Dean Spade: Radical love and solidarity in the face of growing repression (Ep466)

Written By kaméa chayne
Art Twink / Green Dreamer ft. Dean Spade
“Mutual aid is, we should all immediately work on transforming the conditions faced in our communities. We can get up and do it now. We don’t need to be a specialist. We don’t need to have a degree. We don’t need to hope that an elected official or a nonprofit will take action. We can actually just take action, and we should, and we have to.”
— Dean Spade

What does it mean to bypass formalized structures of change-making and to engage in mutual aid? How does the philanthropy-nonprofit-industrial complex itself discourage systemic change? And how do we balance participation in immediate care response with the less visible, longer term, more mycelial work of rewiring community power?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s kaméa chayne speaks with Dean Spade of Mutual Aid and Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together.

Join us as we explore what it means to honor difference and expertise in activism without replicating oppressive hierarchy, reflect on lateral conflicts within the messy terrains of movement building, and more.

We invite you to…

  • tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;

  • tap into our bonus extended and video version of this conversation on Patreon here;

  • and read highlights from these conversations via Kaméa’s newsletter here.

 

About our guest:

Dean Spade has been working in movements for queer and trans liberation, anti-militarism, and police and prison abolition for the past 25 years. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!.” His new book is Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together.

This conversation was originally recorded in late July of 2025, and published in January of 2026.

Artistic credits:

Episode artwork: art twink

Song features: “Earth Dog” and “Peaches” by Isla Greenwood (@islagreenwood on Instagram)

Dive deeper:

Expand your lenses:

Dean Spade on Green Dreamer
 

Independent media is more important than ever! Please consider joining our Patreon or making a one-time donation today.

SUPPORT GREEN DREAMER
 

Interview transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that Green Dreamer’s interviews are minimally edited, and our transcripts do not have 100% verbatim nor spelling accuracy. All statements should be understood as commentary based on publicly available information, and the views expressed in this interview are those of the guest and host only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Green Dreamer.

While we have made reasonable effort in our interview research and production process to ensure accuracy, we do not present our commentary as factual assertion and we are unable to guarantee the completeness or correctness of every piece of information shared. As such, we invite you to view our publications as references and starting points to dive more deeply into each topic and thread explored. Thank you for adventuring with us ~

Kaméa Chayne: So, there is a lot going on in the world right now. And I think in response to a lot of different crises, we're increasingly hearing more people say, you know, we need to do mutual aid, we need to support mutual aid. So, I think this term gets thrown around a lot without people having an opportunity to really talk about what it actually refers to and means.

So, if someone's just hearing this term for the first time, how would you start explaining what it refers to?

Dean Spade: Yeah. What I mean when I say mutual aid is, if you think about all the things we do in our resistance movements to push back against the terrible conditions, mutual aid is the part of the work where we're providing for each other's direct survival needs. Childcare, food, healthcare needs, transportation, visiting each other in prison, emotional support, that kind of work.

And to me, it only counts as mutual aid, it's only actually mutual aid, if it's done understanding that the crises we're in are not the fault of the person in crisis, but that they're the fault of the systems. So it's not, like, your fault for not having a place to live right now, it's that you live in this racial-capital-colonial housing system. Or it's not your fault that you don't have childcare for your kids, it's that we live in a system that produces a crisis for you around having to be at work, and having to be at these different places, and not having a way to keep your kids safe. And that's key.

And then the second piece is, it's only mutual aid if it includes an invitation to join the fight to stop the crisis. So it's like, yes, absolutely. You're unhoused, you're living in this park, you need a tent, we'll give you a tent. And would you like to join our fight for housing justice in our city? You don't have to. You can have the tent either way. But it includes an understanding that since the real root of this problem isn't you, it's this whole system, we wanna get everybody we can involved in changing the fundamental conditions and destroying the things that are hurting our communities. That's what makes it mutual aid and not charity. And that's the important distinction when defining mutual aid.

Charity is like when the government or a nonprofit gives something out, and it's kind of like, oh, let's see, do you deserve housing? Are you sober? Do you have kids or not? Are you documented or not? There's kind of a, like, blaming people for being in crisis, and we either give it to you or we don't, there's no kind of broader project of transforming the conditions. So mutual aid is really distinguished from charity.

Charity is kind of system-affirming, keeps things in place, and decides kind of who gets the small handout. And a lot of people, you know, quote unquote, don't qualify. Mutual aid is like everything for everyone right now. And let's overturn this whole system. And we have to do that to really get to the bottom of this problem, not just give out crumbs to a few people.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, I wanna deepen into this, 'cause I think, oftentimes, when people wanna dedicate their lives to making a difference or making a positive impact, we're taught that the nonprofit world is the space for social, environmental change to take place. So, to either support their work, apply to work at nonprofits, or to volunteer our time with them. And this isn't to detract from the important work of many nonprofits who are doing their best, given what they have. But I think your writing speaks to the limitations of how all of this is structured, right, in ways that are important for us to understand.

So how did you come to think about the limitations of the nonprofit model itself in having to work within the rules of, like, the formalities of that system? And how does mutual aid kind of bypass a lot of those rules?

Dean Spade: I mean, I think I learned that the way so many people learn it. Like, being somebody who's young and who wants to, you know, I was very mobilized around poverty, I grew up in poverty. I was very mobilized around migrant justice and concerns about what the cops were doing in my communities.

And so I, like, go and I'm like, I wanna do this for my life. I wanna work at these places. And then seeing that the poverty-focused nonprofits in the city I lived in were like, weird businesses. They were, like, often run by white men. Women of color worked there and made a lot less. Like, they kinda looked the same in terms of those kinds of scales.

And a lot of what they were doing was like, they could never meet the level of need that existed. They were never gonna, like, end homelessness with this handful of nonprofits. Instead, it just seemed like this cover job for rich people. Like, they could give some donations there, or the government could say something was happening there, even though most people weren't getting anything out of it. And they were turning away a lot of the people who were the most stigmatized or had the biggest need.

And then when I worked in those places, I could feel that there were a lot of limits on what we could do. I'm sorry, we can't help you because you didn't pay your back rent. Or, you're undocumented, or you have a felony. And then I started to study it, you know, like, what's going on here?

And what I found, maybe, you know, this very famous book called The Revolution will Not be Funded, that came out of the women of color anti-violence movement. And it's a book I highly recommend to everyone. It's the stories of a bunch of different people writing about the ways in which, essentially, the nonprofit system is set up to try to tell us that these things will solve it. These are not democratically run, sort of, business-like things. And that most people should do nothing but either donate there or go work there. It's kinda like a specialty, but most people just stay home and either do make the donation, or maybe they make that their career.

Mutual aid is, we should all immediately work on transforming the conditions faced in our communities. We can get up and do it now. We don't need to be a specialist. We don't need to have a degree. We don't need to hope that an elected official or a nonprofit will take action. We can actually just take action, and we should, and we have to. We need to house each other. We need to take care of each other's kids. We need to support each other to get medicine. We need to hide each other from the cops. You know? We need to, like, do. The nonprofit system has a kind of pacifying effect. Alongside the electoral system and many other conditions that kind of tell us, just hope that someone else will take care of this later. That you can convince elites to be concerned about it. Maybe we could convince philanthropists to give their money towards it, or maybe we could convince the elected officials to take care of it if they just knew how bad it was. But actually, like the elites and the systems that they're running, they know. They know that war kills people, and that poverty ends lives early, and that jails are terrible. They're cool with that.

If we want to actually change the conditions, we have to stop waiting for someone else to do it and do it ourselves. And sometimes nonprofits are involved in that. There are obviously some radical, awesome people working in nonprofits. But the system of non-profitization is one that's designed to limit radical action, right? Because it's funded by wealthy people and the government, and it's like, you can do this, you can't do this. You can help these people. You can't help these people. That framework, it means that it doesn't have revolutionary potential, and it’s about keeping people in their places.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, so maybe a helpful way to think about this is understanding the philanthropy, nonprofit, industrial complex as a sort of marketplace for change, right? Because, like you said, it's these billionaires and huge philanthropies that have the most monetary resources to give out. And so they get to pick and choose, like, what sorts of social change do we wanna fund the most? What is most acceptable to us? What does not actually challenge me so much, but, maybe, offers some representational tweaks to the system that ultimately doesn't involve me giving up the power that I've accumulated, the power-over that I've accumulated?

And, I mean, I've written critiques about Sunrise Movement, in the climate space, as I think there was a while where their most radical, Black activists had written statements wanting Sunrise Movement to do certain things, and they weren't really able to honor what was being asked. And I think a lot of the roots of that were them falling into the trap of establishment funding, and fundraising cycles tied to the Democratic Party. Which makes them more so than about tweaking policy within the same extractive capitalist system, rather than really being radical enough to transform their underlying roots.

So, I think I'm curious, also, about nonprofits or organizations that start out with really radical intentions, and not through their fault, not because these people are becoming less radical, but just because of these structural incentives, like, how has this diluted, and as you said, pacified, the types of work that nonprofits can participate in if they kind of go the route of formalizing, and then having to play this game of trying to appeal to philanthropies and big donors in order to fund and sustain their staff and their work? So yeah.

Dean Spade: I am so glad you brought this up. There's so many pieces of that. One piece is, like what you were saying, philanthropists think this is hot this season, and then this is hot. So, like, a lot of times, nonprofits, they have what people call mission creep. It's like, oh, we were serving this community, but then right now the philanthropists are really interested just in the young people, so we have to switch to that. Or, actually, they don't care about, you know, this anymore. You know? So there's a kind of, like, you can't do your work, you follow this money. So they're literally rich people governing your agenda. And just like you were saying, they're not gonna support transformative tactics that threaten their wealth itself, or their extraction itself. So, we know already that the horizon of change is very low, if we're following with what the money has. If we're getting paid, we're probably getting paid by our opponents, right? And so we have to kind of question, like, what are they willing to pay us to do? Maybe not the most radical stuff. So that happens.

I think a couple of other things that happen, I work with a lot of groups that start out, everybody in them is unpaid, right? We're just doing this thing 'cause we know it's needed in our community. We're on fire, people are joining, we're getting something done that's really meaningful. And then the group sometimes, you know, like, oh, someone offered us some money. Should we take it? Should we pay some people? And it sometimes seems like, well, obviously we should because you gotta pay rent. I gotta pay rent. Maybe we should pay some people.

But I actually encourage groups to really pause before taking that decision, because, frequently, as soon as you become a 501(c)(3), you've got some paperwork, you've got the state surveillance. And a lot of times, it changes the dynamic in the group. Like, the people in the group who are the most likely to feel comfortable with that kind of paperwork and have that kind of education start to have more power. So, it can change the group's decision-making and center it more and more with those who have, like, more formal education, or, like, are used to formality, so sometimes that leans towards white people, or men, or people who have been to college, or whatever. That can be a real problem, 'cause all the groups I'm working with are working with people who are extremely poor, and oftentimes involved in street economies and stuff. So, when you start to move the power even more center, that power and people who are not those folks, that's a problem.

And then there's also a dynamic where, like, let's say there were 50 of us really active in the group, and now we're like, oh wow, we can pay these three people. That'll be amazing, 'cause then they'll get to do some things during the day that other people are working during the day, or whatever. But now everyone's kind of like, those three people are getting paid, I'm gonna take a step back. It really is a noticeable thing that once some people are getting paid, once you make it the wage relation, then other people are like, well, I'm not getting paid to do this. And it can really change it.

And then a lot of nonprofits become spaces where it just becomes about trying to get good working conditions for those three or 10 or 20 people. Because, of course, now it's a job, so we gotta fight to have good working conditions. So, then it's just like, wait, is this someone's job or is this a group that was trying to stop the cops from doing sweeps in our town, or stop ICE from arresting people, or whatever the thing was. It just changes it, and it becomes that kind of, like, the wage work thing. And then certain people are like, well, I'm not getting paid, but you're getting paid, and I don't think you're doing enough work. And there are so many, really intense social and emotional dynamics that occur around the wage relationship, because it is a coercive relationship in our society.

You know, there's so much that goes on there. What if we piss off the funders, 'cause we actually do something really good and radical, and then the funding goes away? Now we have to fire you. You know, like, it just gets so intense. And so, I really encourage people to pause when it seems obvious that you should accept money.

One thing I encourage people to do, let's say you come into a pot of money, like, we're doing the work, and we're getting crowdfunding, or we have membership dues, or something great. Instead of paying any of us a wage, let's make a pot where anyone who needs rent can take it out. So, it's not tied to the hours that you worked. And we're not like, well, excuse me. We don't get into that kind of dynamic of surveillance and resentment, but instead it's just needs-based, like the rest of our work. Like, whoever's in crisis, that's who we start with. Like, that, to me, can be a way to still have the group be a place where we care about people's money needs, but not where we tie it to, like, a labor relation.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, this all sounds like it can get very messy, very fast. I have two follow-up questions here. One is, I'm friends with a lot of people who are very radically-minded, who do work in nonprofit organizations, or lead nonprofit organizations. And very much see, like, the limitations of the system itself.

So, what are your recommendations for how nonprofits within this system can try to stay as connected to their missions as possible? So, how can they best navigate this without capitulating to power?

Dean Spade: Yeah, that's so great. I mean, I think one of the main things is just noticing, okay, like a typical thing that the incentives are for nonprofits to look up and align with elites to get the funding, or to get that council member to come to your meeting or, you know, to get the elite media to cover you, and whatever we can do to, instead, look down. What are the people in our community with less access, with greater crisis, what are they saying? What do they want? Like, that's who we're accountable to, not the people. Even though these other people are holding our purse strings, or could pass the bill, or whatever. And also nonprofits, there'll be an incentive to go towards policy work, to go towards elite media work, to go towards things that are more institutionalizing and away from direct connection with the community, away from organizing and relationship-based work. And always towards, instead, relating to the city council, or the legislature, or whatever. So that's like a big issue.

A lot of groups I work with that become nonprofits, we work on being horizontal, being collectivized in the workplace, so that people who are working there have equal power to each other. There's not an executive director who's getting paid more. There's not, like, that bottlenecking of decision-making. But instead, ideally, having the group operate through teams that have paid and unpaid people on them, and unpaid people have equal say. So, people who are on staff may have some more capacity to do certain pieces of the work, but they are not just running the show just because they're on staff. Because, of course, inevitably, we want our groups to, like, be people building machines, not places where six people get a bunch of decision-making and get developed. But everybody else is just like, oh, maybe you could stuff an envelope. Maybe you can come to our barbecue, but you don't actually co-steward the work.

So how can we structure a group, even if there is money running through it, to be structured like an unpaid community group, in which we actually care about what everyone has to say, whether they're paid or not? And that's something I've worked for many years on, and there are lots of things people can find on my website about, like, models for how to do that. But basically, just trying to recognize these dangers that I think a lot of people I know, like you, a lot of people who are actually radical and working in nonprofits know the dangers. They're very common, right? They're well documented at this point.

What are the structures that help us, knowing that we can never be perfect and entirely get away from them, but how do we, like, make countermeasures to these messed-up incentives? Including being, like, if people tell us we can't do our work in our way, we're gonna do it without the money, right? If they're like, you can't get funding, if you support Palestine, then we're gonna not take the funding. You know, like really having some actual boundaries and principles around it.

Kaméa Chayne: When you talk about structures becoming more horizontal, I'm also thinking about my recent conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta, when he talks about how in Aboriginal communities, people have different forms of specialties and expertise. And it's important to turn to different people who have more context-based knowledge around certain things to lead in different areas.

So, I think I'm curious about whether you think it's possible to still honor expertise and seniority in certain spaces, while maintaining a more horizontal structure. So, basically, not saying that everybody's opinion should hold equal weight just because we're trying to build something that's more horizontal, but within that horizontal power structure, still being able to recognize and honor different people's expertise, and, yeah, leadership.

Dean Spade: Yeah, I love that way of putting it. The way I think about that is an anarchist idea about legitimate and illegitimate authority. So, if you are always the baker in our community, and you've baked thousands of loaves of bread, and I'm just starting out baking for the first time, I should really listen to you, and I shouldn't bake alone until I've baked with you a number of times and learned how to do it. And that's legitimate authority. But if you're just older than me and that's why you get to tell me what to do, or you've just been in this group longer, that's not legitimate authority. And most of our society is run on illegitimate authority. Like, they just got there first, or they're just richer, or they're white, or whatever reason, they get to tell everybody what to do. They're the dad, whatever the story.

So, what we wanna do is create structures where we actually convince each other of things. So, if we're in a collective and we're making decisions together about the priorities of the group, and you've been in the group a while, and you're like, listen, people with disabilities have very specific needs in our community in this way, I wanna listen to you because you've actually been doing the work and seen how it's impacted people with disabilities trying to access what we're giving out, or whatever. You know, like, we want to be not using authority as a shortcut to that expertise, but instead being permeable, listening to each other, hearing like, wow, I just heard this person say that, and they have done 17 shifts of this, and they keep seeing that Spanish speakers are arriving, and we need to have someone speaking Spanish at every shift. So that we don't put something in place that's just seniority, that might miss the multiple kinds of expertise that are happening at once, 'cause the new person who arrived might actually know a bunch of things about people we didn't know we were excluding. 'Cause they're in that group, you know?

So we wanna have flexible systems of decision-making that are focused on making sure we really heard each other, and we really listened to each other. And not that we, like, put a stopgap where we never heard you 'cause you were new, or we never heard you because you were younger, or 'cause you were on a different team, even though you had valuable wisdom. The point of this kind of structure is, like, what's the maximum wisdom to get from the group, and how do I let go of being right or having ownership over a particular idea? But instead being like, I want the idea to get better after I share my piece by hearing from other people.

So it's also a skillset that most of us don't have of, like, I want you to disagree with me and tell me how the idea could get better. Instead of, I just wanna go to the meeting, say my idea, and have everyone agree with me. Like, it's really different than what's rewarded in, like, schools and workplaces in our society. So, I also think it's beautiful to, like, build groups that work horizontally, so we can all learn the skillset of wanting to influence and be influenced by other people who share our values and our purposes.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, I think this whole topic warrants a whole conversation just around this subject alone. 'Cause even just this idea of what do people consider to be experts or expertise, like, that question itself, a lot of us have been deeply conditioned to look to certain sorts of degrees and credits as these markers of expertise.

And a lot of that needs to be challenged, whether communities have knowledge accumulated through oral cultures and have knowledge passed down through generations that have never been written in textbooks, versus things that are informal textbooks and in written language. Like, there's so much that we have to question and be critical about in terms of what we deem, who we deem experts, and what we understand to be expertise. So, yeah, there's a whole lot more to go into there.

I think I also wanna ask, like, if the ideal goal of mutual aid is not for it to become professionalized roles where people are staffed and paid, then does it become a matter of a sort of privilege in a way, in terms of who has more unpaid time and energy to give? So how does that question come into play?

Dean Spade: I have to say one thing about the thing you said prior, 'cause it was so good. The other thing is, like, all of our work, especially now at this moment of an advanced stage of ecological crisis, all of our work is crisis work, right? Like most people in the world are in a lot of crisis, and very few people are holding the keys to the kingdom, and it's really, really bad. And crisis expertise comes from being in crisis. It's exactly not the policy wonks who really understand what's going on. It is the slum dwellers. It is the people in the coastal zones. It is the people who don't have something to eat tonight.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Just to add to this, too, I'm thinking about all these, like, UN climate conferences that are held in these, like, exclusive buildings and whatever. I'm like, the climate conference I would be interested in going to is, like, let's go to an Indigenous Amazon community. Let's go there and learn from the more-than-human forest community there. Let's learn from the people who are there, who have so much wisdom to share, who are very place-based and connected.

Dean Spade: And most of that climate conference stuff is like a bunch of people trying to come up with reports that'll convince billionaires and elected officials to do something different, when they have been given the reports. Like, I just feel like this idea that it's still about convincing instead of about direct action.

But let me go back to this question that you asked, that's also so good, about how, if we're not trying to get everybody paid for mutual aid work, what does it mean? Like, who's gonna do it? And is it only gonna be people who are privileged enough to have free time? And the thing that I always wanna say to this is, all of our movements, all resistance movements in the history of the world, have all been done by the people who were at the bottom. 'Cause that's who fights back, 'cause that's who's losing. Right? And no one's ever been paid to resist. That’s not been the deal. You know? So, I think that's hard news for some people.

And there's a kind of neoliberal thing in our society right now, like, that's like pay me for anything I do. And part of that's an appropriate reaction to the fact that certain people have been compensated a lot, and other people's labor has been erased. And that's a lot about race and gender. So I get why people have a pay me vibe. But it's really dissonant from the realities of what resistance is because, of course, if you're getting paid, you're getting paid mostly by our opponents. And so, we're not gonna get paid to do the, like, truly revolutionary, destructive, disruptive things that will take down the apparatuses of violence that are threatening all life.

So what that means, I think in the mutual aid world that I've envisioned, like in the world, which I think there are many examples of the ways it has already existed and exists that are pre-certain kinds of colonialism, capitalism, and also outside those lenses. And also for people who are living in the conditions of exclusion from any benefit of those systems. What that looks like is us all doing as much care for each other as possible, doing it for free, getting our ways of life through each other, right? So right now, racial-capitalism holds our ways of life. It tells us it holds us how we can eat, how we get our clothing, how we get our housing. And that's its power, is that it controls life by controlling our basic needs. And if we provide our basic needs for one another, we get that back, right? That is actually incredibly threatening to that system. And it also means that we can actually decide the terms we provide them on, right? We provide them not through fossil fuels, not through exploitation of workers in the land, right? Not through exploitation of animals. So like, doing that really actually frees us up, right? Frees us from the wage relationship. Because right now, it's like you have to give all your time to coercive labor relationships in order to survive, right? So that you can, like, you know, get your money out of that and then buy your food through that.

And so it's a really different image, and it's really hard, I think people to imagine right now because our lives are so thoroughly dominated and controlled by the systems we live under. But I think you can see it sometimes in moments like when there's really serious ecological disasters, and people just show up for each other and just share things they need. You saw this at the beginning of COVID, like, people just intensely providing for one another for their neighbors, for people who couldn't leave the house, bringing food, doing childcare. Like, that is what we need to do, like, in general. And it's a tall order. And what it means is that so many more people need to be involved than are involved right now.

So right now it can be like, are you kidding me? I can't imagine it. We have a childcare collective, and it can only care for 10 children a week. It's like, yeah, we would need to have hundreds of childcare collectives in every neighborhood. Everyone would need to be involved in two or three mutual aid projects. Some doing food, some doing medicine, some doing childcare, some caring for elders. Some helping people get around. And that's how we would run our lives. And that's what's happening anyway, as things crack and crumble and fall apart in the existing systems. And the more we can set up, the more prepared we are for the disasters that are coming, that will make the lights go out, that will make things that we currently rely on stop operating. And it's the way we learn how to live in this other way that's not centered in extraction and greed and profit and disposability and scarcity.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Something that I'm realizing is that, oftentimes, a lot of people who I interview from different spaces are simmering down their learning lessons to very similar takeaways, but they might say it in different ways or call it different things. Some people call it, like, learning to village within this context. Or David Border Giles, a few years ago, talked about his involvement with Food Not Bombs, which I understand to be a form of mutual aid work, which operates under the table because they have to bypass certain laws in order to most efficiently help feed people who need food right now.

Or Tyson Yunkaporta, again, recently talking about our need to build these black market economies of care, which are not formal state economies, but these informal networks that pop up organically during times of crises. Or, Sasha Davis, another one recently of Replace the State, talking about our need to supplant these institutional systems with alternatives and to, as you said, take matters into our own hands, rather than waiting on these institutions of care or institutions of change.

And across all of this, when they talk about it in their ways, I'm also thinking, like, mutual aid, mutual aid. Like, I see a lot of these through-lines kind of coming through. And so, I think what I'm left wondering about is, what is the end goal of mutual aid? Because I'm guessing this is about much more than trying to meet people's needs right now as a sort of reactionary response to disasters, but possibly even to reclaim power and rewire power altogether.

Dean Spade: Yeah, I'm writing a new edition of the book Mutual Aid right now, and I asked my friend Peter Gelderloos, who I highly recommend you interview if you haven't met him yet. He's a brilliant writer, and I've learned a lot from him for decades. I asked him a bit about what he thought I should put in there. And he gave me this image in the course of our conversation that like, you can imagine there's a factory and it's, like, spewing like an enormous amount of poison, and we're sitting next to it like cleaning off turtles and birds, and we're like filtering little bits of water and it's spewing out so much more poison than we could possibly…and we're getting burnt out trying to clean off these turtles and birds. That's the situation we're in now. If we do mutual aid and it's not connected to attacking the factory, right, we can't just do the care work. We have to do the care work and attack our opponent's apparatuses of violence at the same time.

Direct action and mutual aid always go together. If it's just giving out a little bit of care, it might be charity. If it's not tied to a deeper political theory of getting out from under the boot of colonialism and capitalism and white supremacy, then it might not be mutual aid. Right? So, that is really the bigger thing. And I love that your conversations have led to these conversations about black market and underground ways, because you see that is the direction this is going, right? As they criminalize abortion, as they criminalize trans healthcare, as they criminalize our lives more and more, we will more and more turn to underground and illegal ways of surviving, right? That is what people have always done.

You know, so many of us look to people who have provided illegal abortions in the 1970s, right? And just did that as a mutual aid project. And our mutual aid projects like Food Not Bombs even is, you know, often criminalized. Like so much of what we do, if we do things that are effective, as Peter also says in his work, as soon as you find an effective tactic, they will criminalize it. So we do need to see ourselves as doing outlawed work, as working with an underground, as being willing to take risks together. Our care work is risk-taking, and certainly our work to dismantle their systems is risk-taking. You see a lot of people doing this work right now, like if you see people in the streets stopping ICE from arresting people and peeling ICE officers off of them and keeping ICE at bay, that is both mutual aid work, it is immediately supporting that person's survival to not go be put in the cage, and it's also a work to dismantle the systems that are hurting us.

A lot of mutual aid is that combination, and we really want, we want people to do every kind of mutual aid work, including just, you know, changing diapers and making food and growing food and all of that. All that is vital disaster-prep work. But we need to know when we're doing that, that it includes this deep risk-taking and willingness to break the rules and laws of the existing system to get between violence and our people.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. I think that's a really important question to think about, because mutual aid and direct action have to go hand in hand. And at the same time, I think mutual aid work, while all of it as much as possible, is necessary, I think sometimes they can either reinforce existing systems or be a part of something that helps us to unravel and unwire from being tethered to the system.

So I remember interviewing Hiʻilei Hobart of Cooling the Tropics a few years ago, and she was talking about how she supported the food distribution portion of encampments on Mauna Kea in protest of the 30-Meter Telescope Project. And it left her wondering, like, what does it mean when their Kānaka and Native Hawaiian-led movement is not rooted in food sovereignty, and their encampments were still reliant on having to bring in packaged foods, mass imported from big corporations elsewhere.

So yeah, I'm also just thinking about how mutual aid is much deeper. I think it can go much deeper than trying to meet people's needs now because, for example, people buying packaged foods made through mass production or exploited farm labor from Amazon to give out to people who are houseless, that is one way of trying to meet people's needs. But we can also simultaneously be thinking about the longer-term work of, like, how do we connect local food sovereignty movements to people who have fallen through the cracks of institutions of care and who most need to be tethered into this.

So yeah, I think a lot of this speaks to your statement that we need to acknowledge the necessity of immediate care and defense work, and getting to the root causes. So, yeah, I know it's already a lot for people to think about, especially when so many are burnt out already from just trying to live our day-to-day lives. Like, oh, it's not enough. I mean, it is enough. We need all the mutual aid work that we need to do, but also, like you said, unless we can get to the deeper root causes, we're always gonna be kind of reacting, right, to existing situations and not being able to get ahead.

Dean Spade: Yeah, and I think it's also knowing that if we lived this way, the more we live this way, actually, the easier our lives will be. Part of the burnout is that we're so isolated, individualized, like, you know, more people live alone than ever before. Everyone's doing all their own meal prep. There's the lack of collectivization of food, childcare, healthcare, cleaning. All of this stuff is part of what makes our lives so exhausting. And, like, just the desire to actually share with people.

And the other thing that you're saying that I really feel it's, like, yes, we do the immediate needs. And for a lot of people, a lot of people join movements because they wanna help people with their immediate needs. They're like, oh my god, I can't believe this thing is happening. And that's beautiful. And then once they join us, we wanna keep that solidarity expanding. So we wanna be like, yeah, totally. I'm so glad you're here. Let's do this immediately. It's important for people that you already know, you care about. And do you know, I think you might also care about Palestinians. Have you heard about what they're going through? I think you might also care about Hawaiian sovereignty. Have you heard about it, what people are fighting for there? Like, actually using every space where people come with their generosity and their passion and their anger to be like, let's deepen and widen.

And I think some people I've talked to, I had some experiences when COVID first started, and I was working with a lot of mutual aid groups all over the U.S., people who'd never done organizing before, and they were like, should we try not to proselytize our politics at our mutual aid project? Like, should we give out these tents at the park, but, like, not have a banner that says housing for all? And I was like, oh no. You are allowed to be super political. Yes, give the tent to everyone, whether they agree with the banner or not, but, like, absolutely say what your politics are. Absolutely, you're hemmed in by nothing. You're all volunteers, like, be as radical as you can be. Tell everybody why you hate the cops. Invite them to find out if they hate the cops.

Like, really letting our mutual aid work and demanding it not be defect, not be kind of made palatable. Which I think that term, when it was mainstreamed in 2020, 2021, to some degree, it became like just like a nice thing you can do to volunteer in your neighborhood and lost some of its roots, as a term often used by anarchists, to indicate something that goes hand in hand with direct action to dismantle the state.

Kaméa Chayne: As we speak right now, late July of 2025, Palestine and Gaza, rightfully so, is taking center stage in a lot of people's hearts and minds right now because of the increasingly dire and deadly forced starvation that people are facing there. And I think it always demands greater awareness and support.

And also, I do think that people will miss out on a lot if we don't connect the dots between Palestine to farm worker rights, to other Indigenous movements and causes, to big pharma, to houselessness, the carceral system, and so on. And I think this isn't to overwhelm people who might already be feeling overwhelmed enough processing these atrocious events. But I think, as much as I don't like to use this analogy, I think of it like smartphones setting up our face-ID and needing all of these different angles of our faces to be able to get a good picture of what our faces look like.

So I think Palestine is one giant and important angle for understanding the state of the world and how a lot of things work. But in order for us to get a clear picture of where we are and how we can actually reclaim power to affect change, I think we do need to continue to learn about other issues and how they all ultimately connect together. 'Cause, yeah, I wanna be very sensitive and supportive of people doing everything that they can, but at this stage, I don't think somebody being just brave enough to finally take a stance and say, Free Palestine, is enough. I think it's still necessary, but I'm like, what comes after awareness? What comes after making a social media post or resharing a story? What comes after chanting at music festivals and concerts? Right?

Like, those things are really great for movement building, but I think if they stay in the symbolic realm, then they don't actually meaningfully help to rewire power structures. But I think mutual aid systems in the ways that we've been discussing can. So even though they don't always seem to be related to Palestine in the ways that some direct action might be, I personally think rebuilding local mutual aid networks, in the more radical orientations, can be really impactful.

I have a lot more questions, but I wanna invite you to pick up wherever calls to you most right now in terms of how, just, the slower work and the less glamorized work of building mutual aid can be tethered to something that feels so distant and immense and urgent, like genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and so forth.

Dean Spade: Yeah. I'm so glad you said all of this, and it was so well said. I think, you know, what our opponents would like would be that we would all just stay home and only post things on social media, vote, maybe donate to nonprofits, and maybe wander out to a march once a year where we don't meet anyone. Like, they want our work to stay in the symbolic realm and for us to not directly be involved. And what we're trying to do is help people get from having an awareness of injustice to doing, like, really material things about it. And to having robust communities of people to do that with, both to support them and to help them develop their political action, like, to its fullest, right?

And so I think part of our job as organizers is to figure out how do we recruit people to go from just making that post on social media for the first time, or saying something bravely at their school, or something that's new for them, to like, having their entire life be on the movement. You know, like, what are the things? And so, I often lead people in workshops where we try to think about, well, what helped us, what helped us go from the first dawning of like, hey, something's not right here, this is unjust, to having real responsibilities with others, being in groups, having a bunch of friends to talk to about our favorite ideas, and like, debate with and have dilemmas about.

And one of the things I see happening right now is a lot of people are newly thinking about Palestine, and other people are mad at them 'cause it took them so long. And actually, many times in my life, I've been through similar moments where some people have become newly offended by something, and the rest of us are like, are you kidding me? This has been going on so long. We've been exhausting ourselves trying to get you to pay attention. And it's, it's okay to grieve that it's taking so long, but we have to welcome those people so wholeheartedly and give them a lot of really great invitations to get deeper involved.

So what does that mean? Like, one thing I think is, like, if you go to marches, bring something that invites people to a next meeting or to a next, like, to something that's more local, to something that's immediate, so that it's not just, I went to the march and I didn't meet anyone and no one talked to me and then I went home. A lot of people, I think, are having that experience. They're heeding the call, but they're not getting deeper. Right.

It's so funny because. One thing we've always been trying to do is helping people see that local issues are related to the international. You know, if you hate the cops in your town, please join us in the fight against the IDF. You know, like, we've been trying to make that link, hey look, they're all funded by the same people. You know, all of that stuff. So right now, when some people are having an awareness around something international, it's oh, actually, that's connected to your own police force where you live. That's connected to the food system where you live, that's connected to the colonialism where you live. Like, really trying to help people have a truly internationalist analysis that connects the most local conditions of their own daily life with things happening to people all over the world.

And I think we do that by making as much contact as possible, inviting people to things. You know, I think that we also do a good job of that by like, you know, when you go to rallies and marches about Palestine in your own town and people are, like, also saying some things about the local cops and saying some things about what Boeing is doing in this town, and who the arms manufacturers are, what Google is doing in this town, what Palantir is doing. Or making the connection between the war industry globally and the conditions on the ground, like the way unhoused people are being treated by those same corporations moving into certain neighborhoods. Like, I think people are doing that, and so we need to do it both intellectually and with like real invitations. And that's why we all need to be…if you're listening to this podcast, you're ready to be part of or start a mutual aid group in your own town, that gives a big, warm, loving invitation to new people.

We can't just start stuff and be like, oh, the 10 of us are gonna do it until we burn out. No, we had to make people-growing machines that radicalize people, that give people skills. That's our job, is not just to do our own work, but to bring more people into the work and help them learn what they need to learn and you know, be patient with them, if some stuff is new and they say the wrong thing, and like be loving. Give them those pathways to solidarity and to try to remember who gave them to you and what worked, what helped, what felt good.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, we wanna be embodying these different ways of being and holding up, always holding up mirrors in front of ourselves and constantly doing our own work as well. I think a lot of people are increasingly starting to understand the power of boycotts and in not supporting certain things that are unethical.

So I'm kind of like, well, if you really go down this rabbit hole of boycotting this, boycotting that, boycotting this thing because this corporation participated in this thing, then the other side of this is this question of what do we wanna build that can really make our lives more relational, less transactional, and therefore less taxable too. And detethers us from these systems of complicity. So it all comes back again to mutual aid. Like, not just boycotting what we don't want, but thinking about what do we want and how can we continue to nurture these communities of radical care?

And as we start to wind down, I do wanna weave in themes from your latest book, Love in a F’d Up World, because relationships are at the foundations of community, and collaborations, and allyship. And right now, I'm thinking of Sophie Strand in our recent episode, inviting us to re-root the idea of community in place. And how place-based community can be really messy because not everyone who lives near us is gonna share our political ideologies or agree with us on every issue and topic, but we still need to network with them because we share an ecology with them. And especially during times of disaster, we're gonna have to turn to each other and help each other out.

So, the practical aspects of mutual aid building, you started touching on this, in terms of not being afraid to put ourselves out there and to, you know, be outspoken about what we believe in and what we want. But I'm wondering, how much do political ideologies and shared values matter in maintaining a sort of glue and cohesion for, like, the sustainability of these networks? Like, if I wanted to start a mutual aid network to check in on elders in my community, do I need to ensure that people who also wanna join me in doing this work also support Native rights, also support Palestine, and so on? So, how much do, like, these shared values matter to get something going? Or should it be, more so, centered on, like, commonalities around the tasks at hand that need to be carried out?

Dean Spade: I think we need both kinds of mutual aid projects, and I see both happening often. So, like, I know people, of course, who start things where it's, like, we're doing a childcare project for moms recently out of prison, and a lot of us have more of the same ideas about supporting those people. Something related to our identities or something related to a shared experience. And we're on it, and we have some shared ground. Although you will always have differences, every group has differences. You gotta work out and, oh yeah, well we all care about this, but I'm not an abolitionist, and you are, I don't know what that is yet. Or I haven't worked with trans people before, or I haven't thought about disability justice before.

But I also see people organizing groups, like a friend of mine, you know, wanted to do disaster prep in the neighborhood and flyered everybody in the neighborhood in the surrounding streets, like, hey, come learn how to turn off your utilities in an emergency. So there was no kind of political baseline of like, we all have shared values around abolition or Palestine or anything. But the person also had a desire to eventually have it grow towards relationships with neighbors, where people would stop calling the cops on unhoused neighbors and neighbors living in RVs. That was one of the agenda items that was unspoken. But first, you start by just, like, let's have a good time turning off our utilities. Let's talk about what we wanna do next. Anyone wanna have a go-bag party? And you don't hide your politics, but it's not an entry, it's not a ticket for entry.

I've done that many times in my life. I've organized, often, like with other trans people or with other people facing poverty or whatever. And you know, you don't have to be an abolitionist to enter, but I'm definitely gonna tell you why I'm an abolitionist. I'm gonna try to influence you, and let's talk about it together. And then maybe at some point the group decides to take a stand on something that's an abolitionist stand. So I think it's both ways. It's like, especially when you're talking about disasters, we do need to know our neighbors. We all need in-person relationships that are local. And a lot of people right now have most of their relationships online. And so, when you do in-person, local, yeah, you sometimes are really working across major differences. 'Cause the reason we're here is just 'cause we're both here. And it's not about hiding the differences, but it's about finding what the sameness is and working from there. Building a relationship and then being like, yeah, I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about what I think about that. Or, you know, or you just said something racist in the course of our conversation, I'm gonna tell you why that doesn't sound good to me. You know? And we also have a shared investment 'cause we're neighbors who both decided that disaster prep matters, right?

So I feel like we wanna build lots of kinds of mutual aid projects. Some that are, are based on different kinds of affinities, and all of them are gonna be groups where there's intra-group difference. And a lot of what's going on right now is that people are just going through a very antisocial time. Like most people are pretty, pretty scared of other people, that society is really succeeding at destroying our social ties, even though we are deeply social beings. So this takes a lot of bravery. I just wanna acknowledge, like, a lot of people are like, ugh, the idea of meeting my neighbors gives me the heebie-jeebies. Or I can't imagine going to a meeting or calling a meeting. And it's one of those things where we have to work our edge of discomfort.

I have a friend who lived through Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and she lives in a really, really large, like, apartment complex that's two buildings. And she said that the skill she wished she had most was how to call a meeting and facilitate it for the hundreds of people in those two buildings. Yes, it's wonderful to have a solar battery and a special kind of radio at blah, blah, blah. But being with people is something we need more of us to skill up on. And kind of facing our fears. And I think a lot of people are staying out of mutual aid work because they're like, oh, is it gonna be boring, slash is there gonna be uncomfortable conflicts? It's like, yes. All of those things are part of being with other people. And also that's how you get people who have your back, and who will bring you soup when you're sick, and who will visit you in jail if you get arrested. Like we need in-person relationships, and we need to figure out why we've been de-skilled from that. And it's not about judging ourselves, but it is about kind of working the edge of discomfort.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, as an introvert, I really relate to some of these anxieties of the discomfort of putting myself out there, and starting conversations with strangers, and so on. And I do think, at this time, it is more crucial than ever for us to build our capacities to be able to stay with conflict and stay with the mess. And also recognizing that younger generations are growing up in the digital realm, where a lot of people are also less skilled, not to their own fault, but because of the ways that this, quote unquote, modern society has been progressing towards. Which is that a lot of us spend a lot of our social time on social media, where the dynamics online are so different than in person. I think it's an important practice for all of us to relearn how to really engage people and conflict resolution in person.

And to this point, also, unfortunately, I have heard many stories of organizations, where certain people working as a part of this organization as an individual human, like, they're not great people, like they've caused harm and conflict. So, like, why is it that they can really be so courageous and bold and stand up for such radical values, but in their interpersonal relationships, they're collaborations, the closest people who work with them are sort of experiencing something that is totally different? And I think sometimes people do end up having to cut ties with other people because of these conflicts or because things have run their course.

So I'm wondering if you think there is always this need for resolution or, like, fixing issues in the name of bigger shared goals, or is it okay for some things to rupture as people sort of find their own pockets of space within the bigger movement? So, how important is it, if two people aren't getting along, if somebody is causing harm, unfortunately, in this system, a lot of people don't end up being held accountable, but like, what does that process ideally look like? And if people don't feel safe in an environment, working with this group of people, like for them to just leave and be okay for them to leave and go somewhere else. So, I know these are a lot of questions jumbled into one, but I wanna invite you to share your thoughts on this.

Dean Spade: Yeah, I mean, what you're describing, that people who have incredible values in some ways then act really outside those values and others, that's a hundred percent of us. That's a huge thing. And part of the reason I wrote Love in a F*cked Up World, and you know, we have a podcast of the same name, is because what I noticed, I think one of the biggest security threats to our movements is that we all act so far outside our values. And I think people do it really hard when they're stressed out generally. And the kind of work we're talking about is stressful, right? It's, like, work with people in crisis, often, things we've been through ourselves, very stressed out, not enough resources, right? So, under stress, most of us act our worst. And a lot of us act our super, super worse when it comes to our sexual and romantic relationships.

So I put a special emphasis on that in that book because that's where I've seen so many groups fall apart. Like, you and I are working together, and we break up, and we make everyone take sides. People are just unethical around this in so many different ways. Like, so much sexual harassment in our movements, so much sexual violence, just like in our society in general. Like there's some kind of gap between. And to me with the word accountability means that I am actually enacting my values, and most of us are not self-accountable, right? And a lot of people have a fantasy that holding someone else accountable would be that basically that they would get in trouble. That's a carceral fantasy from our culture.

Real accountability means that I'm acting towards my values, that I can receive feedback from you. If you're like, Dean, you're not acting towards your values. These things you did are impacting me or the group in these ways that I can receive that and hear it, and that I can also give you feedback when I see you're not acting towards your values. Right. In our culture, people do not give and receive feedback. We talk behind each other's backs. We ghost. We get stressed out and blow up. We do everything besides saying, hey, friend, when you don't do the dishes, sometimes it gets in my way. That’s like, I have to go live alone, 'cause I couldn't possibly have a roommate and have to tell them that I need them to do the dishes. Right? Like, people are so afraid of giving and receiving feedback.

So a lot of what I talk to with groups about these days is like the stuff that prevents conflict from blowing up out of proportion. Like actually doing exercises in the group to learn, to give and receive feedback, to learn to be non-defensive. Even though, of course, it's scary. If you say, hey, Dean, when you're late, is has this impact, it doesn't mean you're telling me I'm the worst person in the world, then I need to disappear. Also, having boundaries, what you're describing, like wanting to be like, hey, if you act that way, I don't wanna work with you.

Of course, we all need to be able to make choices, including, it's okay if groups split. It's okay if we're in the group together and you really wanna prioritize this part of the community, and I wanna prioritize this part of the community, we don't actually have to hate each other. We could just be like, let's have two groups. Like, that's okay. We don't need to go online and tell everybody the other one is a hideous, nightmare person and have a whole political rationale for it. So a lot of the work I'm doing, too, is helping people notice if we're having a strong emotional reaction in the course of our organizing, that's making me think you are the worst person in the world, and I need to go online and tell everybody how bad you are, when, of course, it's actually the university president that's our enemy, or the mayor or the head of Boeing or whatever. But instead, I think it's you, the other anti-war, you know, person who cares about the well-being of all people on Earth, right?

And so how do I experience the really big feelings that come up in organizing and relating with friends and lovers and other people in creative projects, and not act the most intense, reactive thing I can? How do I have that little pause before I press send on that email that's full of accusations at you? Or when you bring up to me, hey Dean, these things you said, I think they had this racist implication in the group, before I blow up and say I'm not a racist, how do I be like, pause, okay, you share my values, you're probably telling this to me 'cause you really care about our work together and think that my actions matter. Can I take them in? These relational skills are really missing in our movements, 'cause they're missing in our society. We're not worse than the rest of society, but we're not that much better. And so how do we get some of those skills so that we can stop blowing up, like, this vital, life and death work we're doing?

And how do I notice when I'm feeling something is life or death? 'Cause you said something in the meeting I didn't like, or 'cause we broke up, or whatever. And that's not actually life and death. That's just a strong feeling, and deserves my love and care, but I shouldn't react to you or to the group as if my life is being threatened because you disagreed with me, or you rejected me, or I didn't feel invited, or whatever. And that's, I’d wish you'd responded differently to a difficult situation, which of course none of us know how to respond to perfectly. This is the kind of skillset that we're really having trouble with, which I think is like, truly, you know, causing groups to fall apart regularly.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Thank you for sharing a lot of these relatable examples. And, like you said, all of us need to continually be reflecting and doing our own work. And I think a lot of what you mentioned, maybe, more so, apply to movements with shared causes, where people are working towards shared intentions and shared goals. Where people can come together and be like, yes, we're starting a group for whatever cause, and let's all agree that we want, for the bigger mission here, we should all continue to work on ourselves, and if conflicts arise, we should try to work on it in x, y, z ways and stuff.

I think when it comes to physical community, there might be a different set of challenges there, because maybe other people in my neighborhood are not all at this level of awareness to be like, we need to be working on ourselves so that we can build a healthier, regenerative community. So, I guess, a big question for a lot of people who don't live around, people who, I guess, have this strong understanding and desire that we need to build place-based communities, is like, how do we build community with people who are toxic and who don't have that level of self-awareness to wanna work on themselves? And therefore, we can do our best in communicating our feedback and working on ourselves, but what if we put out is not being received in the ways that might be actually more productive and fruitful for our relationship building? So yeah, like, I guess a different form of messy, relationship community building in, yeah, just a different context.

Dean Spade: Yeah, we all get to decide those people we don't wanna work with. It's like, life is short. So, if every time I talk to you, you say a bunch of really harmful stuff to me, and I've asked you to stop, and you won't stop, absolutely. I can pick my battles, or I can be like, we just do 15-minute conversations where I check on you about your illness, but I'm not willing to hear you rant about how terrible people like me are for 30 minutes or whatever. Like, we can all have boundaries.

But one of my goals is to be a little bit more flexible and forgiving. Like, if I can work on my reactivity, then when other people do stuff I don't like, I often don't take it quite as personally. And I wanna be a good landing spot for a lot of people who are new and might just be working stuff out. I don't believe anyone is entirely toxic. We all do toxic stuff, every single one of us, right? And so, how do I assess when something's too much for me? Absolutely. You gotta have a “no” available, or you can't have a real “yes” available, right? So it's important to know what your “no” is, but also, like, how do I figure out if I am walking into every conversation with hypersensitivity, waiting to find out that you're gonna offend me?

Because a lot of us use our politics to create those kinds of defenses. So what would make me feel safe enough in myself? An example I often use is pronouns, right? People often get pronouns wrong for trans people. This is something I've dealt with for, whatever, 25 or 30 years, however long I've had pronouns. And people get it wrong. Can I go into the meeting and meet you and you use my pronouns wrong at first, ‘cause you aren't used to trans people, this whole thing is new to you, and can I just be like, I know who I am, and so many people in my community know who I am, and do I need that to be life or death every time? And for some people, that's something you gotta know about yourself, you know?

But my goal is to learn how to carry enough safety with me, know that I'm supported, and build a deep bench of support so that I can tolerate people who are in various stages of the learning journey, which includes knowing when I need to be like, oh, gotta get off the phone, or gotta leave. Thanks so much. Like, with, rather than bringing so much reactivity. So yeah, so I think, yeah, we know lots of people are not gonna do certain kinds of work on themselves. They're not doing it in the same way as each other. There are so many ways to do this work, you know? What's the work I can do to become the most effective I can possibly be at being with the people who are out here? And that includes the work of knowing what to say “no.”

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah. Thank you so much. I really have been working, too, on trying to not take things so personally and understanding that people are contextual beings. So, however they're receiving what I'm saying or responding to me are oftentimes reflections, not of me, but of where they're at.

Dean Spade: Almost always, yeah.

Kaméa Chayne: Maybe they had a hard day. Maybe, yeah, they're going through stuff, like, I don't know. But whatever is coming out at me, like, I don't need to hold that and internalize that for myself.

But yeah, this conversation was already jam-packed with stuff ranging from the systemic to the personal, to a lot of relatable and practical guidance. So, thank you so much for everything that you shared with us here.

As we start to wind down, is there anything else that I didn't get to ask you about that you'd like to share? And what are some of your calls to inquiry or action for listeners?

Dean Spade: Yeah. Well, one thing is that I have a new podcast that's about all of these themes, so I'd love it if your listeners wanna check it out. It's also called Love in a F*cked Up World. And I mean, one other thing, there's a tool that I worked on that I think is really important right now. It's called “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity In the Face of Repression.” I can send you the link to put in the show notes. It's a really simple tool for making sure we don't throw other organizers under the bus who use different tactics than us.

And we didn't get into this conversation that much this time, but I think it was kind of implied in some of our conversation. So, if some people are doing more rule-breaking or law-breaking tactics, how do we make sure we don't talk about their work when the cops come down hard on our communities, as they are right now and as they will continue to, in ways that break solidarity? And it means kind of letting go of some common, automatic language that a lot of people use in our movements about being peaceful and nonviolent and stuff like that. So I'll send you this link, and maybe you can share it with listeners. I think it's a very basic tool that I'm hoping will help some people with a kind of common problem that's coming up as the political repression worsens.

Kaméa Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately or publications you follow?

Dean Spade: I remain obsessed with Vicky Osterweil's book In Defense of Looting. It's a really readable book full of examples of people doing disruptive action that made a big change against the odds, which I feel like we all need to see that now. We need to hear stories about people fighting off, like, really intense regimes of domination. She tells the story in such a compelling way, I highly recommend that book. It's free online. And if you only have time to read one chapter, I recommend chapter five.

Kaméa Chayne: Amazing. Thank you for that recommendation. What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Dean Spade: Well, just coming off the end of our conversation, something I use a lot is, everything is imperfect, everything is impermanent, and everything is impersonal. It's a Buddhist phrase, but it's, like, so helpful to me. Like, of course, if I meet you and begin working on things together, you're gonna be imperfect, I'm gonna be imperfect. Things are gonna change all the time. And probably a lot of what's happening between us is not at me. I don't need to take it personally.

Kaméa Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Dean Spade: I've been really inspired by the militancy people have been demonstrating on the streets against ICE. Like, watching people throw the tear gas back at them, watching people come prepared to save people from being abducted. It's really beautiful.

Kaméa Chayne: Well, Dean, thank you so much. It's been such an honor to speak with you today. And as we wrap up here, where can people go to further support your work? And what are your closing words of wisdom for us as Green Dreamers?

Dean Spade: Yeah, I mean, I'm just so grateful to you for making this podcast and interviewing so many interesting people and helping keep people inspired. I would just really encourage people to remember that we don't know what's gonna happen, and it's doing the work in the face of uncertainty. Our job is just to spend the rest of our lives caring for one another and fighting back, even though we don't know exactly what's gonna happen. That is what this moment calls for. And it's a hard call, and none of us are alone in doing that.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you. And best places where people can find you and support your work?

kaméa chayne

Next

Dr. Jennifer Mullan: Decolonizing healing and honoring our sacred rage (Ep465)