Mutual Aid, Fascism, and the Politics of Care

My maternal grandparents were Black Panthers in Oakland. They loved and partied and organized and fought the government and did it all over again. My paternal grandparents came from Alabama, joined the city’s Black Baptist community, and bought a house here in the 1970s. Rent parties were part of my childhood, and I remember the pleasure people took in gathering to help a neighbor pay what was owed. Folks came with a few dollars and stayed to dance. The rent was serious business, but everyone had a good time, including the family everyone had come to help.

My Bubbie, Audrie, was a second mother to me. Widowed before she turned 21, she struggled with alcoholism and depression, and experienced her share of heartbreak. She was extraordinarily generous, including during periods when she needed considerable help herself. I knew her struggles intimately and understood how they affected our family. She was also funny and loving, and I never had to pretend her life was easier than it was to appreciate the person she was. Community care is at the center of everything I do. I am a communal person, occasionally to a fault, and much of what I understand about love comes from the complicated business of remaining involved in one another’s lives.

Mutual aid, for me, is a demonstrated practice of loving. My grandparents fed the hood and welcomed people into their homes because they knew what it meant to need someone. Their generosity belonged to a Black political tradition that understood the government’s neglect of our communities as deliberate. Yet I remember the laughter as clearly as I remember the organizing. There was pleasure in being together, and people found reasons to celebrate during years that gave them plenty to worry about. I grew up among folks who understood how quickly circumstances could change and who made a practice of helping one another get through them.

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When my youngest child was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a rare and severe form of epilepsy, close friends organized a GoFundMe to help us manage the demands of his care. My own cancer diagnosis followed, and I found myself needing assistance on a scale I had never anticipated. I had spent years helping organize resources for others, yet receiving so much help unsettled my understanding of my place in the community. I had confused being dependable with remaining capable of giving at the same level regardless of my circumstances.

Though these have been some of the hardest times of my life, I have been loved well. I didn’t feel like less of a person in the asking. My dignity was still at the center. My friends knew how difficult receiving help could be for me, and they trusted us to decide what our family needed. Learning to receive help also had its lessons in offering. I give fiercely and abundantly whenever I can, knowing that my capacity will change again. The relationships that sustained us existed well before we needed financial assistance, and they will continue to change as our lives do.

Image courtesy of Amber Butts

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The Black Panther Party’s survival programs grew from communities that had spent generations caring for their own amid deliberate government neglect. The Free Breakfast for Children Program fed children whose hunger was tolerated by a government with ample resources to address it. The Panthers understood that feeding those children was urgent, and they demanded political change from the institutions responsible for their deprivation. They called this survival pending revolution. Their organizing drew upon relationships among neighbors who understood that caring for one another also meant confronting the conditions making so much assistance necessary.

I think about my grandparents’ communities as political leaders encourage us to fear one another. The people in those communities disagreed and disappointed each other, and they still found reasons to gather. They knew that hardship could change how a person behaved and that caring for someone could require considerable patience. Fascist politics depends on a narrower understanding of who belongs, encouraging people to regard their neighbors as competitors for resources and to accept the exclusion of those deemed undeserving. I have seen how much care people can offer when they know one another beyond their hardest moments. I worry about what happens when suspicion is encouraged so persistently that we become less willing to know one another at all.

Mutual aid has been a form of community defense in the face of state-sanctioned violence and abandonment. My commitment to abolition grows from the relationships that have sustained me and from my refusal to accept punishment as the measure of public responsibility. I want us to recognize the dignity of those receiving assistance, especially when their circumstances challenge our expectations about what a person should contribute. The generosity of my friends gave me room to make decisions for my family during a frightening period. I want that same respect for people whose needs are less familiar to us, including those whose choices we might question.

The government has resources to provide necessities that families are currently raising money to afford. Its failure to do so places enormous demands on communities whose members are also struggling. I refuse to let scarcity determine how I care for others, although I know generosity alone cannot meet the scale of need. The political commitments I inherited ask more of government than praise for community resilience. They also ask us to continue caring for one another with the pleasure my grandparents knew, including during years when the demands on us seem endless.

My grandparents’ lives taught me that needing assistance does not diminish anyone’s ability to make decisions about their life. I want my children to inherit that understanding, along with the freedom to question the traditions that shaped it. They will know what Black communities accomplished under conditions of deliberate deprivation, and I want them to imagine futures their grandparents could scarcely have anticipated. I want them to experience the joy of caring for others and the dignity of receiving care themselves. They deserve to shape their own political inheritance, and I intend to listen to what they have to say.

We will keep each other sacred and at the heart of everything we do. We will not lose sight of each other.

Amber Butts is a Black mama, abolitionist, and advocate for collective freedom and self-determination. Rooted in Oakland, she moves through worlds of play and repair, treating tenderness, nuance, and joy as abolitionist strategies of survival and transformation. Her role as an organizer is guided by expansive, nuanced visions of Blackness that refuse constriction and one-dimensionality. Her work—through cultural strategy, storytelling, and grief practice—carries forward traditions of mutual aid, imagination, and struggle across generations. Amber’s favorite freedom practice is observing how non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another, lessons that shape her abolitionist commitments and her vision for interdependent futures.