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.
- For example, BLOCS Atlanta (Building Locally for Community Safety and the Georgia Tech Student Planning Association.[↑]
