whomever was sitting next to us, often someone she had met on a prior visit. I loved watching these exchanges; while I never fully understood the Punjabi that melodically tripped out of everyone’s mouths, these meals were early lessons in how to build community: share a meal, share a space—share a little more each time.
Taking langar with my Dadiji fundamentally shaped how I conceive of my place in the world. At the age of four or five, I was starting to understand that being Sikh meant being part of a global family. As I grew up, I learned that this family was formed from and shaped by resistance to oppression, be it via a structural lack of food or, in so many cases, outright persecution. What makes me most proud of my heritage is the fact that, while our families have lived through persistent persecution (including acts of genocide), Sikhs have always responded by making it our work to do what we call seva (“selfless service”), or providing care for and with everyone selflessly and relentlessly[4]. For my father’s family, care and resistance are one in the same.
***
Since Floyd was murdered and the third MPD precinct was taken by protestors in the Twin Cities, residents of Dionde:gâ (called Pittsburgh) have stayed in the streets fighting for Black lives. They are fighting for the Black trans, women, and queer folks lost to violence, including Jonny Gamage, Tony McDade, and Nina Pop. They are also fighting for the lives of Black youth, including Antwon Rose II who was murdered by East Pittsburgh police on June 19, 2018.
I have largely watched this history unfold from my apartment, just a few blocks from the Tree of Life - Or L'Simcha synagogue, where a white natonalist terrorist shot eleven Jewish congregants in October 2018 and where the doors remain closed. I have felt deeply inspired as organizers tirelessly assert their own demands for Black futures and the abolition of policing here. In the wake of the police murder of Black community and ongoing acts of xenophobia both nationally and locally, the Movement for Black lives is life-affirming for all residents of Pittsburgh.
At the same time, my heart has been in my hometown. For three months, I have been galvanized by young people fighting tear gas and flashbang grenades for their right not just to survival, but to a future. Have been enlivened as community members like Ruhel Islam, the owner of our beloved Gandhi Mahal, opened his doors to medics and protestors at the third precinct for two full days. When Gandhi Mahal finally succumbed to fire, Islam famously said: “Let my building burn...Justice needs to be served.” And as community members have, in light of months of long-standing, COVID-amplified vulnerabilities, struggled to care for themselves and their loved ones as grocery stores, transit, and other resources have become more tenuous or disappeared entirely.
In late May, mutual aid groups sprung up on Facebook to support neighborhoods across the Twin Cities. They were designed to provide forums for residents to share resources and understand where to find housing or diapers, transportation, pharmacies, and most persistently, food. Browsing the South Minneapolis group in late May, I found a map that was updated in real time, indicating whether grocery stores, convenience stores, and other imperative spaces were damaged, opened, or closed. The map also listed modified store hours and indicated whether a store was open for the foreseeable future or was taking it day-by-day. I reached out to the folks who built this map and, for two weeks, joined other volunteers every morning to cold-call 20 or 40 of hundreds of stores to see if they were able to meet their neighborhood’s needs.
Thankfully, the grocery store map became redundant in early June, when stores that were not damaged quickly reopened and returned to regular hours. But the return of spaces where folks could trade money for food did not solve the economic devastation of COVID-19, of tenuous housing and lack of rent and mortgage freezes, of food apartheid that is rampant across the Twin Cities metro area and the US. These compounding violences are not just exacerbated by policing, but are the direct results of it. As Dakota writer Diane Wilson (citing an elder) reminds us in A Good Time For the Truth: Race in Minnesota: “If you control the food, you can control the people.”
***
As I have said, the Sikh edict and practice of relentless care is my ancestral link to mutual aid. As Bay Area chef, organizer, and founder of JustUS Kitchen Jocelyn Jackson recently told Soleil Ho, “These traditions [of mutual aid] have been handed down for generations. Not because we know how to do it better, but because it was necessary for our survival. And it’s really really beautiful to see our instincts play out today from a place that is ancient because one of the first things you do in a crisis—that I’ve learned both overtly and also, just through practice—is that you caretake for the folks that are most at risk first.” This, as Jackson emphasizes and as my experiences of taking langar confirm, has most often been done through food.
Because Sikhs have faced persecution throughout our histories, mandating interpersonal care and care for all is a survival tactic, a compassionate practice emerging from violence, and a way to resist the violence of structural inequality and insecurity. Langar was one such practice. Established in the 17th century, it has always been used to provide nutritious, culturally relevant food to anyone living with food insecurity and/or under food apartheid.
Long before COVID, national and global Sikh groups like The Sikh Coalition and Khalsa Aid have respectively been providing langar within their US communities and as a service to refugees and communities impacted by disaster globally. Since COVID-19 stay-at-home orders began, these same organizations have been providing daily langar in creative ways, including hosting drive-up events at gurdwaras, regularly taking pizza to hospitals to sustain healthcare workers on 24-hour shifts, and by ensuring that people forced to live in inter and intra-national refugee camps have prepared meals.
Given langar’s place both in care and resistance work, I wasn’t surprised to see that Sikhs’ commitment to community food provisioning has only grown in the uprising. This is evidenced in many articles, including Priya Krishna’s NYT piece, “How to Feed a Crowd in a Protest or Pandemic? The Sikhs Know.” After unpacking langar’s history and speaking with gurdwaras and community spaces across the US, Krishna turns to the uprising, asking community members why they have created outdoor spaces near protests and/or opened the doors of their gurdwara for protestors.
I cried as I read the piece, particularly enlivened by the answer a young Kaur studying at UC Irvine gave to Krishna: “It is our duty to stand up with others to fight for justice...Langar at its core is a revolution—against inequality and the caste system[5].” In the current context, langar is not abstract resistance; it is abolition work. Replacing violent structures (stratification systems and caste oppression, among others) with ones that respond to community-identified needs is explicitly a path away from persecution. As Kaur says above, serving others selflessly to meet their needs is a revolution, but this, clearly, is not just done with food. It is done by freely and reciprocally sharing one’s resources, be that time, knowledge, skill, or thing, to fortify one’s own community, something I became more aware of as I dove deeper into the Twin Cities mutual aid landscape.
***
In early June, I discovered that a much more complex map had emerged as grocery stores reopened: the Twin Cities Mutual Aid Project (TCMAP). This new map was a direct response to the massive mobilization of community members who had converted storefronts, churches, parking lots, and many other spaces into sites distributing food, personal care, clothing, and other community needs in the days and weeks following George Floyd’s murder. From the first week of June on, over 100 folks have brought their heterogeneous skills including programming, data entry, storytelling, education, and so on together to build and maintain a map of many of the burgeoning mutual aid sites throughout the Twin Cities metro area.
My role at the map is in data entry; when a site has new needs for ice, diapers, etc., they tell a peer on our ‘street team’ who stay in touch with mutual aid sites, message us on facebook, email us, or reach us in a myriad of other ways. As the information comes in, we add it to the map, which updates in real time so that residents can contribute to site needs or get their needs met quickly. As I said earlier, while grocery stores opened within a week or two of the primary uprising in late May and early June, inequality, capitalism, neoliberalism, and COVID-19 have made it impossible for most Twin Cities residents to comfortably or easily access basic needs.
Because many ‘mappers’’ families and loved ones understand that managing communities has always provided the blueprints for urban structural violence since settlement, we know that the Twin Cities have never been “the most livable place” for the majority of us or our communities. We mappers see every day that what community members are doing on the ground to “fill the gap” of pre-uprising services (from housing to mental health)[6] is not a return to normal. Instead, it is a push toward a more localized, interpersonal future.
By trying to amplify these dreams-made-tangible, TCMAP hopes we can provide support, connection, and reciprocity for many of the folks doing the grounded, exhausting, and heart-full work of imagining otherwise. As such, our essential purpose is to better facilitate care—if someone needs something, they can see what their community is offering nearby; if someone wants to give, they can find where community have a need, and if new structures, like temporary, organized responses to housing injustice, are being imagined, they have folks to ask for support in real time.
This approach to supporting extant care networks fits comfortably into my favorite definition of mutual aid, from Big Door Brigade: “Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together right now!” Following these edicts for right engagement and community care, TCMAP understands itself as one node of many in the aforementioned web of community members thinking in the near-term to address resource insecurity over time.
This form of political participation, Big Door Brigade go on to say, rejects the more common notions of charity (which is “often a strategy for controlling poor people”) and social services (part of the non-profit industrial complex, wherein “rich people and corporations get to decide what strategies should be funded”). Dr. Vidhya Shanker recently underscored this in a social media post, saying: “Charity is exploitation spelled backwards. Equally unsustainable. Equally unjust.” Centering the needs and voices of people over profit and rejecting charity for actual engagement are explicitly abolitionist acts[7]. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” By doing mutual aid, Twin Cities residents are affirming their and their neighbors’ lives because, if the police are to be abolished, community care will be what we have left.
***
As I said early on, “abolition” and “mutual aid” have truly become everyday language in the Twin Cities and elsewhere in light of this massive and ongoing movement for life and against oppression. Like my Dadiji showed me so long ago, TCMAP is highlighting for me that care is not just central to our daily lives, but is imperative to abolition.
Sikhs have effectively been doing what is called mutual aid since the foundation of our faith. My global family’s ‘institutional’ knowledge of how to feed people, be it finding the funds to do so at great volume or the ability to churn out gallons of tasty, culturally appropriate, and health-full food for and by community members, is, I think, particularly compelling for our ongoing reckoning with policing, anti-Blackness and violence against Indigenous communities (especially women and girls), white supremacy and fascism. This is because, as Krishna’s interviewees showed, when we feed each other, we are not simply saying, “here, eat well;” we are actively producing futures in places where the future has been foreclosed.
At the same time, it is important to make clear that mutual aid is not utopian, but egalitarian work; it arises and is sustained via a myriad of complex, meandering, and iterative approaches. It is messy, and there are likely more ways to get it wrong as there are to do it well. This is because moving away from the structures that bind us is not easy[8]—there is never agreement, predictability, or safety as we stumble our way through and against massive change. But if we follow the path of abolition, taking one intentional yet forceful step at a time, it might be possible to create community that looks, feels, sounds, and even tastes drastically different. Different from acquiescing to state-mandated Black and Indigenous death; from schools as pipelines to prison for our youth; from disabled family being refused the resources they need to survive. Different from daily insecurities as the norm for huge numbers of our community and chosen, natal, and queer kin[9].
Creating community that embodies these differences is possible in large part because life-after-abolition is determined by those with the most to lose if it falls apart rather than by those who have the most to gain from communities’ and cities’ ongoing abjection: politicians, the military and carceral industrial complexes, and corporations writ large. When we care for each other, we actively reject the structures that require our harm to maintain themselves (capitalism, ableism, militarism, xenophobia, imperialism, casteism, settler colonialism, racism, transphobia, and on and on). We are taking them out of the equation as much as possible, and, instead of using goods and needs to produce more power, we are decentralizing power and wealth by moving resources where they are needed.
If my communities are resourced, our collective future is inherently more resourced, and we can begin unweaving cycles of deprivation, violence, and pain from our everyday experiences of being in the world. As Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna Samrasinha told me, “[disabled folks[10]] and poor moms are the real OGs of mutual aid and we know how to do it...because we get why care is both skilled work and vulnerable.” We do not resist systems to recreate them—we resist them to make something else entirely.
To do this, we must foundationally retrain our neural pathways to see care as not just skilled, but highly valued work. We must reject patriarchal ideas about feeling and caring so we can center vulnerability, empathy, and interpersonal connection in building new communities[11]. Mutual aid is not easy, but it is essential. If we reject the neoliberal ideal of centering our own (consumer) needs at the expense of everyone else and instead honor our interrelation with the people and more-than-human beings within and beyond the borders we wish to dismantle, we can begin to move toward a culture based in reciprocity and care.
When we receive and give support, we resist. When we receive and give support, we build collective futures. When we receive and give support, we abolish systems that never meant for us to survive, anyway.
Bio: Dr. Simi Kang is a queer, mixed Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar.
[1] I am the daughter of a white Minnesotan mother and Punjabi Sikh immigrant father. I grew up middle-class on Dakota and Ojibwe land in Mni Sóta Maḳoce, called Minnesota, where I often pass as white. In addition to these privileges, I am a working scholar with a PhD. I have moved a great deal to do research, and have taken jobs financed by land-grant and other settler, capitalist institutions on the traditional lands of many Indigenous communities.
[2] i.e., militarism, border regulation, immigrant and IBPOC detention, imperialism, settler colonialism, other ongoing colonialisms, and more.
[3] As I show later, gurdwaras are not the only places where langar takes place. They are just the most common. Langar is a part of annual celebrations and takes place where it is needed, including outdoors and as a delivery service during COVID-19.
[4] It is critical to acknowledge that while I am speaking from a Sikh and mixed-white framework, Indigenous and Black women and trans and non-binary folks, whose expertise I overwhelmingly invoke throughout, have built the foundations on which all of my analysis rests. Additionally, as Unmargin Editor Dr. Vidhya Shanker reminded me, while this is where my analysis rests, this does not mean that other communities that I do not evoke here, for example, Dalit scholars and activists, haven’t been thinking through care work and community support for generations.
[5] A founding principle of Sikhism is the eradication of inequality and the caste system, which our founder, Guru Nanak, understood as going hand-in-hand.
[6] I again thank Dr. Shanker for offering a great deal of complexity to this idea in her review comments. I am choosing to replicate them here because I can’t say it any better: “...neoliberalism matters here, I think, too--that the neoliberal state has essentially been abdicating/ outsourcing/ privatizing its responsibility to black and brown peoples while subsidizing the care and growth of white folks in the suburbs, etc.”
[7] While the outward function of TCMAP is to bridge resources and needs in our communities, like other mutual aid projects, many of its volunteers have a parallel dedication to taking wealth out of spaces of power (policing, prisons, the military) and redistributing it to spaces that actively support and maintain community (schools, libraries, health care, etc.). This dual commitment is how mutual aid and abolition are linked—each requires the other, and those who facilitate one are often creating the framework for the other.
[8] An extensive number of theorists, activists, and revolutionaries have considered so many of these things long before me. A small snapshot of these folks includes Karl Marx, Cedrick Robinson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Fred Moten, Grace Lee Boggs, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, Iyko Day, Aimee Bahng, Nick Estes, Adam Bledsoe, Jodi Melamed and many others.
[9] I again thank Dr. Shanker for the thoughtful complexification of the notion of kin (to read more about the various ways we can imagine kin, I suggest reading scholarship by Shanker herself, Zoe Todd, Robin Wall Kimmerer, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Psyche Williams-Forson, and so many more, and consuming art by Studio Revolt, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, Sham E-Ali Nayeem, Bao Phi, Chaun Webster, Sun Yung Shin, Lisa Brimmer, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Patricia Smith, Cece Carpio, Ocean Vuong, and so many others, and learning about the work of collectives like the People’s Kitchen Collective, New Orleans-based Women With a Vision and Antenna, and many, many more.
[10] Listen to or read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s discussion of “crip wealth” on the Disability Visibility Podcast (Ep: 48: Care Work) for an example of wealth that refuses capitalist norms and regulations.
[11] Again, I am not the first person to think about these things by any stretch of the imagination; for a much more thorough analysis, read work by radical disabled organizers and artists like the Sins Invalid collective, critical disability thinkers like Mimi Khúc, Sami Schalk, Leroy Moore, Diana Louis, Margaret Price, Alice Wong, Candace Coleman, and many others.