Dean Spade > Quotes

“The point for me is to create relationships based on deeper and more real notions of trust. So that love becomes defined not by sexual exclusivity, but by actual respect, concern, commitment to act with kind intentions, accountability for our actions, and a desire for mutual growth.”
― Dean Spade

“Let’s be gentle with ourselves and each other and fierce as we fight oppression.”
― Dean Spade

“Power is not a matter of one dominant individual or institutions, but instead manifests in interconnected, contradictory sites where regimes of knowledge and practice circulate and take hold. This way of understanding the dispersion of power helps us realize that power is not simply about certain individuals being targeted for death or exclusion by a ruler, but instead about the creation of norms that distribute vulnerability and security.”
― Dean Spade

“When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“The only thing that keeps those in power in that position is the illusion of our powerlessness. A moment of freedom and connection can undo a lifetime of social conditioning and scatter seeds in a thousand directions.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Mutual aid projects let us practice meeting our own and each other’s needs, based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice. They let us practice coordinating our actions together with the belief that all of us matter and that we should all get to participate in the solutions to our problems. They let us realize that we know best how to address the crises we face.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Rich people's control of nonprofit funding keeps nonprofits from doing work that is threatening to the status quo, or from admitting the limits of their strategies.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It's a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I'll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it's the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don't like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it's just a really excellent pastime.”
― Dean Spade

“I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behaviour, and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something in a new way.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Nonprofits compete to show that they are the best organization to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make their work look legitimate to the funder, which means working according to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions for a particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs. For example, the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter, because rich people would rather believe that homelessness is caused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Perfectionism sometimes appears as a fear of saying anything that is politically off-base and being judged, so that people don't share their opinions; or are wildly defensive if someone questions something they said; or quickly attack or exclude anyone who doesn't use the same jargon as them or is still learning something they already know about.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Paternalism is also visible in programs within welfare and criminal punishment systems that force criminalized people and people seeking welfare benefits to take parenting classes, budgeting classes, and anger management seminars. The idea that those giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need is based on the notion that people’s poverty and marginalization is not a systemic problem but is caused by their own personal shortcomings. This also implies that those who provide aid are superior.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“The charity model we live with today has origins in christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Because most people in our society have a tangled, painful relationship with money that includes feelings and behaviours of secrecy, shame, and desperation, a lot of otherwise awesome people will misbehave when money is around or get suspicious of others' behaviour.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Elite solutions to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“[Three responses to mutual aid] Some will ignore proliferating mutual aid efforts. Some will try to fold them into a narrative about volunteerism, labeling mutual aid efforts "heroic" and portraying them as complementary to government efforts and existing systems rather than as oppositional to those systems. And some police and spy agencies will surveil and criminalize mutual aid efforts.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Burnout is the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work, and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety. If it were just exhaustion we could take a break and rest and go back. But people who feel burnt out often feel they cannot return to the work or that the group or work they were part of is toxic.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“When our groups are focused on getting important things done "out there", there is rarely room to process our strong feelings or admit that we do not know how to navigate our roles "in here".”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all the aspects of our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“The charity model encourages us to feel good about ourselves by “giving back.” Convincing us that we have done enough if we do a little volunteering or posting online is a great way to keep us in our place. Keeping people numb to the suffering in the world—and their own suffering—is essential to keeping things as they are. In fact, things are really terrifying and enraging right now, and feeling more rage, fear, sadness, grief, and despair may be appropriate. Those feelings may help us be less appeased by false solutions, and stir us to pursue ongoing collective action for change.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Being more engaged with the complex and painful realities we face, and with thoughtful, committed action alongside others for justice, feels much better than numbing out or making token, selfconsoling charity gestures.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“From our current vantage point, living in a world with the most militarized borders, the most expansive surveillance technologies, the most severe concentration of wealth, the most imprisonment in human history, the most military bases and high-tech weapons, and the most advanced mechanisms of propaganda, it can be hard to imagine other ways of living.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“After Hurricane Irma, a local sheriff announced that, “If you go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Being able to get help in a crisis is often a condition for being politically active, because it's very difficult to organize when you are also struggling to survive.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“If I want to move toward a more balanced role in the group, or even transition out altogether, I need to do so gradually and intentionally.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Am I campaigning? What are my motivations in telling this? Am I trying to get support and process my experience, or am I trying to get other people to think badly about this person?”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“No Masters, No Flakes”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“This departs from expertise-based social services that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed therapist, lawyer, or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“things that the criminal punishment approaches fail to do: give the survivor support to heal, give the harm-doer what they need to stop the behaviour, and assess how community norms can change to decrease the likelihood of harm in general”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis