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 7 of 8)
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.
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