Minneapolis's sanctuary movement

This article is some righteous, heavy shit.

Both Southside Harm Reduction and the Sanctuary movement are based in the belief that communities are already best equipped to care for and protect one another. In contrast to the non-profit model, in which decisions are often made by people outside the communities ostensibly being served, trust and relationships are built over time, and people are given the resources to build their own futures. “There’s something about having to explain yourself to somebody to get what you need that, and I’ve experienced this, feels really degrading,” Tina Monje, a member of Southside told me. “To say, ‘This is how in need I am.’ It’s like having to justify your need for life.” What was special about the Wall, Martin said, was that it was supported by residents of Little Earth, many of whom were relatives of those who were living outside. “People would just come and hang out, and it was no different from just having a neighbor,” he said. The goal, he said, is to support people in the ways they want to support each other.

The housing-deprived, often by necessity, model values that racial capitalism would rather deny: community, care, cooperation. “We aren’t the ones who are choosing to inject safer, we aren’t the ones who, 99.9 percent of the time, are injecting Naloxone and reversing overdoses—it’s the people that we’re seeing,” Martin said. “That is mutual aid, and that needs to be supported.” It’s an example of the communal care—encompassing practices like the AIM patrols that began in the sixties and were continued during the recent uprisings, or the social programs of the Black Panthers—that has long been practiced by marginalized groups. When considering this country’s history of brutal dislocations in protection of whiteness; when considering the forced separations of family and neighbors through chattel slavery, reservations, boarding schools, mass incarceration, immigration detention, foster care, evictions, and encampment sweeps; when considering all this, it seems possible that holding your people close in a world that would destroy you is the most revolutionary thing someone can do. - The Baffler