#squadcare

But whether it's through selling bath soaps or encouraging activists to take mental health breaks, celebrating individual self-reliance elides the fact that ultimately care is not something we do for ourselves. We rely on others to care for us when we are too young, too old, too ill, too broken, too sad, too scared, too needy, too overwhelmed, or too incapable. Care is why we live in community, why we form families, and ultimately, why we form government. Ultimately, self-care encourages women to rely solely on themselves rather than to make demands on anyone or anything else. Self-care validates as good and noble all of those women with sufficient resources to "take a break" from the hustle and bustle while it censures those who seek relief from the collective care of the state—through child care subsidies, food assistance, low-income or subsidized housing, or health care. In so much of our political language, the black, brown, and poor women who seek care in these ways are still represented as bad, fraudulent, lazy, and wasteful. And so instead, we turn to squad care, a way of understanding our needs as humans that acknowledges how we lean on one another, that we are not alone in the world, but rather enmeshed in webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships. Sometimes our squads are small, intimate, and bonded by affection, like the bestie squad Blair and I have shared for decades. Sometimes our squad is enormous, impersonal, and bonded by geographic and historic identity. As Americans, our national squad care is most obvious in moments of natural disaster or through public policies like social security.