Mutual Aid During COVID-19 in Brooklyn, New York: A Cross-Class, Interracial Collective Mobilization During Rising Inequality and Ongoing Crises

Abstract

This research examines Mutual Aid (MA) during COVID-19 in Brooklyn, New York as a case study of a cross-class and interracial collective mobilization. MA generally refers to collective care for collective power (Spade, 2020). Unlike traditional forms of MA that organize around a collective identity of surviving and resisting an institutional injustice (Nelson, 2011; Hartman, 2018), the MA groups in this study organized around a call to support your “neighbors,” a contested term in gentrifying Brooklyn. Drawing on fieldwork from November 2020 through June 2021, this study examines MA groups that formed since the onset of the pandemic with a focus on neighborhood-based grocery operations. It explores the potential for, and inherent challenges of, organizing collective action across socioeconomic and racial lines, particularly during ongoing, intersecting crises – the pandemic, economic fall-out, racist state violence, and democratic decay – where inequalities are increasingly acute and apparent. Through reflexive participant observation, interviews, and archival research, and using movement framing (Benford and Snow, 2000) as a theoretical lens, this research finds that while MA serves as a platform for collective dreaming and future planning for a more equitable, democratic world, MA groups also confront and grapple with the structural inequities they aim to address within their own organizing and operations. While these tensions and contradictions ultimately constrain MA’s prefigurative politics and practice for a more just world, MA groups nevertheless cultivate organizational and knowledge repertoires that members view as essential quotidian resistance to institutional injustice.