The morning keynote speaker on the final day of the biannual Jesuit University Humanitarian Action Network (JUHAN) conference, Dr. Mark Potter, discussed the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) as a framework for a mode of humanitarian assistance that models the Jesuit tradition of accompaniment. Potter wears many hats: as a theological scholar of solidarity within Catholic social teaching, as a high school professor, and as a board member for the KBI. In his lecture, Potter illuminated, among other things, the hard work of solidarity for the long haul, a concept which I find particularly prescient both for the political moment in which we find ourselves as well as where I stand as I wrap up my year serving as a Jesuit Volunteer in Alaska.
“Long-haul solidarity,” as Potter described it, responds directly to the difficult work of walking and working as an ally with marginalized communities. Important, I think, is Potter’s emphasis here on solidarity—not service, charity, or any other synonyms. Solidarity negotiates the power balance between those seeking to help and those who are marginalized and moves away from the former and towards the latter. The role of the “helper” is subsumed to the power structure of a movement lead by marginalized communities. While Potter drew out five tenants of long haul solidarity in his talk—stance, humility, mutual transformation, collaboration, and persistence—I want to focus particularly on the latter three.
Solidarity as Political
We are living in a time in which the "urgency of now," as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described it, is felt for so many of us on a daily basis—when participating in a protest or calling one’s representatives is no longer an exceptional act. What will it take to ward off the cynicism, weariness, and burnout that accompany responding to this urgency in the long term? To this, I think of Potter’s values of collaboration and persistence. “The arc of the universe bending towards justice,” as Potter noted, is not a random occurrence but requires the concerted efforts of many hands reaching up and refusing to let go. In collaboration, we are strengthened by community—a community of individuals who each bring their unique strengths to bear on the efforts at hand. Relatedly, persistence—in building this action-oriented community in the first place and the far harder work of maintaining it—is equally necessary to the long-term solidarity project.
Solidarity as Personal
As I prepare to end my Jesuit Volunteer year at the end of this month, I find myself reflecting frequently on a different long-haul concept, that of mutual transformation. The most important lessons learned in my refugee classroom this year have not been in a cultural orientation lesson or while bus training a new arrival around Anchorage, but in the multitude of moments in between—the everyday encounters in which those I serve have taught me. When we speak of serving in solidarity with the marginalized it is so often incorrectly painted as a unilateral action, stemming from the caregiver to the client. The client is having a bad day? You, as the service provider, will be there to support them.
But, in the long term, this is rarely the case, and to name it as such belies the deep complexity and power dynamics of solidarity work and the important reality that, service provider and client alike, we all have difficult days. If I can look back on this year and say with any degree of confidence, “Yes, I survived Alaskan winter,” it will not be for the Vitamin D supplements or the cross-country skiing but for the love and light that clients showed me on the darkest of Alaskan days. Mutual transformation, then, is not a pleasant surprise by-product of solidarity work but rather a radical act that acknowledges that the true core of the solidarity project lies in each other and the personal relationships formed therein.
We alone cannot move the arc of the moral universe, but through mutual transformation, collaboration, and persistence we may find that, in the long haul, our solidarity efforts bend towards justice.
