The political will and imagination we need now to organize a world free from fear in the age of HB2

What you will find below is a piece collectively shaped by SONG staff. It is long. It is heavy. It is heartfelt. Often, we claim that we are not experts. You will not find any of us with PhDs or elaborate resumes on any of the subjects mentioned below (though we have called upon many in the SONG family who do!). We do claim, however, that we are experts of our own lives. Here we have attempted to trace the trajectory of some of those lived experiences to the experiences of our ancestors and the living survivors and fighters in our communities. We have worked to trace the trajectory too of their resistance, political imagination, and brilliance that is connected to our own present day purpose in fighting for our survival and livelihood.

In these times, as so many have shown us and taught us, we believe that shared struggle in our understanding helps us get to the shared risk and shared action that we must take to transform the world around us. We hope you will join us this summer for a series of ongoing conversations that dive deeper into various topics while weaving through themes about the political will and spirit we need to tackle and overcome some of our greatest challenges. It is but one offering of SONG to the greater collective global effort to get free.

partus sequitur ventrem

At livestock sales in rural and small towns across the U.S. South, lambs, swine, poultry, equine, and cattle are sold or auctioned to the highest bidder. Usually held once or twice a week (sometimes seasonally) each market has its own culture. Nearly all of them fill at the designated time with middle-aged and elderly men who are trying to make a living in the age of industrialized agriculture; some are clad in Carhart or denim coveralls and others in their “Sunday Best” boots, Wranglers, and hats. By far the most popular, and often profitable sales are garnered by cattle.

For the unacquainted we’re talking about cows:  the animals that bring milk and end up as steaks on plates. There are black and white Holsteins, brown Jerseys, the all black Angus, and sometimes heritage breeds. They are sold by head (that’s one cow) and by herd (that’s a bunch of cows). They are sold by function such as beef (that’s for eating), feed (that’s for getting fat to turn a profit), dairy (that’s for milk), breeding (that’s for making other cows) or some other special use and each use brings about nomenclature and descriptors like steer, bull, calve, boner, breaker, lean, heifer, fresh, dry, short bred, yearlings, springers, horned, stock, or slaughter, that help the people running the show tally and keep track of how much of what sells for how many dollars.

Prior to the start of bidding the livestock is put on display for the farmers and ranchers to poke and prod at their disposal. With eyes, experience, intuition, hands, wooden sticks and electric taming rods they assess the animals for weight and height, temperament, likelihood of injury, illness or immunity, body demeanor and structure, age, and sex. Amidst the unthinkably loud and horrid sounds of cattle bleating, the potential buyer takes these many factors into consideration, often with steno pad in hand, and notes the stock pen and either the number pierced in the ear or the family or company logo branded or tattooed on the hind quarter of the animal. This is done as a way to remember one animal from many before the official sale begins. The sale and bidding start, often, in an arena of sorts with stadium type seating, the kind you find at small softball fields, and a dirt floor in the middle where each animal is paraded for potential profit. As the bovine are pulled into the center ring the auctioneer rattles off the farm the animal is from or its owner, the beginning bid price, its breed, and its weight before launching into the bidding debate that will reckon the animal useful, profitable, a loss, or disposable.

It is not uncommon for animals with sperm to sell for more than those that will carry to term and birth a calf or for those that are in prime health and age for pregnancy to be sold at the highest price. The animals that are seen as the strongest and healthiest will bring the most in the form of dollars. And for those that are seen outside of the ideal weight range or breeding age, will never milk, or are sick or limping, will sell for the least and usually end up on their way to a slaughter house as a testament to a life deemed to have ridden its course by either buyer or seller. Walk up to nearly any of those buyers or sellers and ask them if they are engaging in chattel economics and they will likely look at you wondering why you are asking them such a question.

The definition of chattel is simple enough:  an item of property other than real estate. Modern legal definitions will sometimes expand to say something like, tangible moveable goods such as cattle or clothes. But a simple Google search or visit to your local library will turn up several definitions, from Oxford, Webster, or the Cornel Legal Dictionary, of the word chattel. Like most language, the word has evolved over time to reflect a specific time, culture, and place where a word has relevance and meaning. In many parts of the world, including the U.S., the word chattel reflects a heavy history of slavery, that is, a market economy where humans are bought and sold for profit.

Read those first four paragraphs again substituting in humans, Black people specifically, into nearly every sentence and you have close to the same narrative of slave markets and auction blocks throughout the U.S. South in the 1800s.

“The slaves remained at the race-course, some of them for more than a week and all of them for four days before the sale. They were brought in thus early that buyers who desired to inspect them might enjoy that privilege, although none of them were sold at private sale. For these preliminary days their shed was constantly visited by speculators. The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound; and in addition to all this treatment, asking them scores of questions relative to their qualifications and accomplishments.”
New York Daily Tribune,
March 9, 1859

Likewise, enslaved people were inventoried as product and property traced through the blood lineage of the mother,

“African slaves and their descendants inherited their enslaved status from their mothers. Although the number of laws governing slavery—and enslaved women—accumulated over the course of the colonial period, the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem—progeny follows the womb—was one of the first, and it inextricably bound racial slavery to maternal identity. The doctrine first established the inheritability, and hence the permanence, of slavery as a legal status.”

The systematic treatment of enslaved Africans illustrates how gender and fertility, wealth ownership, and race were foundational to the U.S. state understanding of citizenship and legal status and the rights, access, and permissions that it did or did not grant under the emerging nation state.

Systems of governance, economies, and the geography of towns and cities themselves around the world were tailored around this gruesome and violent Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that forced 12.5 million Africans into North America, South America, and Europe. In the US, after the the 1808 ban of “African slave trade” and through the 1860s, nearly 1.2 million of these enslaved Africans were displaced through the buying and selling of the domestic slave trade bought and sold largely at slave markets in the US South from:  Natchez, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia, and Montgomery, Alabama. Generating both demand and mass profits, the northern part of the U.S. was not immune to the atrocity of an unacceptable institution. In terms of finances, for white plantation owners, and the U.S. state itself, there was much to gain and little loss. Enslaved Black people had reached 4 million in population garnering monetary wealth for the U.S. state that exceeded $3.5 billion before legal emancipation and represented somewhere between 200 and 300% of the nation’s income. But such loss cannot just be measured in dollar signs and it must be acknowledged that the system of slavery was not just economically beneficial for the state, but it also cemented the racial hierarchy of whiteness despite the nation’s promise of democracy.

The institution of chattel slavery in the U.S., by default required the conquest of land itself and relied on the mass genocide of native peoples to turn land into property understood only by a legal system descendant of feudalism.  The conquest and genocide was carried out by the minds and hands of men of European descent with a particular lineage and expectation of wealth and ownership embedded in the practice of domination. These men brought their systems of property to a land already inhibited by indigenous people and First Nations and claimed it as their own using ledgers, quill, parchment, and guns to negate centuries of verbal agreements and contracts. They drew new borders based on vapid notions of land and heredity, and they enacted with a horrid science and spiritual rigor the slaughter of sovereign and autonomous indigenous nations and tribes. All of this was executed in the name of a destiny dictated and “excused” by their God and an inherent belief in the inferiority of native peoples to control what their whiteness allowed them to see as an endless sea of resources.

Policies of extermination, prison camps, and forced displacement of native peoples during the 1800s were just some of the atrocities used to solidify white dominance. White colonizers and settlers utilized scalping, rape, sabotaging food sources, and spreading disease. These tactics of terror were accompanied by assimilation efforts that met the gender and sexual practices of indigenous people with hostility; the spiritual and cultural traditions with bibles; and family structures with kidnapping and “boarding schools” that tried to eliminate tribal life and language. By the end of the first US centennial, indigenous populations had been decimated from 10 million to less than 300,000 and 2 billion acres of land had been seized. It was clear that democracy was just a figment of the white American imagination, meant for some and not others, crafted to build and sustain an empire that was trying to stake its place in power globally.

But Black and indigenous people met the colonial imperial U.S. project with resistance. The attempt at domination was met with equal rigor and audacity, often in the face of death or torture, because of our collective will to survive. Whether it was the writing of Venture Smith or Phillis Wheatley, Nat Turner’s orchestration of the Southampton Insurrection, men like Dangerfield Newby who fought at Harper’s Ferry, Harriet Tubman’s work to liberate thousands of enslaved people on the Underground Railroad and at the Combahee River Raid, the unnamed persons resisting in song and spirit to poison or defy masters; or it was Tecumseh, Osceola, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Chief Joseph fighting for their right to ancestral lands, these leaders had the desire to play a part in the transformation of the conditions before them. They manifested political imagination, will, risk, and movement that dared to set themselves and others free. As our ancestors have historically and continuously laid claim to their autonomy, dignity, and self-determination, the State pushed back with evolving systems of social and population control based on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, economic standing, and physical and mental ability, all of which hid in plain site the violence that we are still experiencing today.

The Colonial Imperial Project Becomes A Nation and Creates the Criminal

In any given decade of this country’s history, we can point to the political, spiritual, and cultural warfare waged on Black people, people of color, women, and gender and sexual transgressors. The perpetrator has often been the state apparatus that is made up of the leaders and institutions committed to what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “great” democratic political experiment. At the very least, the state has repeatedly quietly consented to such violence. The tactics employed were and are deliberately meant to keep us in fear, divided, and isolated from one another. Even before the days of the 1%, those who controlled the most resources and political power knew that a divided people would not stand up to break that consolidation and control. Carrying this forward, the colonial and imperial project of the U.S. has maintained some order of systemized control in the name of profit and legacy for over two hundred years, and the nightmare of social control and population control tells itself over and over again on this continent like an old horror film on loop.

Whether it was southern plantations of the 1800s, reservations of the West in the 1900s, the system of peóns and patrons on large estates in the southwest, or Chinese work camps during the Gold Rush or cross-continental rail road lines of the Reconstruction era, the barring of rights of women to governance, or sodomy laws that criminalized homosexuality as an act punishable by death; the control of indigenous, Black, and immigrant nations, tribes, ethnicities, communities and people looked remarkably similar, as if an equation simply needed implementation. Though every community suffered differently, a pattern emerged: force migration; contain people with demarcated borders; control and monetize labor and label production; maintain population and legal or citizenship status via mass murder, local and national policy, and control of reproduction; and control will, spirit, and culture in order to dehumanize and strip people of autonomy, dignity, and the will to resist.

These systems of control were designed to advance the larger colonial and imperial project that relied on increased white presence and the subjugation, assimilation, or massacre of indigenous people, enslaved Black people, and anyone seen as non-white. Every aspect of these systems require regulation of the body and of masses of bodies for the function at hand.

“To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot

The system of chattel slavery required a detailed display of enforcement to keep it in place and to dissuade its upheaval, or the liberation of both individual bodies and communities of bodies. Following legal emancipation, an intricate set of laws and practices developed to maintain a social and economic order that designated where and how bodies, according to race and according to gender, could move, exist, operate, love, dress, educate, rear children (or not), worship, and labor. Deviation from the set order was not permissible and in most cases qualified as a crime, seen as a threat to safety and security of white people and whiteness itself.

This period was marked with the strange fruit of lynching of indigenous people; enslaved and free Black people; Chinese, Italian, and Mexican people; and women. Lynching was utilized as spectacle with the aim of emboldening white vigilantes and instilling fear in those resisting what was enshrined as the natural order of things. Public lynching with crowds of thousands, like the rape and murder of Laura Nelson in Oklahoma over a cow, quickly became an accepted form of entertainment serving to exemplify punishment for those accused of crimes against white people. The logic that emerged was that white safety and security must be held as the highest written and unwritten law, that a violation of that was deemed criminal, and that criminals must be punished. Lynching was then rationalized as just punishment sanctioned by the State to protect white people and the supremacy of whiteness.

Lynching would continue after the turn of the century as the pattern of control to punish and stamp out self-determination, dignity, autonomy and sovereignty, and concreted the foundation of race construction and hierarchy, the worth and value of non-white bodies to the American empire, the bedrock of who has access to public space and institutions, and the physical lines that isolated tribal nations to reservations and constructed the racialized border between the U.S. and Mexico. The legacy of slavery and lynching grossly foreshadowed the brutal system of Jim Crow and mass incarceration in which Black people and people of color would be defined and controlled into the next two centuries.

“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”
The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander

The Loins of White Anxiety

The expansion of the U.S. further west in the mid to late 1800s buttressed the ushering in of the “century of segregation” known as Jim Crow, accompanied by rising white anxiety that Black and indigenous people, and immigrants (at the time Irish, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese) would cause the demise of civilization in America. At the crux of much of this anxiety was the fear that Black people, indigenous people, and people of color would out-populate white U.S. born people as the country grew in both populace and geographic size over the next 100 years into the 20^th century.

“Dr. Horatio R Storer, the leader of the medical campaign against abortion, envisioned the spread of ‘civilization’ west and south by native-born white Americans, not Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, Indians, or Catholics. ‘Shall’ these regions, he asked, ‘be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.’”

This perceived threat and the response to:

1) a growing suffragist movement of women demanding their political rights to vote and hold office,
2) the rising tide of Black people organizing economic and political power,
3) organized native resistance to attempts by the U.S. government to grant them a tailored version of citizenship and caveated sovereignty and,
4) an emerging cross-race subculture of LGBTQ people challenging the norms of gender and sexuality manifested in a U.S.-sponsored population control agenda over the remainder of the century that includes but is not limited to

• attacks on midwives who both facilitated birth and abortions and were seen as a threat to a male dominated medical establishment
• the criminalization of abortion from the 1880s to the 1930s
• increased state monitoring, regulating, and policing of those providing sexual and reproductive health services
• a growing eugenics movement that designated who was “fit” and who was “unfit” to bear and raise children resulting in
  • the demonization of the use of birth control for white women as a way to avoid “race suicide”
  • the forced and nonconsensual sterilization of Black people, indigenous people, people of color, those with disabilities, poor people, and LGBTQ people
• the phasing out of the use of boarding schools by the U.S. government to policies like the “Indian Adoption Project” that removed native children from native families
• forced medical experimentation that relied on the suffering, disease, and death of Black people, native people, and people of color as a blueprint for modern medicine to save white lives including:
  • the testing of pharmaceuticals like contraceptive Depo Prevara and vaccines on indigenous peoples, especially women and children;
  • the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the case of Ebb Cade injected with Plutonium, the stolen stem cells of Henrietta Lacks, the mosquito droppings on Black Floridians to test dengue fever ;
  • and, the exportation of these practices to U.S. occupied territories and colonies including Guatemala and Puerto Rico.
• electro-shock therapy, asylum institution, lobotomies, and chemical castration of LGBTQ people

The U.S. domestic and foreign institutions created for the sole purpose of social, bodily and population control were being fortified under the guise of nation building and with white supremacist doctrine at their core. “American” values were being shaped and executed daily through churches, hospitals, boarding schools, state run asylums and hospitals at the expense of Black, indigenous, and people of color’s ability to decide the, “destiny of their lives and their bodies.” This legacy of state violence continues to inform policy and culture in the United States. Black women, indigenous, and women of color feminists have highlighted and exposed for decades the ways that state power is lauded over our bodies and commits daily assaults on our dignity, self-determination and autonomy. From the days measured by pounds of cotton to the use of enslaved Black women as breeding stock to the intentional delay of state response to the death of thousands of gay men from HIV/AIDS and women of color from breast cancer, we have experienced first hand the impact of control as a mechanism that destroys the social fabric required for mass resistance and upheaval of systems bent on keeping us anything but free.

We are What We Come from, We are What We Create

There are too many Joann Little’s and Sandra Bland’s of the world. There as those still living amongst us, like CeCe McDonald or Ky Peterson that are defying the State’s claim that they are criminals. Representation or proximity to power alone has never and will never guarantee our survival and our livelihood in a nation state founded on our exploitation and extermination. The present day death of Black women and girls at the hands of police; homophobic and transphobic homicide; the mass deportation and detention of millions of immigrant people; the massive profits yielded by the labor of imprisoned populations; attacks on access to abortions, contraception, and other reproductive health care; the practice of shackling people in prison during childbirth; the continued medical industrial assault on birth and death workers; the regulation of access to public space, hormones, and the right of transgender people to decide which bathroom to use; and the intentional choke holding of democratic local governance and voting rights are but a few of the chains that must be broken for us to see liberation in our lifetime.

Black Feminism and women of color experience, thinking, leadership, advocacy, action and organizing have made great headway in asserting and claiming that our autonomy and sovereignty are core to our survival. We’re talking about the Black Feminism cooked up, envisioned, and walked out by Black women organizers, writers, and leaders for hundreds of years, the one that knows ‘women’s work’ is essential for our communities to be whole, powerful and thriving. From the start, Black and women of color feminism has demanded the right to contraception and abortion, the right to raise our babies, the right to milk and bread, the right to land, the right to act on our sexual desires and our gender dreams, the right to return to or remain in ancestral lands, and the right to the unfettered freedom of our people.

Southerners On New Ground is but one organization committed to and informed by the liberatory vision and praxis of Black Feminism. In 1992 the dream of SONG was conceived in the U.S. South by three Black lesbians and three white lesbians and by 1993 it was born into their hands and hearts, ignited by the needs of the time and the dreams of the particular feminism brought forth by the Combahee River Collective Statement, which called us into:

“…struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, …the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face…”

SONG has carried forth this call in our daily organizing and culture building as an unapologetic devotional to women, queer people, transgender people, native people, Black people, immigrant people, disabled people, working people, and poor people. Our work has long called for us to pay attention to the bleeding points, the sites where our bodies are being caged, controlled, policed, surveilled, assaulted and murdered by the State or with its sanction. We too have seen these points as sites of potential resistance, possibility, and transformation. It is simply not enough to say that these abuses must stop. We must also fight for the full liberation of our bodies with an urgency best demonstrated by the abuelas who u-lock their necks to detention center gates so that their children inside can hear the chanting, by the teenagers of Ferguson who did not hesitate to break curfew, by the trans liberators dancing in defiance in front of governor’s mansions, and by each of us who make choices small and large every day to honor our truths, our lives and our people even when the potential consequences lay heavy on our spirits.

There is a call across movement, across sector, across geography, and across identity to answer this political moment with the urgency required of each of us to move in step, sometimes coordinated and sometimes in a different dance, to claim a future that is rightfully ours to live with our desire, autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination. We cannot afford to be divided, each working on our issues in silos, while ultra-conservative leaders and institutions dismantle our social safety net and poison the collective political imagination.

We share a common enemy in the right wing that is working to gain even more power in this moment of fears with puppets and policies like Donald Trump and HB2 ready to unleash hell on our people. The Right is coming for us with all the same old moves blushed in racist, pro-business, homophobic, transphobic, patriarchal, and anti-worker tones; and relentless cultural, legal and policy challenges to our very autonomy and survival.

It’s time to come for these “Good ‘Ol’ White boy” bigots, right wing leaders and followers, and all those who source their power from patriarchy and white supremacy of the Right’s ideology, logic and blueprint that fuel homegrown hate used domestically and exported to the rest of our kinfolk. Our struggle is global and interconnected and it is time to expose the institutions and leaders that cause us the greatest harm. It’s time to challenge them at ever turn, unseat them, defame and deflate them, and grow the kind of community power in the face of this backlash that can fortify our liberation movements and build a ring of fire around our most vulnerable folks.

There is power, and we have found it, in claiming our skin, our tribes, and our kinfolks, as brilliant and beautiful and fighting for each other’s collective survival. We draw on our queer ancestors’ legacy for the courage to step out and transform daily reality. We look to each other for the will to chance, to trust, and to gain. To those bent on our subjugation, we will look you in the eye with the force and spirit of our ancestors and to our people we say, “Rise up, we have nothing to lose but our chains!” We are chattel no more.