Southerners on New Ground (SONG) connects us to the collective rhythm and dreams of the South through legacies of resiliency and resistance, transformation and movement building. This article reflects a conversation about SONG from the perspective of older and newer members to SONG. Cara Page, Evelyn Lynn, Lamont Sims, and Noemi Molitor came together in August 2010 to talk about SONG's meaning in the context of organizing around social justice in the South.

SONG is a Southern regional organization that builds strategies for economic and racial justice through a lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, queer, gender non-conforming, and two spirit (LBGTQTS) lens. SONG focuses its efforts and resources on rural communities in the U.S. South by offering Organizing Schools, workshops on community and movement building, as well as member-organized social spaces and other forms of social justice work and coalition building.

Sixteen years ago, three African American and three white lesbians came together to found SONG to focus on the South as a political region, attentive to its legacies, and the South as a space of living and community for LBGTQTS people. SONG is and has always been a membership-based organization. It is a multi-racial organization doing multi-issue work, addressing how racism affects our communities, foregrounding the perspectives of working class folks, and always articulating how different forms of oppression are connected. SONG is invested in transformational work. We strive to create space to collectively envision our lives free of oppression, to resist assimilation, to think about what we need to build movements rather than single-issue campaigns, and to create the kind of community and support structures we need to survive as people of color, as queer people, as people with disabilities, and as all of the above marginalized communities in the South.

While SONG focuses its energies on rural communities, SONG does occasionally work in cities such as Atlanta, where we met to write this article. We asked each other questions about SONG's work and vision: How do we see SONG in relation to movement building, to queer politics and feminism, and to social justice issues in the South? We reflected a little bit on academic research, as it is helpful to the cause, and, most importantly, we exchanged our experiences with, concerns about, and longings for activist work. While we present our conversation as a whole, our individual perspectives remain visible and audible. As you read, our individual voices and stories will be highlighted at times within a context of our common ideas and visions. Let us briefly introduce our literal kitchen table:

Cara Page has been with SONG for two generations, from its leadership in the 90s, to its new leadership in Durham, North Carolina, to the present. These days she lives in Atlanta, organizing in the South with SONG and the Kindred southern healing justice collective. She described a process of "colic and rebirth" that SONG underwent a few years ago when co-directors Caitlin Breedlove and Paulina Hernandez held a listening campaign to position SONG's strategic action in the South.

Evelyn Lynn first encountered SONG in 1997 when attending the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Creating Change conference. Having left the South in search of LBGTQTS political community, this brief encounter with SONG spoke to that longing for political community and offered a glimpse of the kind of support she might have if she returned home. Evelyn's more recent relationship with SONG began in 2006 while she was living and working in New Orleans and trying to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. During this time SONG offered much needed support to local communities around healing, trauma, and survival.

Lamont Sims came across SONG quite recently and is a member of BlackOut at Georgia State University, a Black queer student organization that exists to challenge all oppression. He is also a member of Sweet Tea: Southern Queer Men's Collective, a small group of queer men based in Atlanta who challenge sexism. From 2009 through 2010, Lamont was part of the Atlanta Mentorship Circle; this 6-month program brought together LBGTQTS activists from the metro-Atlanta area for co-mentorship training around social justice work. Working towards "local capacity, unity and interconnection of people in the state of GA", the circle envisioned "social work that is cross-issue, anti-oppression, and meets at the crossroads of race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality". The Mentorship Circle is also where Lamont and Noemi connected.

Noemi Molitor learned about SONG through her chosen-family in 2006 and has been with SONG in spirit ever since. In 2009, she moved from Germany to the U.S. and got to join SONG in person. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University in Atlanta where she commits herself to social justice struggles in her scholarship. She continues to be involved in political projects in Berlin that address the legacies of German colonialism. In this vein, she has worked to push the critical remembering of street names that celebrate colonial actors and worldviews in Berlin's cityscape today, and has lobbied to rename them while publicly documenting their history.

As we started thinking through this S&F Online's theme of "polyphony," we thought about how many voices literally hold SONG. Playing off the metaphor of polyphonics, we theorized SONG as the consistent bass line to the foundation of our work. SONG's bass beat holds the center and keep us grounded in our direction while our many voices carry the harmony and rhythm of the work. In this sense, SONG's work and the resources it provides represent the fundamentals of our organizing. Our different perspectives, our multiple longings for shared political struggle, for collectivity and kinship, for spiritual homes, for a reclaimed erotic, for reclaimed bodies, and for reclaimed land form the harmony and rhythm of SONG. This harmony becomes audible not through assimilation, but through an anti-oppression lens that appreciates the beauty of difference and believes in the right of all to live decent lives free of harassment, bullying, exploitation, and hate.

SONG's leadership core forms a foundation from which its different members are connected and build action. We organize around local issues, short and long term campaigns, and spiritual expressions. To Noemi, transformation and longevity stood out as commitments that hold and sustain SONG. For example, in organizing schools across the South (which will be discussed further below) we learn through various tools how to create organizational longevity and sustainability for our communities; some of these tools are different models of power and power analysis, Story Circles and inclusive event planning. In our work, we practice to be attentive to how we live our lives and to the everyday, specifically through how we treat and approach each other. Cara commented that SONG's commitment to accountability is the approach to its members that helps to carry the work forward by sharing leadership and ingenuity, while remaining accountable to long term goals of safety, resiliency, and liberation for our community. Indeed, SONG speaks to our longing for alternative worlds, allows spaces for dreaming, and enables inspiration.

As members of SONG we envision and nurture our longing, desire, imagination, and creativity as ways that allow healing and alternative responses to persecution, violence, and to the targeting and isolation of our communities. Academic traditions invested in positivist praise of rationalism often bring skepticism or even cynicism to transformative anti-racist, feminist, and queer agendas and do not appreciate what pushes our desire and longing towards liberatory action. In our conversation we shared an appreciation for emotional, spiritual, visionary, and political work that alternative academic approaches invested in critical theories may overlook when their analysis falls short of being accountable to communities and transformational practice. Noemi recalled hearing Caitlin Breedlove talk about how she approaches scholars that enter social justice organizations who bring the most beautiful and brilliant critique of current political systems but offer no alternative visions. "As much as we need these analyses," she says, "if you cannot suggest something productive to change things, you might need to take a step back to pause and reflect."

As we contemplated lessons learned about how to bring multi-issue social justice work into action, we thus discussed how simply pulling things apart in fierce analyses and criticism is not enough, and might even be destructive. To us, it was important that we understand these lessons not in the sense of corporate values like measurement, success, or productivity, or in the tone of threats and weaknesses. Rather, what stood out to all of us about SONG's work was the desire to move beyond what we are against and to unite around what we are for. For example, with the SONG office's move to Georgia, we might ask ourselves locally, "what do we want Atlanta to look like?," while building with organizations that already exist in the city.[1] SONG's organizing schools' curriculum therefore builds onto dreaming, imagining, and creating as positive means of transformation.

At the same time, SONG made central for each of us the question: how do we take care of ourselves? When we think of transformation, we think in a way that is beyond opposition; our very survival becomes part of creation. SONG recognizes that our individual survival is ultimately connected to our organizational sustainability. Continued transformation relies on our longevity, and on our ability to nurture ourselves and avoid burning out. SONG rejects the notion that selflessness is necessary for struggles against oppression. Instead, SONG believes that self-care is a very important factor for sustaining community and the work that we do. Considering the core working agreements, SONG makes it very clear that we are our greatest resource by valuing people over profit and other forms of corporate value. We cannot afford to willingly throw anyone away; neither can we value profit over people. Sustaining ourselves and others who share this work is a major part of SONG's mission and builds towards our collective healing and our cultural and political survival. SONG uplifts the interdependence between our individual and collective wellness. This includes acknowledging and working with our trauma, our experiences of violence and oppression, rather than leaving them unspoken and/or individualized—we believe this to be vital so that we can live collective sustainable lives.

Transformational Politics and Legacies

"A part of my learning curve around the need for self-care and transformational tools (which coincided with my most recent connection to SONG) was as a result of bearing witness to extreme injustices while organizing against a criminal justice system in Louisiana. This system operates as an extension of Southern slavery. Regardless of innocence, people are beaten, abused, and robbed of their lives. The collective impact on their families and communities is devastating. The extreme violence and injustice of this system fuels violence in communities and has left New Orleans with the highest murder rate in the country for almost two decades. More than two thirds of my organization's membership had lost a child or grandchild. Staff and members attended funerals several times a month. Often it felt like we were surrounded by violence, loss, hopelessness, pain, anger, and depression. Though we had significant victories as an organization, we lacked the capacity to access and use geographically grounded healing tools that could help us collectively push through the trauma we experienced as a result of the conditions we faced. Individual healing support from SONG for myself and organizers in New Orleans was critical to our survival." —Evelyn

Certainly, political campaigns can be transformative in altering relations of power between communities and the institutions that impact peoples' lives. Forcing the state to change (for example: laws promoting racial segregation, the pathologization and criminalization of homosexuality, the exploitation of workers) can have a profound impact on how a community understands its own power to make change. But simply making policy change is not enough. Beyond short-term campaigns, we look for movement-building, for sustained cultural change as opposed to formal accounts of equality that do not address either everyday violence or social inequalities upheld by the state. When attempting to articulate this kind of deeper transformation, we have experienced frustration with prepackaged ideas of "transformation" that we have seen brought to national organizing contexts. Without knowing our region and culture, people attempt to teach "new" organizing skills, overlooking or ignoring the context and legacies upon which people in the South are already building. This is why SONG emphasizes memory as a political action. We politicize memory by holding on to narrative culture, spiritual and political practices, and oral traditions, a Southern tradition that has helped people survive and build resiliency. In our conversation, we also described the erasure and removal of memory as part of a colonial logic, as a tool of power to individualize people and to remove communities from their memories of healing, resistance, and of the ability to build and shape power.

As part of a larger structure of social inequalities and violence, we discussed police violence in the criminal justice system against both adults and children. From this perspective the police and the state are the forces that foster violence. In organizing around these conditions, in SONG we constantly ask ourselves how to continue when there is little time to hold the collective pain of our losses. How can we sustain our movement when we cannot sustain ourselves? How do we hold both a place of pain and power? What are the tools of survival that we need? Which do we already know? Where is the joy in our work? SONG looks for the answers in the legacy and the history of the South and our communal practices of resiliency. SONG's continued leadership in this regard has been essential, both for the South and for LBGTQTS work across the country.

Igniting the Kindred, SONG's project and motto, refers to gathering people who have similar experiences, a closely connected longing for a transformed South in the context of racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, sexism, nationalism, and exploitation. To build this transformed South we must transform ourselves. One moment that stood out to Noemi was during the Atlanta Mentorship circle when the members were asked to consider the agreement "I am willing to be transformed in the service of my work." This statement was used by SONG's co-directors Paulina Hernandez and Caitlin Breedlove as a positive reminder that we all come with ignorance and bring the potential for violence, yet we are offering space for a willingness to connect around the desire to overcome and to un-learn hurtful behavior. Even as we struggle and make mistakes, we bring the willingness to be accountable around our worldviews, assumptions, contradictions, and privilege, and to approach power inside the group as well as the dynamics of how power is held.

"The 2009/10 SONG Mentorship Circle in Atlanta taught us how to deal with tension in our particular group and how to challenge each other past this group experience. As conflicts arose, we were able to work through them because we allowed ourselves to feel hurt and anger and to hold each other accountable by sharing our feelings. During some sessions, we worked through how certain statements could be interpreted as racist; rather than blaming the speaker, we focused on what was said, while still addressing privilege and white supremacy. While we were mindful not to completely neglect our purpose of learning organizing tools, we still committed ourselves to address tensions in the group, based on agreements on how to treat each other we had committed to when beginning the Circle. We believe that if we had not taken the time to go there, if we had not worked these things out with each other, we might have continued learning the organizing tools we were supposed to learn, but the group may have stopped hearing each other." —Lamont and Noemi

Grounding the Work in the South

We asked each other, "What is it that is different about the South?" Evelyn put it into words: "we don't have the luxury to throw anybody away." Working it out with each other is an important commitment SONG rests on. The South is a region that is often equated with "backwardness" or deemed to be "more racist" than other parts of the U.S. SONG resists such stereotyping, reductive claims and instead analyzes them as tools or discourses of oppression and inequality. This narrow view also forgets that the South has been the proverbial engine of the Civil Rights Movement and a primary site of anti-racist protest and resistance. And not just in larger cities like Atlanta or Montgomery, but all over the South in the everyday struggles of people. SONG puts the South back on the map—looking at racial justice and class justice through a queer lens, alongside the legacies of resiliency, resistance, and movement building in the South. While the South is often dismissed and fantasized as a "space of the past," we talked about noticing that many Southerners who relocate often speak to us about missing the rhythm of the South in other places. We believe the South has a rhythm of patience, kindness, and resilience that helps people to maintain themselves in the chaos of social injustice.

SONG looks at the South as a place of legacy. That is, the legacies of racism, of genocide, and of slavery. And further, of the legacies of structurally excluding and threatening queer populations, of exploiting workers, and of illegalizing immigrants of color today. At our table, we talked a lot about holding the legacy of trauma and genocide in the South. The consequences and the impact of this legacy are greater than what we know. At the same time, this legacy tells us about the survival skills and resistance that people have created in the South. SONG seeks to hold both resistance and mourning in the face of genocide and trauma. Meanwhile, we carry the knowledge that it is possible to imagine and create alternatives that are shaped by our ancestral legacies.

While SONG directs its organizing focus to the South, we understand community as local, regional, and global. In this sense, we all described a feeling of commitment to "real" and "imagined" communities, while being committed beyond U.S. borders in spirit. Or, in the other way around, for the immigrants[2] among us, other countries are locations or spaces of belonging that are indeed quite real. These different perspectives already show the need to push borders and to deconstruct the idea of national and regional entities or realities. Lamont recognized that places like Oakland can feel like a "Southern space" because of the huge migration of southern Black folks to that region. Cara also reminded us that by "South" we often mean only "Southeast," and ignore our connection to the Southwest and global south. These are false borders that were created to divide us, and SONG seeks to build across that divide. SONG foregrounds a particularly regional experience and a commitment to that region in the context of the current political divisions in the U.S., while also holding a national and international space that connects our global struggles through a liberatory framework.

What does "Spiritual" mean? Holding the Multiplicities

"Being a newcomer to the South by way of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England, and returning to the lineage of Georgia Share Croppers and Black Seminole Nation in Coco Beach, Florida, as a Black queer woman, as an organizer, as a healer/cultural worker and artist I found refuge and sacred space inside of SONG. They carry the whole body; allow us to forge our memories, our dreams, our political thinking, our spiritual survival practices, our collective resiliency. I have come to SONG as a co-trainer for the SONG Organizing School in my work as a healing arts practitioner responding to violence and trauma in our communities and movements seeking to transform the conditions that allow trauma and violence to persist.

What moves me about SONG is their attention to legacy as an understanding of political transformation. If we cannot describe what histories we have come from and what contradictions we hold it will be harder to tell our truths. The hard truths of violence and abuse in our family, the targeting and criminalizing of our queer bodies, our black bodies, our disabled bodies, our many gendered bodies, our immigrant bodies, our women of color bodies. It is within SONG's principles to listen to our legacies and hold our truths that we can unfold rage, disappointment, possibilities and dreams as part of one whole." —Cara

In our reflections on violence and trauma, Evelyn asserted that reflection and spirituality have to be core when organizing around trauma, or a movement might fall apart. The organizational challenge here was to recognize the realities of trauma and post-traumatic stress, for individual people and our collective bodies. Scholar and activist Andrea Smith has also emphasized this need in her work[3], noting that political movements often fail to recognize that their members, marginalized communities, have put a lot of effort and energy into healing from trauma. We need to realize that as traumatized organizations and communities, we must tend to post-traumatic stress, to enable well-being within our activist work, not on top of, or outside of it. Thus, if a movement does not make space and resources for this work, it excludes people or makes it hard or impossible for them to participate.

Cara mentioned that SONG's political work in lifting up healers, cultural workers and other traditions as inherent to our southern movement-building creates a place of grace and honor for this lineage of survival. We used the notion of a collective body to touch on interconnectedness, on the interconnectivity of SONG as a collective, which could be as specific as the people of New Orleans post-Katrina and as wide as all of SONG's membership base. As a collective we can commit to responsibility and accountability in different ways, especially when we create an environment and a space people can fully lean into. As we said, we cannot be asked to hold an organization without holding down each other. Individually we maybe can exist without an organization, but the organization could not exist without us. To us, SONG is an organization that is able to hold the collective and individual trauma violence creates by giving permission to bring our whole selves to the work.

In this context we continued more deeply spiritually. Noemi reflected on the ways in which homophobic, colonial strands of Christianity have made her very skeptical towards religion, and how certain new-age kinds of spirituality have been resistant to reflect their problematic tendencies for cultural appropriation, or cultural appreciation, without giving back politically. At the same time, "spirituality" to her could mean allowing oneself to bring emotional understandings to a political and cultural context, which allows for an analysis of how social inequalities happen in everyday interpersonal relationships. This lens asks how social inequalities are woven into commonsense culture and how these structures can affect our minds and souls, i.e. our well-being; it also gives space to articulate the way we see the world and the ways in which we suffer from everyday violence and allows for healing beyond individual processes.

Evelyn described the permission to bring the longing for spirituality and its practice as vital in her work. In organizing outside the South, she has often felt the Left's hostility to organized forms of spirituality (i.e. Christianity) and those who practice them. Of course, there are many legitimate reasons to be critical of Christianity. In addition to its significant contributions to colonialization, the most visible current practice of Christianity has been appropriated by the Right. They use it to embody the rationalization for hate, oppression, and violence and, as a result, many of us have felt alienated and rejected by our spiritual homes. But Evelyn expressed that being alienated by the Right and feeling hostility from the Left can cause people to miss the important connections that justice-focused spiritual communities can bring: the opportunity for liberatory practice, for fellowship and community, for deepening our understanding and practice of the values of love, respect, and kinship. "The church should be ours, not the Right's," she said. Spirituality can be revolutionary and SONG seems to embrace this knowledge.

To Cara, spirituality through SONG is about holding the multiplicities. Cara spoke of SONG's ability to move, inspire, and build capacity of organizers through spiritual and cultural work. It is always a space where spiritual practice is given permission to exist as a central force to our work and vision—without ostracizing or uplifting one practice or another—just holding a space that connects us, that honors ancestral work. She evoked a moment in SONG's history that she described as a turning point in SONG. Like a collective breath, the resting period that SONG had a few years ago, was used to gather stories in a Listening Campaign inspired by the Zapatistas Listening Campaign. To Cara, SONG held a spiritual and political consciousness by asking SONG members what they dreamed for, what they desired in the context of history and memory in our southern LBGTQTS communities. Cara saw this as a spiritual practice and tool in of itself. With the Listening Campaign, SONG held a reflective moment to find out what it needed to pay attention to in order to be able to respond to any internal or external wounds of change in SONG's leadership or history. SONG asked the members what they needed from each other and from SONG. This in turn allowed for an organic rebirth of SONG's political work and vision that came from our movement and community's hearts and bodies, not just from theory or reaction. Cara also identified spirituality as being connected to place. For instance when we look at the name Combahee River Collective[4] we can see how to place a Black Lesbian collective and manifesto's name inside of the physical-geographical name of a river is a spiritual practice in its own right. In the same vein, SONG, in the spelling of its name (Southerners on New Ground), seeks to physically reclaim a social, political, and spiritual ground to the reconnection to southern geography.

Thoughts on Feminism—Deeply Queer

"Feminism has always been a radical framework for social justice in my life. I have always thought about the destruction of patriarchal culture on people, but feminism helped me learn and develop tools to defeat it. I started thinking about this after thinking about current frustrations with some feminist scholars and activists—specifically those who neglect to imagine 'difference' and its place within feminism. I am always excited to talk about feminism, because it represents the framework for social justice that has transformed my thinking the most, pushing me further in and through the margins. As I continue struggling as a low-income worker, complicated by gender oppression (conformity), homophobia, and anti-Black racism, feminism helps me cope with these issues by having the power to openly challenge them.

From my experience, feminism is one of the only forms of criticism that also exists to challenge itself and other social justice frameworks. I learned to hold myself and others accountable for maintaining forms of oppression from male feminist activists. Later, through women's studies, I also understood how feminists emphasized the importance of doing internal work for radical change against sexism and dominant forms of patriarchy. This has been my experience with feminism in SONG as well. What I think is most powerful is that their feminism goes without saying. SONG's major goal is challenging oppression, which comes in multiple forms affecting people, multiple identities and experiences. Feminism is one of the powerful forces behind this." —Lamont

We discussed feminism as something we all assume and experience as a basis in SONG's work. In this sense, we shared an appreciation of feminisms that don't come narrow, i.e. they might not be identified as such in the sense of a single-issue agenda or strategy. Instead, in SONG feminism appears again not as a luxury, but as everyday work. To Lamont feminism is already there in SONG; in a reference to womanism[5], he described SONG as following the commitment that as you see oppression you do something about it. "Challenging oppression wherever and whenever you see it" allows feminism to be a part of SONG's social justice framework for Lamont. Again, SONG emphasizes, "holding the multiplicities," which suggests that feminism is not/cannot be the only lens for social justice.

Noemi brought in another "early," yet current discussion around feminism and queerness in saying that Queer Theory has not always embraced spirituality. She reminded us of the discussions around "essentialist" or "cultural" feminism versus the deconstruction of gender and sex. There have always been several feminisms, clashing over ideas such as that women are "more peaceful by nature" as they are closer to it through their ability to give birth, or over judgmental dismissals of TransMen as supporters of patriarchy[6]. As Noemi cited Donna Haraway's ironic comment, "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess"[7], we laughed hard in recognition of feminist tensions, and SONG's commitment to gender diversity. Noemi also expressed how SONG's feminism to her is a feminism that is deeply queer. Deeply queer in that it speaks from the perspective of sex workers and not about them, deeply queer in that it speaks from the perspective of trans folks about their lack of health care and not about them; deeply queer in that it creates space for different allegiances to spirituality and to gender varieties of all kinds, from Two Spirited folks to gender queer identified Trans lesbians who were assigned the female sex at birth.

Skill Sharing and Organizing Tools

"What a relief to have the chance to write an article about SONG. As a graduate student in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, writing is a daily activity and a skill I like to bring to my organizing work. However, academic writing can be a very particular kind of writing. At times I experience it as constrained—by requirements, time, and tone. At the same time it was my studies of gender, critical race, and anti-colonialism that politicized me tremendously—I received those engagements as gifts through teachers who were 'on the streets' as much as they were in the classroom as a political space. Writing about SONG, about the kind of work that moves my soul, feels liberating, makes my (keyboard) chords hum. Here I can be writing entirely from the heart.

Being able to be with SONG physically and geographically through the 2009/10 Atlanta Mentorship circle allowed for the experience of bringing our whole selves to the work and to each other. As we were reflecting on it for this article, Lamont remembered how he used to experience the struggle for social justice as exhausting. It seemed to him that self-care would automatically be the sacrifice you make, the price you pay as you are trying to make a living and to do transformative, political work. I could relate to what he was saying. When trying to fulfill a fulltime study, research, and teaching commitment, I often come up against the norms of private, capitalist education that asks students and teachers to exhaust themselves, rather than to take care of their whole selves, bodily and emotionally.

Still, in my heart, organizing work and the desire to build community are ultimately and directly transformative; I keep struggling to attend to them first and foremost. I often feel like being mindful about care work towards those I love, towards myself, and towards my community, taking the time and energy to practice non-violent relationships and to embody patience, is taken away from me. The Mentorship Circle encouraged us to look at this differently. It brought the understanding that we need to be able to create spaces to take care of ourselves and to create non-violent relationships with each other to be able to hold our experiences of violence and oppression, to live differently, and to create sustainable movements.

During our conversation for this article, the question whether people can hear each other was central. In the larger context of our work through SONG we share an understanding that trauma of our ancestors and ourselves affects our lives in ways that deserve attention. To all of us, SONG is a space that gives permission to turn to questions of trauma, survival, and liberation and to care for ourselves and for each other. The movement work SONG creates and supports has felt so profoundly different from organizing, community, and scholarly practices that try to be removed from experiences of violence and interactive skills of transformation." —Noemi

In practice, SONG's vision is to contribute to transformation by engaging folks who have been marginalized, by offering programs and campaigns that teach community organizers and activists how to do things themselves. Here SONG values skills-sharing, not teaching in the sense of expert/student. In particular, SONG values collective, membership-based organizing, as opposed to the tendency to look for a single hero/leader that some organizers cling to so that one person gets transformed to then pass on their knowledge to others. Grassroots education on the other hand envisions simultaneous processes of collective learning and un-learning and values the passing of knowledge, and giving credit, while it understands the legacies of the knowledge and the survival skills of our elders. The sharing of tools, for SONG, is a way of supporting work that is already being done and that people dream about doing.

During SONG's Organizing Schools recently in North Carolina and Virginia, and also in this year's Atlanta Mentorship Circle, we taught and learned about SONG's multi-issue perspective on social justice issues. In one exercise we thought through land, body, spirit, and work (economy) to understand oppression as multi-faceted and interconnected. Under each rubric, we asked what we needed, what we dreamed about, and what we reflected on, in order to analyze how things, issues, and people are connected. Colonialism, housing policies, ableism, exploitation, and underpayment might appear as connected between land, body, work, and spirit, as might whether there is room for religion or spiritual practice in a certain social movement. We started with what people know; for instance, drawing a map of one's neighborhood can be a tool for power analysis around resources and surveillance: are there sidewalks, grocery stores in walking distance, public transportation, where are the police, who do they put under surveillance?

Another way of inviting full selves is a popular education tool, an exercise called Story Circles[8]. By sharing our stories, voices, and experiences when introducing ourselves to each other, we take something that is individual and make it collective. "What have your people done to survive?" We answer as we are getting to know each other, maybe touching on resistance and holding on to dignity as survival, maybe touching on privilege and violence as carriers of power. Similarly, we demonstrate that struggles that are individualized in order to keep them marginal are in fact tied to larger social structures and institutions. Poverty is not a problem, or the "fault" of individual people; it is tied to systems of social dominance like capitalism and racism that are built upon inequality and that systematically inform state policies. When analyzing the distribution of resources in society for instance, an analytic lens of violence/ownership can illustrate how ideas such that land can be owned are invented rather than given.

Part of practicing accountability is to create the spaces we are meeting in together to share knowledge, tools and strategies. In this, SONG brings core agreements and protocols with an emphasis on positive ways of interacting.[9] Against the background of oppression we are asked how we relate to each other. As simple as it may sound and as vital as it is to sustain a movement, we ask ourselves what makes us feel good and fulfills our longing and desires. We ask what could be an ideal space, what creates the conditions that make us feel good, uplifted, and possible as we work together across differences—in a particular Organizing School or local mentorship circle or in the context of a broader social justice movement.

By sharing our version and vision of SONG in the form of this article, we hope to have shown how through SONG's political framework of asking what our "longings and desires" are, we can become inspired to build locally, regionally, and globally beyond geographical, political, and spiritual borders. As we acknowledge how we are all implicated in violent structures and in power relations, we challenge ourselves and each other "to be transformed in the service of our work." As we invite our experiential and emotional knowledge, we can hold and support each other towards resiliency and longevity in our present and coming movements for social justice. Let us close, then, with a quote from one of our authors:

"Having the courage to speak to our singing hearts, SONG does not presume to escape difficult histories to transform our collective selves. We are instead asked to sit in grief inside of our love and liberation and to build a powerful resiliency that can hold both without putting one down for the other. As mentioned through Evelyn, 'we do not have the luxury to keep anyone out.' My addition is that we do not have the luxury to shame or isolate anyone for harm they may have done, and we do have the tools to imagine how to transform the harm and learn how to take care of one another. SONG dreams and imagines what and who we are to make these things possible." —Cara

Endnotes

1. For example, BLOCS Atlanta (Building Locally for Community Safety and the Georgia Tech Student Planning Association. [Return to text]

2. We mean people who might not have U.S. citizenship or folks whose families immigrated post-Civil War. Our use of the category immigrant here points to contemporary border policies and citizenship privileges while being aware that to this day the U.S. is a settler colony. This legacy of European colonialism is frequently euphemized in the term "immigrant nation," a gesture we oppose. SONG is committed to bringing indigenous perspectives to the forefront of the movement. See for instance: "Two-Spirit First Nations Collective: In Lak Ech: You are the Other Me; Arizona, Queerness, Immigration: A Critique and a Call to Action" from 2010. [Return to text]

3. See Andrea Smith, "Feminism Without Bureaucracy, Beyond Inclusion, Re-centering Feminism," Left Turn 28 (2008); Also see The Abolitionist's interview with Andrea Smith (PDF); and The Boarding School Healing Project. [Return to text]

4. Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," In All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, Gloria T. Hull Ed. (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982): 13-22. [Return to text]

5. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Books, 1983 [1967]). [Return to text]

6. See Gayle Rubin's analysis of transphobic discourses: Gayle Rubin, "Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries," In Transgender Studies Reader, Susan Stryker and Stepen White, Eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006): 471-81. See also Janice Raymond writing against transwomen: Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979). As another critique of transphobic discourses, see: Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See further: Jean Bobby Noble, Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape (Toronto: Women's Press, 2006). And also: Krista Scott-Dixon, Ed., Trans/Forming Feminisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006). [Return to text]

7. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 181. [Return to text]

8. See John O'Neal of June Bug Productions. [Return to text]

9. SONG's core values. [Return to text]