My state is impressing the world with its communal cooperation and altruism. It turns out we’re just responding in a normal human way.
In sociology, there’s a term to describe this phenomenon: “bounded solidarity.” Alejandro Portes, a prominent sociologist at Princeton University, first introduced the term in a paper published in The Annual Review of Sociology in 1998. It’s used to describe when a community is bound by a crisis, and during this time, it can lead to extreme acts of altruism and kindness that aren’t usually seen in non-crisis times.
OK, nice of sociologists to provide a name for the phenomenon.
We are seeing this in Minnesota right now. Multiple media reports have highlighted the ways in which the community has come together. Volunteers are delivering groceries so immigrants can hide at home. People are raising money to help Minnesotans cover rent because they haven’t felt safe to go to work. People are taking each other’s kids to school, organizing shifts for people to stand guard and protect immigrants in their neighborhoods. As NPR recently reported, when a preteen got her period for the first time — a preteen who hadn’t felt safe enough to leave the house to go to school — a community rallied together and launched an underground operation to get her pads. Minnesotans have been braving the below-freezing cold to show up for protests and denounce the violence in their communities for weeks.
These acts of kindness and solidarity matter because it’s exactly what people need to move through a crisis, build resilience, and transform a community for the better. Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University teaching disaster resilience, and a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, once told me that when it comes to a disaster, his research found that community-based responses are more successful than individual-based ones.
You mean like mutual aid? The antithesis of the rugged individualism this country usually promotes? We’ve been talking about that for a century or so.
Now that’s the right way to do it.
Most humans are generally pretty nice people if they perceive an opportunity to do so. ICE is wandering around being jerks, the people of Minnesota look at that and think “I don’t want to be like that!”, and being nice and supportive to other humans is pretty much diametrically opposite the way ICE is acting.
Let’s not mince words.
Mutual aid – that sounds like dangerous Anarchist talk next thing you will be saying property is theft.
Remember the ‘Velvet Revolution”? Remember the “Soviet Union”? That old authoritarian regime collapsed, largely under its own weight with just the teeniest push from people. Sadly, it didn’t collapse enough in Russia.