#CultureOfCare
I’ve been telling this story for 10 years now, and over the years I’ve found new language to expand on it and seen it grow in ways and in places I least expected it to.
I’ve seen the term being referenced by so many and often to mean what I mean by it and at times not in the same way (companies and corporations using is to boost leardership or company culture). And while the framing of what a #CultureOfCare has come to mean I can take credit for, it’s not a term that I coined. The term itself comes from the medical industry where patient care is thought to be paramount. It’s also been used to counter bullying and harassment in campus cultures.
I define it as a new social contract — a new covenant of care which forms the basis of not only all social relations (be they interpersonal, community wide or political) but also our politics. Care and our commitment to it informs all that we do. We reimagine how we organize, form communities, build structures, do governance, make policies and create systems and economies that are based in care.
Whenever I talk about care people take it to be a soft approach — where I’m naively asking people to be more caring towards each other. Yes I am, but I am also asking us to radically transform how we live and do things. I’m asking us to dismantle and abolish the interconnected systems of oppression that form the basis of how our society is currently organised. Because abolition IS care.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore keeps reminding us that abolition isn’t about absence but presence. This is what I want us to focus our attention on — on what we build together! The together has to be based in care and solidarity across historically oppressed and excluded communities and peoples.
We already know the way our extractive economies and systems are designed and set up don’t serve the majority and are actively life-threatening. They concentrate power, wealth and resources in the hands of a select few by exploiting and extracting from poor, queer, gender non-conforming, disabled Black and brown bodies.
The imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy as bell hook termed it (I’d add cishet and ableist to the term) is rooted in violence and the only “antidote to violence is care” to quote Saidiya Hartman. The flowchart above by Dr. Rupa Marya also explains this interwoven web of violence that leads exploitation, enslavement, abuse, trauma, genocide and ecocide. Hartman sees care as a way to survive the world:
I mean, caring for ourselves, partly, is the way we destroy this world and we make another. We help each other inhabit what is an otherwise uninhabitable and brutal social context.
However I want to push that further, I want care as a means to help us thrive and imagine beyond what is currently possible. Where collaborating on care and cultivating is as a practice no longer is seen as a radical political act but rather what is and how it should be. Where all our systems and structures are life-affirming. What are these life-affirming systems you ask: it’s comprehensive universal health care, it’s efficient, accessible and affordable public transport, it’s affordable housing, its paid family leave, its child, elderly and disability care for all, its a living wage (or UBI), it’s affordable, accessible and community-owned energy systems, it’s identity, religious and other civil liberties and freedoms, it’s rights for nature, it’s quality and free education, it’s remote working, it’s shorter work weeks, it’s access to community services and public spaces that are designed with the disabled in mind, it’s community accountability and responses to harm, it’s land back and it’s reparations!
And it’s more than that, and that’s where our imagination comes in — how do we reimagine interpersonal and social relations differently? how do we reimagine organizing at the community level? how do we reimagine resourcing things differently? what would be equitable? what does power mean? what does accountability mean? who are we holding accountable? and how are we building trust with each other?
Culture of Care is collaborating on care at a personal, interpersonal, structural and cultural level.
