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Evelyn Lynn,
Noemi Y. Molitor,
Cara Page, and
Lamont Sims,
"A Conversation about Southerners on New Ground:
Transformation, Legacy and Movement Building in the U.S. South"
(page 3 of 8)
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
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