We could talk to Ko Melina about her life in music for hours. Leader of Ko & the Knockouts, baritone guitarist for the Dirtbombs, a DJ on the Underground Garage channel on Sirius XM — Ko’s life in music is rich. She was on the ground floor of Detroit’s garage rock scene in the 1990s (that’s her photography gracing the covers of the first White Stripes record and singles) and her own bands are lauded in their own right, having toured and played giant music festivals at home and abroad.
But when asked to join Model D as part of our Explorer Series, taking over our Instagram account for the past week or so, Ko took the opportunity to shift the focus from herself and shine a light on the numerous mutual aid organizations lifting up the community throughout the city. Mutual aid is not charity, she says — an important distinction.
To quote her first post from the takeover, “The focus of mutual [aid] is to build a self-sufficient, empathetic, and educated community that does not need to rely on government intervention. Mutual aid is voluntary, it's an exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit where the people, not corporations or governments, take responsibility for caring for each other to make sure that communities survive.”
Here, Ko tells us about the events that introduced her to mutual aid in Detroit and how she came to co-create her own Eastside Mutual Aid organization. It’s an inspiring — and sometimes very disturbing — story, and one that shows how achievable forming your own mutual aid group can be.
This interview redacts a racial slur as described by KO in an encounter dealing with racism directed at her personally.
Model D: You’ve had this incredible career in music, in rock and roll. When did community work start becoming important to you? When did you start getting involved?
Ko Melina: So, basically, what happened was this little thing called COVID hit. And . . . [she sighs] Yeah, so last year, it was like the end of March and COVID was happening. I had gone to my pharmacy, which is inside of a Target, to pick up prescriptions. I'm looking at the aisles, making sure I don't have to get anything else. And then this guy walks up to me and he's wearing an article of clothing on his head that was a simple color with four white letters on it. And he started screaming at me.
He started saying all this stuff about how I need to go home. Honestly, I was kind of really confused by it. I really had no idea what he was talking about. And then slowly, it dawned on me: Oh, wait. Oh, guy in a MAGA hat. Now he’s saying, “Kung Flu.” Now he's saying, “China virus.” Now he just called me a ****. You know what I mean? Like, all this is slowly dawning on me.
In my mind, I'm like, Dude, I've never even fucking been to China. I was born here. That’s something I’ve dealt with my entire life, where people are like, Where are you from? And I combat it at every level. I'll say Detroit and they’ll be like, No, originally. And — because I was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois — I’ll say Champaign-Urbana. I make them work for it, you know? And then finally, if they don't get it, I'll be like, Okay, the proper way to ask me that kind of question is, What is your heritage? You can’t just assume that because I'm Asian that I'm not from America.
So this guy's screaming at me, yelling racial slurs, talking about how I’m diseased; all this shit. And he's a big guy. What do I do in this situation? We do have a pandemic going on here, so I don't really want to touch this guy or really be anywhere near him. I do have a face mask on but at that point in time, they're telling us that you have to wipe down everything you possibly touch. Like, every five seconds, use hand sanitizer — stuff like that. So what do I do here? What, am I gonna punch this big guy? And then have him beat me to death? He's obviously full of hate. Then I look around and I realized that there's a crowd of people around me. And they're all filming and nobody is saying anything! Nobody's stepping in to be like, Hey, dude, back off. They were just standing there filming. It was just . . . Whoa. And then finally the guy says, I just don't understand why they let people like you in this country.
So of course I had to go and quarantine because I didn't know — the spit didn't actually hit me, but I didn't know if, like, the residual spittle hit my body or . . . Whatever! We didn’t know shit about COVID then. So I had to quarantine for 14 days.
Over the course of her quarantine, Ko went from shock to guarded optimism to anger to: “What can I do to help?” It’s there where she started the Heart of Detroit project, a year-long series of portraits and profiles of Detroit small businesses, musicians, community organizers, and more. Over the course of her project, Ko was introduced to the world of mutual aid.
Model D: So your introduction to mutual aid came through the people you met while working on the Heart of Detroit project?
Ko: Yeah, so I'm talking to all these people, looking at different people's Instagram pages, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, looking at people's Facebook pages, friends of friends. I happened to run across Chef Bee, who has Sisters on a Roll mobile cafe. I called her up. And I was like, I want to do a profile on you. So, Chef Bee told me, I'm gonna be down at Rosa Parks Transit Center at six o'clock, we do this big feed. She didn't really tell me anything else about it. Once I got down there, it was just like, What is going on here? She had 700 — when I say meals, I don't mean just a hot dog or a hamburger and some chips. It’s beautiful food, food that I would pay $25 for and she had 700 meals prepared. People were lining up and all that food was gone within 15 minutes. And I was like, What? Wait, what is happening here? Food insecurity is so terrible right now. She's like, You know, I'd like to say that this is just homeless folks but it’s not. I didn't know until I saw it with my own eyes.
After a few more Heart of Detroit projects, Ko’s car broke down. She would soon raise $5,000 through an online fundraiser. Only needing $500 to fix her car, Ko would give the rest away, leading to the eventual formation of Eastside Mutual Aid.
Ko: Duane [Daniels] FaceTimed me and he was like, “I want to do this clothing drive but I only have 200 followers on Facebook, you have like 4,000. And you have all these different accounts and have all these thousands of followers. You could post something, and we could probably get some clothes.” And I was like, Okay, we'll do it. So we did that first clothing drive, and we got something like five or 600 bags of clothing. And that's when I was like, Whoa, what do we do with this stuff? And he was like, “I just, I didn't really think that part through.” And I thought, I know what to do with this, because I had just met Chef Bee.
She had all those people down at Rosa Parks waiting for food. And I'm like, I'm sure they need other resources as well. So we started taking that stuff down to Rosa Parks Transit Center on Wednesdays. And through Facebook Messenger we started a group and invited a bunch of people into it and it became Eastside Mutual Aid.
I kept doing my projects. It got more difficult because I was trying to do mutual aid and the project at the same time. But it was just like, writing about this isn't enough. Because writing about it, people are like, “Oh, yeah, that's a cool guy. Next.” But, like, actually doing something about it? That’s a whole other situation.
Find Model D on Instagram to learn more about the numerous organizations that Ko made space to feature, and follow her Heart of Detroit page to learn about even more.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.