On Behalf of Our Critical Ethnic & Community Studies Program Students, Faculty and Staff
We join our voices to the multitudes across the U.S. and around the world, sharing our grief and outrage at the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others by law enforcement officers.
We protest the criminalization of Black lives and the murders that result from anti-blackness, racialized and militarized policing.
We are a program that builds knowledge for solidarity, social justice, and personal and political transformation. We work transnationally and engage transdisciplinary approaches in partnership with diverse students, communities and academic disciplines.
We affirm our determination to do everything in our power, as educators, advocates and organizers, to help end this epidemic of police violence directed at Black lives.
The most recent police killings come at a time when the COVID19 pandemic is causing disproportionately higher death rates in Black, Latinx and Native communities. Asian American communities have especially been the target of racialized attacks tied to fear mongering sparked by the pandemic. These are the neighborhoods in which our UMASS Boston faculty, students and community partners live, work, risk their lives, and strive for a better future. Mobilizing cultural heritage and inspiring strengths, our communities raise their families and achieve their dreams in the face of unacceptable racial, economic, gendered and anti-immigrant bias and oppression.
We affirm our determination as a program to center our work on uncovering, challenging and transforming the ways racism and other forms of intersecting inequalities operate as social determinants of convergent public health emergencies for cisgender and trans* Black, Latinx, Native, Asian American and other communities of color.
Ashley Tarbet DeStefano speaking on “Mutual Aid not Charity” hosted by Social Justice Center at Emerson College
One of the most important aspects of organizing, activism, solidarity, and social justice is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. As we know from living in the world, change is inevitable and is the only reliable constant in life. In fact, as Octavia Butler reminds us in her epic visionary fiction tale Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch, you Change. / All that you Change, Changes you. / The only lasting truth is Change.” So we must come to expect change in all it’s forms at all times, and learn to adapt in order to survive and to make the world a slightly better place on the other side of that change. The current public health crisis that humanity is experiencing worldwide has reminded me of this wisdom and has helped to keep my hope that we can collectively seize this moment as an opportunity to further disrupt and dismantle the existing systems of oppression—white supremacy, capitalism, settler-colonialism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, ableism—and work together to build and practice the kind of world that we want to survive and in which we want to thrive. In this moment of reaching for hope and human connection, I have turned more deeply and firmly to mutual aid as a means and a journey to living this praxis.
First of all, it is important to note that marginalized communities, especially communities of color, Indigenous communities, disabled folks, and queer folks, have engaged in mutual aid for a long time. This is either because of community roots in horizontalism, or because in order to survive the ongoing crises of capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism folks are required to find interdependent solutions for survival. The practices themselves have roots all over the world and throughout history, whether the term “mutual aid” is used or not. Recently, it is a term that has been pervasive in the media and community conversations, and in some places I hear it discussed as if it’s a new idea. However, it only feels like a new idea to folks who may be privileged enough not to have to live in a daily state of crisis caused by oppressive systems of power because in that position you can put your faith or trust in authority and assume that it will support your wellbeing. Therefore, we can turn to mutual aid in times of global crisis, but first we must learn from those communities who have developed historical and political knowledge about how to approach mutual aid from a solidarity framework in order to challenge the status quo and build toward social transformation.
Mutual aid through solidarity is a complex approach that requires intentionality and praxis. On its surface, mutual aid is material support to survive existing harmful systems. However, at its core, mutual aid is an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial practice. It engages people in building new social relationships that address these harms, developing a shared political analysis of the root causes, and prepares us for continued survival and movement mobilization after the immediate crisis is over.
It is not just a kind thing that you do to help a neighbor, it is an act of political resistance in which we engage in the care of people and communities that the systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and settler-colonialism have deemed disposable, expendable, and less valuable or human. It is also an act of disruption. It refuses and disrupts social hierarchies of value that support and maintain those systems by nurturing horizontalism, centering the leadership of the most marginalized members of our communities, and maintaining a commitment to individual and community self-determination.
However, mutual aid often is misused to label projects and activities that use a charity model approach rather than a solidarity approach and it is crucial to understand the differences if what you want is to contribute to social transformation. Charity as a framework maintains hierarchies of power and social value, reinforcing the systems of white supremacy, capitalism, settler-colonialism, ableism, cis-hetero-patriarchy by celebrating the generosity of the powerful and blaming those at the bottom of the hierarchies for their conditions rather than the systems that put and keep them there. In charity work, people in power at the hegemonic center make decisions for people receiving charity and divide recipients into categories of deserving and undeserving of help or of being saved. Charity is enacted to control marginalized people by creating a relationship of dependency and unequal power to facilitate assimilation into white supremacy, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. It recuperates, reinforces, and legitimizes existing harmful systems while demobilizing and isolating the masses to ensure cooperation and ineffective resistance. The charity framework is the antithesis of solidarity, but often uses the term “mutual aid” from solidarity movements as a mechanism to co-opt and subdue resistance.
I have been energized by the amount of mutual aid work through solidarity practices that I have witnessed in the last several weeks. Existing mutual aid networks have become more robust and are swelling in participation, or are using the current momentum as an opportunity to push their demands forward. Existing mutual aid networks have created temporary relief funds for folks who do not qualify to receive the government’s stimulus checks because of their imposed social status or categorization. I am seeing new relationships and networks within communities blossom where relationships didn’t exist before, and people actually reaching out and getting to know their neighbors if they didn’t already, offering and asking for support. Information, resources, and access are being shared and compiled for the collective benefit.
The energy and resilience around collective survival and support is inspiring, and you may be moved to want to take action and get involved as well. If so, and if mutual aid is a new concept for you—or even if it’s not and you just want to learn more—I would like to share some of my favorite resources from my directed study this semester based on Dean Spade’s course syllabus for “Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization” at the University of Chicago:
Participants of AMEND – Ambitious Men Engaged in Necessary Dialogue – including the author, far left. Photo credit: Winston Pierre.
When I attended UMass Boston as an undergraduate student, I was introduced to a young men’s group called Ambitious Men Engaged in Necessary Dialogue (AMEND).
I have been involved with AMEND since February 2014 when I attended my first event and met the founding brother of the group, Manny Monteiro.
Manny is a UMass Boston alum who, as an undergraduate, worked as a Peer Mentor for the Success Boston Initiative. While serving in this capacity, Manny felt there was more he could do in order to impact the lives of others and to give back to his community. With the help and support of former Success Boston Initiative Coordinator Liliana Mickle and Manny’s other mentors, advisors, and success coaches, his vision became a reality and AMEND was formed.
AMEND has been encouraging men to engage in necessary dialogue since November 2012 with its first ever session. Manny’s inspiration for creating AMEND was due to experiences in his life where he felt he was lacking masculine love, a desire of finding connections with other male figures, and to create a safe space for men to talk about topics and interact with each other in a way that might be seen as “unmanly” in some spaces.
Redefining masculinity in an age of toxicity
Many men might have been taught that it is “unmanly” to express emotions or to talk about their feelings. AMEND provides an opportunity for men to do exactly this – while learning, growing, and healing with each other in community. Manny succinctly summarizes what AMEND does with the acronym RICH BROS: Reflect, Inspire, Create and Heal (RICH) through Brotherhood Builds, Retreats, Outings and Sessions (BROS).
Some of the topics discussed during AMEND sessions included “Perceptions of a Woman,” “Define your Struggle,” “Masculinity,” “Social Justice,” and “Education.”
Many of these topics touch upon values of UMass Boston’s Transnational Cultural and Community Studies program, the graduate program in which I am enrolled. A matter of fact, one of Manny’s advisors is TCCS core faculty member Aminah Pilgrim.
From left to right, Liliana Mickle, the “mother” of AMEND, Manny Monteiro, AMEND’s founding brother, and Professor Aminah Pilgrim, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and core TCCS Faculty member at UMass Boston. Photo credit: Merveil Meyitang.
As a part of AMEND, I was able to join a group of brothers who all share love for each other. I remember the first meeting I attended: I felt so drawn in because of the passion and enthusiasm of AMEND members and other event attendees for the topics discussed, and how everyone wanted to learn and grow as a group. I loved the atmosphere of the space and how the people who attended wanted to establish a community with each other.
One of my favorite AMEND sessions was called, “What’s your why?” During this session, we talked about our goals and future aspirations. Within the conversation, other brothers and myself talked about our dream-careers and what’s holding us back. As a group of predominantly young men of color, some of the barriers and roadblocks revolve around race, ethnicity, and gender. It was great to hear others’ aspirations despite what is perceived to be holding others back. In spite of these obstacles, I really admire everyone’s determination to achieve what they set out to accomplish.
As a group of predominantly young men of color, some of the barriers and roadblocks revolve around race, ethnicity, and gender.
I’ve also participated in sessions on the topic of fatherhood. We talked about fatherhood in a way that disputes gender norms. We resisted the idea that fathers are the ones who have to be “manly.” We advocated that it is OK for fathers to show love and affection with their children.
What I most appreciate about the culture of AMEND is how people are able to share ideas that go against mainstream views of how things “should” be – in masculinity, manhood, and beyond. I also appreciate how men are able to express emotions of anger, frustration, sadness, and cry. As mentioned throughout courses in the TCCS program, “the personal is political and the political is personal.” Read Zainab Salejwala’s article, “Using a faucet is a privilege” about the Flint water crisis and human rights in America…
The emotions and experiences of the people who come to these events are real and personal. If any of the men who attends an AMEND event is overwhelmed with emotion, they are welcomed to let out any emotions they have. They are in a safe and supportive space to do so. If a person says something that goes against what society might view as how a man “should” be or how they should feel, AMEND has created a space for those men to feel comfortable sharing these experiences they might be viewed negatively in other spaces.
One of the biggest things I love about Manny and the culture he has started through AMEND is the group’s commitment to reflect, inspire, create and heal (RICH) and the commitment of learning and growing together through our retreats, outings, and sessions.
Looking ahead
For the future of AMEND, Manny has big visions. He wishes to turn AMEND into a non-profit organization and find a physical space that will further facilitate providing support to young men. He even wishes to eventually provide housing for young men with housing insecurity.
I am excited to see what happens next. Manny is man who is dedicated to giving back to the community and who enjoys helping others.
In my future with AMEND, I hope to further engage with brothers in upcoming events. I hope to incorporate the knowledge and experiences I have gained in the TCCS program thus far in future AMEND sessions as we promote learning, growing, and healing while engaging in necessary dialogue on topics such as gender, sexuality, masculinity, education, social justice, and many more.
Rajini Srikanth
Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts
Core Faculty, TCCS Program
Illustration by Myles Green.
I first started to think seriously about the linguistic act of apology when I encountered a comparison of the apology letters of two Presidents writing to Japanese American internees for the violation of their constitutional rights and for the material and psychological devastations to their lives caused by the internment.
The comparison is provided by Stewart Ikeda, and the two letters he assesses are those by President George H. Bush and President Clinton. His conclusion, after a careful examination of the structure of the two apology letters, is that Clinton’s letter is the more sincere and therefore the more effective, because he does not take refuge in bureaucratic language, does not use the passive voice to distance himself from taking responsibility for the internment, and explicitly states that racism and wartime hysteria were the reasons that the country – the leaders in particular but also the people – allowed such a gross violation of the rights of 120,000 people of Japanese descent to occur.
Ikeda does not consider whether an apology is a sincere speech act to begin with; he takes it for granted that an apology is worth delivering for an injury done and that an apology should communicate genuine remorse and self-reflection on the part of the one who caused the injury. If you have ever received a meaningful apology from someone who caused you harm – economic, psychological, medical or any other type – you likely remember, in your muscles and bones, the experience of feeling less weighed down, of feeling uplifted, of a certain kind of veil being removed from your view of the world, of the purging of anger, of the quieting of sorrow. An apology can alter you both psychologically and physiologically.
If you have ever received a meaningful apology from someone who caused you harm – economic, psychological, medical or any other type – you likely remember, in your muscles and bones, the experience of feeling less weighed down, of feeling uplifted, of a certain kind of veil being removed from your view of the world, of the purging of anger, of the quieting of sorrow.
***
I’ve often wondered, what would Michael Brown’s mother feel like if she received an apology from Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael in August 2014? Or Eric Garner’s daughter, if she received an apology from the police officer whose chokehold strangled her father, in 2014? Would the apology have prolonged her own short life? She was an outspoken activist against police brutality. Did the stress of that task claim her life in 2017?
President Obama signed an Apology Resolution in 2009 for wrongs done to Native Americans, but this resolution is almost perfunctory and, moreover, the apology was not announced to Native American groups and brought to their attention. Robert Coulter of the Indian Law Resource Center observes, “What kind of an apology is it when they don’t tell the people they are apologizing to? For an apology to have any meaning at all, you do have to tell the people you’re apologizing to.” True. Other nations – Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – have issued public apologies for the harms done to indigenous peoples.
Nine states in the United States have issued apologies for slavery. But what does it mean to apologize for such an egregious wrong, a devastating violation that persisted for more than two centuries and affected millions of individuals? Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2014 essay in The Atlantic calls for reparations for slavery, describing the myriad ways in which white America has plundered black Americans and left them economically and psychologically vulnerable. That neither political party wants to discuss reparations – even to study what it would mean and how much it would cost – says something about the fundamental unwillingness of this country to acknowledge the deeply problematic foundations on which it stands, he says. So, while apologies for slavery have been issued, the conditions of Black life have changed little. There is a hollowness to the words, one could argue.
Other glaring omissions or inadequacies remain. Japan has still not issued an “unequivocal” apology to all the women from many Asian countries who were sexually exploited as “comfort women” for the soldiers of the Japanese army during World War II. The surviving women who were used as sex slaves do not accept as a meaningful and genuine apology the agreement that was reached between South Korea and Japan in 2015 on the matter of comfort women. The United States has not apologized for the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the radioactive poisoning of the environment and subsequent generations of Japanese.
One of my colleagues, who is sometimes justifiably cynical, has argued with me that apologies are suspect articulations. One can mask exploitative and oppressive practices by performing apologies that are skillfully crafted and delivered. Abject apologies can convey a sense of deep remorse, but in fact the injurer may not have fundamentally changed. A company can apologize for some serious lapse of oversight that resulted in death or injury: a medication that was priced too high and therefore inaccessible to those who really needed it. A hospital for a botched procedure: Surgeon Atul Gawande recommends apologizing for medical injuries even though in a culture as litigious as ours, an apology could be read as admission of deliberate wrongdoing and therefore culpability before the law.
But an apology can radically transform the possibilities for the future of a relationship between two people, between two countries, between two groups. It can eliminate fear and engender a new beginning. An apology can function like the big bang – creating the conditions for new life and new collaborations and harmonies. But what if each party in the disrupted relationship believes itself to be the injured subject and is therefore expecting the other party to deliver the apology? And this is where we come to that vexed issue of power.
The more powerful of the two parties involved should deliver the apology – after all, the powerful have less to lose than those without power. An apology by the powerful to those less powerful may even make the former feel a certain sense of righteous self-satisfaction: “see how generous and noble I am that I can set aside my pride and humble myself to this person, this group.” I would argue that even a self-serving apology, delivered by the more powerful party, can achieve a type of clearing of the fog, a parting of entangled branches, to deliver a clear view of the terrain that both parties can now traverse together.
David Grossman, Israeli novelist, essayist, and journalist, in a compelling speech delivered in 2006 on the occasion of the memorial rally for slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, exhorts his fellow Israelis to apologize to the Palestinians. Grossman is proudly Zionist, and as a committed Zionist he realizes that it is in the best interest of the Israeli Jews to reach out to the Palestinians and acknowledge the profound destruction of their way of life wrought by the founding of the state of Israel. Let us as a people, says Grossman, recognize the misery and suffering we have caused the Palestinians.
There is no way of knowing whether this apology would open up a new pathway for a meaningful interaction between Palestinians and the state of Israel, but it is certainly worth an effort. Should the Palestinians trust the sincerity of the utterance? Should they accept the apology as a genuine offering of recognition of their humanity? And, herein, I believe, lies the crux of the linguistic act. Can it carry within it all the complexities of sentiment and understanding that the injured party needs to feel from the injuring party so that the injured group feels there is a deep and genuine desire to connect emanating from its adversary? The performance of the apology – and I admit that initially it might be primarily performance – must be skilled and rich, textured and complex – so that it carries within it the potential for transition from performance to desire, ritual to internalized sentiment and practice.
Can it carry within it all the complexities of sentiment and understanding that the injured party needs to feel from the injuring party so that the injured group feels there is a deep and genuine desire to connect emanating from its adversary?
Aaron Lazare, well known researcher on apology, observes that delivering an apology can purge the injuring party of guilt and shame and, he says, not only can it heal a broken relationship, but it can also enhance a relationship because “something is discovered” in the act of apologizing. While I agree in the main with Lazare’s belief in the salutary effects of apology on the one making it, I wonder what happens when the injuring party feels no guilt and shame because the party that has suffered the injury is not considered “fully human” or fully deserving of the embrace of humanity. Would white police officers, who are by and large culturally conditioned to see the black man’s body as a weapon, truly embrace the humanity of the African American male? Would they feel sufficient guilt and shame at having wrongly injured or killed a black man so that they would be moved to offer an apology to the family member or loved one of the injured or dead man?
Shame and guilt are necessarily accompanied by introspection. Without introspection, without the capacity to look within oneself, there can be no apology. The introspective act requires one to acknowledge culpability – to be able to say, “I did a wrong”—and to feel genuine sorrow, shame, or guilt for the wrong one has done. And, as Lazare reminds us, a sincere apology also signals “forbearance” – a promise that one will not repeat the offense. Apologizing is an act of humility – one is prepared to “de-center” oneself and to foreground the emotional well-being and dignity of another person – that individual or group one has harmed. (I borrow the word “de-center” from Elaine Scarry.)
A sincere apology is a gift: the gift of your vulnerability and your humility to those whose suffering you have caused. You go as a supplicant asking that your gift be received, and in that gesture, you demonstrate that you are seeking to build a relationship with that person, that group, whom you previously had treated with indifference, callousness, or hostility.
Sometimes I am tired. I wonder if anyone else ever feels like a nomad in their own body. Stopping at a space that feels incomplete, dilapidated. Is this the journey or the destination? My mother gave birth to the struggles of her people’s diaspora through the intergenerational trauma that was inescapable for my brothers and sisters and I. Where is home? Is home the California chaparral – hot, arid, frustrating, yelling, crying? It wasn’t the California coast – cool, distant, dreamy, aloof. Apparently, “home is where the heart is.” But how many times have I removed my heart to make a home for a tall, white man’s emotional labor? Colonization.
Sometimes I am tired. My people are crying. My people are hungry. My people are poor. My people are politicized. My people are vulnerable. My people are paternalized. My people are researched. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out who my people are. Am I that much of an anomaly? I am the product of anomaly. M I S C E G E N A T I O N. Tragic and confused, and, of course, undesirable but so desired. I’m so exotic. I lick my lips with the tongue that will shape words that taze you, they run through your body like electricity and you cannot deny them because you don’t want to. I don’t play hard to get I am hard to get, and when you think you’ve gotten me, you haven’t.
But I am tired. Sometimes I feel alone, and sometimes I am not okay. I don’t know where I belong. My mother speaks of home as a place where she used to eat fried grasshoppers stuffed with peanuts and smell the tobacco from her father’s pipe. But she never describes it as the California chaparral. “Forced migration.” Explain to me how we can take trauma that is so acerbic it tastes of metal in your mouth and then turn it into the word “diaspora.” A word that sounds like a whisper, so innocuous. Explain to me what isn’t an imagined home, because that is the only home I know and the only home that my mother, my home, knows.
Sometmes I am tired. But I still can’t find a home where I can rest.
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