Black Communities Have Known about Mutual Aid All Along
In the pandemic, “caremongering” has become a new term for an old—and joyous—practice
Mutual aid is not new. It’s a long-standing practice of Black communities. “Mutual aid is just something that we’ve always done,” says Caroline Shenaz Hossein, a professor in York University’s social science department. “Crowdfunding, the sharing economy—I mean, these are all these nicknames that white people come up with to make it look like it’s new, and it’s never new.”
In the late aughts, Hossein’s research took her to the Caribbean, where she met the “banker ladies”: women who ran and participated in money pools. Money pools are deeply familiar to many people from Black diasporas. Your moms and aunties get together, they cackle loudly for a couple of hours, and later, your mother says not to worry, you will be going to university. There’s a magical quality, money appearing as if from nowhere.