How Do Activism & Direct Action Relate to Community Care?
How Do Activism & Direct Action Relate to Community Care?
Direct Support & Assistance: involves providing immediate support & assistance to those in need within the community. This could include offering food, shelter, medical care, or other essential resources to individuals facing hardship or crises. Activists can demonstrate solidarity & compassion within the community by directly addressing people's needs.
Education & Skill-Building: activism also involves educating community members about our rights, resources, & how to advocate for ourselves effectively. In the context of direct action, this calls for direct engagement in one’s community, to build community capacity to support one another through solidarity, & other modes of direct action. As opposed to more general modes of educational activism, like distributing or writing educational materials, direct action centers a community’s self-strengthening of its skills. Most commonly, this involves hosting skill workshops around practical organizing skills, & necessary information in organizing; urban gardening, protest first aid, & improvising & repairing key pieces of community infrastructure are some examples. Although often temporary, building sustained educational spaces requires such spaces to be open & welcoming, thereby fostering anti-racist, queer-opening, & anti-oppressive attitudes that challenge people to not only acquire new skills but do so in such a way that can be socially transformative for what we conceive as possible for us & our community.
Marches & Rallies: working from generalized definitions of direct action, rallies & marches operate as a direct, disruption of social norms & flows of everyday life in a radical assertion of support & solidarity behind a cause, often strongly vocalizing similarity with/the discontent of a marginalized &/or oppressed group. Practices involve an organized, public demonstration in a static or roaming manner through cities or towns, often disrupting the normative use of infrastructure with physical bodies on a collective scale. A rally usually takes place in one spot, while a march covers more ground to raise awareness across a neighbourhood, town or city. Peaceful rallies & marches are directed to signal or otherwise assert support for & scale a cause against state forces & capital, that generally oppose these social movements. They often involve public speakers, demonstrations, & chanting. An example of a march includes the march on Washington for Jobs & Freedoms in 1963 where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. An example of a rally is the Quit India Movement led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, to gain independence for India.
Protests: To various degrees, all the above facets of rallies apply to protests, yet the distinction lies in 1) protests involve directly confronting specific sites of oppression, & 2) are often non-violent. Protests may involve organized, loosely organized, or unorganized crowds appearing to directly voice opposition to or disrupt oppressive or harmful structures & policies. An example of this is the toppling of the statue of John A. Macdonald. The statue's head fell off when protesters toppled it in 2020 during a demonstration calling for the defunding of the Montreal police & an end to systemic racism. Another such example is interior protests, where communities enter into public meetings invited or uninvited to voice opposition & disrupt normative processes that have oppressive results. Examples include municipal city council meetings which, although intersecting with electoral politics, can take the form of an invited or uninvited entree into city hall to challenge local policy. Alternatively, one notable example is Indigenous organizers, including land & water defenders, disrupting the Royal Bank of Canada’s shareholders’ meetings in opposition to the bank’s investment in & financing a pipeline built across Indigenous territories.
Protests are distinct insofar as they can be seen as noticeably more antagonistic than rallies/marches. One example is the arrest of Wet’suwet’en Chief Namoks for disabling a bulldozer. Notably understood by his community as non-violent, the state used the category of violent protest to undermine & persecute Indigenous peoples protesting the occupation of Indigenous lands. Other examples include the coverage & selective persecution of protesters themselves, such as Skyler Williams who was recently found innocent of charges laid against him as a land defender at 1942 Land Back Lane, notably when Haudenosaunee law was applied to interpret his actions.
The point is not just to express solidarity, but to move as a social group against symbolic and concrete structures to improve or change society by liberating oppressed groups or disrupting systems, governments, and businesses that do so. Crowding, confrontation, & blocking of buildings & infrastructure is not uncommon.
Boycotts: a collective & organized exclusion applied in economic, political, social or labour relations to protest certain practices that are regarded as unfair by the individual or group boycotting. Essentially, this is a withdrawal from commercial or social relations as a form of protest. One highly famous example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott, instigated by Rosa Parks & the NAACP against the Montgomery bus systems as they operated as a social field of reproducing mechanisms for segregation in the United States. The result was a sustained period of intensified repression, violence, & harassment against the Montgomery Black community in general & Rosa Parks particularly, who were harassed, issued death threats, & struggled to find employment for the next decade. Nevertheless, it demanded a response on the part of the community through mutual aid, driving one another to work, & on the part of the state, eventually desegregating buses. For more info, click here.
Sit-ins: when a group enters a public space & refuses to leave or impede normal activities to continue there until there is a solution to the issues at hand that satisfies the organizers. Sit-ins involve ‘sitting in’ on a public space, usually in government buildings, managerial offices, or factories, & holding a rally. Sit-ins are a directly confrontational protest that start in a space where they are unwanted, thereby rupturing a sense of normality & drawing attention to complicity with structural violence upon a group with oppressive practices. An example of sit-ins involves Black, trans Civil Rights activist Pauli Murray organizing the forced desegregation of restaurants in Washington DC. Pauli Murray & other Howard University students entered & subsequently filled white-only restaurants in Washington with black students from Howard University, filling all seats & compelling the owners to serve them.
Volunteering: volunteering is the offering of unpaid labour for the benefit of community. Volunteering as social activism can be designed & used to bring about change. Volunteering can help to influence policy decisions by participating in grassroots movements & lobbying efforts. It can also promote social change by facilitating personal growth, which occurs when people are exposed to realities they would not usually encounter. Exposure transforms people's perspectives & behaviour as they obtain new knowledge or awareness of other people's realities. Volunteering improves the community experience by encouraging participation from people of various backgrounds & can help people make a lifelong commitment to social change. Volunteering provides possibilities for leadership & skill building as it helps identify areas of interest & allows groups to join in larger community initiatives. Any form of activism often relies on voluntary contributions to bring the desired change & fosters social inclusion by allowing marginalized groups, such as women, immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, & 2SLGBTQIIA+ to participate in community initiatives. It can help ensure community advocacy activities are appropriate & legitimate for those in need.
Examples of Social Volunteering include:
Organizing at a local chapter of Food not Bombs (FnF), which is a completely decentralized, global network of mutual-aid organizers acting against food insecurity. Operating based on ‘solidarity, not charity’ (mutual aid), FnB distinguishes itself from Non-Profit organizations in direct action taking primacy in how they organize. Generally, communities themselves donate to or organize with FnB to collectively gather and redistribute food & other essential goods amongst themselves to uplift marginalized members in a way that increases the autonomy of communities & individuals.
Volunteering with Indigenous healing & community services to engage with & contribute to building support networks operated for & by Indigenous communities.
Overall, activism & direct action as community care are about fostering solidarity, empowerment & collective well-being. By actively engaging with community issues & taking meaningful steps to address them, activists contribute to building a more just, inclusive, & compassionate society.
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