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
