Reciprocity or Redistribution: Mutual AId as a Moralized Market in Gentrifying Brooklyn

Mutual aid is an ancient practice repopularized during COVID-19. Generally defined as collective care for collective power, it is typically organized by people surviving and resisting a common injustice. In contrast, mutual-aid groups in this study are organized around a call to support your “neighbors,” a fraught term in gentrifying areas. Through fieldwork in Brooklyn, New York, during COVID-19, this study examines how mutual-aid group participants navigate discrepancies in their organizing principles and practices. I consider how they contest what they deem to be inequitable economic exchanges based on capitalism and charity and aim to construct what they consider more just, reciprocal market relations. However, as gentrification interrupts the potential for reciprocity, mutual-aid participants reframe their goals as “ad hoc income redistribution.” This article considers dissonance in movement aims and strategies and more firmly places race at the center of the intersection of morality, markets, and movements.