Justice as a Labor of Care: Self-Care, Collective Entanglement, and Feminist Activism in Caribbean Spaces

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.

—Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light¹

My goal is a world that values caring labor.

—Andaiye, The Point Is to Change the World²

Audre Lorde's famous quotation links care of the self to the collective practice of a radical politics of change that challenges all systems of exclusion and exploitation. In "A Burst of Light," her essay on living with cancer, she carefully reflects on self-care in the context of a fight against systemic disablement, racism, homophobia, poverty, and U.S. imperialism. She repeatedly reminds us that her fight against death is wrapped up with a sense of self based on her empathy and interconnection with all those who face myriad forms of injustice. For Lorde, care of the self is a practice of mutual recognition based on an acknowledgment and respect for the equal existence of others. "Care," Christina Sharpe writes, is "a difficult word freighted with all kinds of raced, gendered and colonial histories."³ Lorde understood this, and precisely because of this, she knew that self-care is entangled with collective care and that this is always already ethically bound up with the principle and practice of justice. Guyanese activist Andaiye, whose words also serve as an epigraph to this essay, understood that the principle and practice of justice relies on caring labor and that organizing around this entanglement is critical to the project of changing the world.⁴ Care is at the center of a vision of a future that puts the needs of living things before the production of things for private wealth.

Care, as we use the word here, operates in the context of historically constituted and intersecting systemic inequalities and encompasses a wide range of actions. It refers to the wide range of emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical work needed for the everyday maintenance, affirmation, and continuation of life. It includes care of the self, communities, and the environment that sustains these. It includes work—for better health and well-being, education and knowledge production, food, clothing, shelter, care of the young, and all living things in their myriad forms. At the same time, it is far more than these material acts. It is also the intimate emotional and affective (though not always harmonious) values and ideas that inspire and motivate us to do the routine and mundane acts of care. It is the emotional and psychological work that holds relations between living things together. It is the courage to do this work again and again with persistence and grace, no matter what obstacles may be encountered. Care is linked to justice because without care there is no reason to value justice and no possibility of its realization. It is also a way of understanding justice—not as punitive or disciplinary but as a relationship grounded in recognition and reciprocity.⁵ In summary, care refers to an entire universe of ethical, affective, reflexive, reciprocal, and empirical acts that underpin our ability to live, work, and act on the world around us. The problem is that in this moment, as the pandemic has made clear, there is little reciprocal recognition or valorization for the labor of care.

In what follows, we argue that while racial capitalism has always devalued the labor of care, neoliberalism has worsened a crisis around care needs in ways that pit individual desires for self-care against collective needs. As we will show, this has been accomplished through marketing of a discourse of self-management that relies heavily on embodied self-management and the consumption of a battery of professional services and products. Inspired by the work of Andaiye and Red Thread in Guyana and drawing on a method of making care needs visible, we advance an alternative notion of self-care that emphasizes its connection to community care. We discuss one life history, that of "Veteran," to elaborate the huge demands placed on individual Black working-class...