Over the last year, SONG’s base and thousands of other LGBTQ people have taken to the streets answering the call to do our part in demanding Black Lives Matter and Not1More Deportation. Black, immigrant, white, rural, urban, transgender, queer and undocumented SONG members have invited strangers over to their homes, planned their first vigil or protest, shut down highways and intersections, staged actions at city council meetings, launched campaigns, facilitated their first planning meeting and much more.
Also in this moment our membership, constituency, allies, different organizations in and out of the region have asked SONG to name some of our practices and to call on our white LGBTQ family to persevere in the struggle for liberation, both within our SONG roles and in the community. As current white leaders in SONG, now is the time to match the courage of our comrades, to make room and support Black, of color, immigrant, undocumented, and transgender and gender nonconforming people in launching and leading 21st Century movement building in this country.
The following tool is a starting point for developing more connection, unity and shared work inside of our white membership at SONG – across broad class, ability, locations, ethnicity and levels of experience. With this document we hope to centralize some of our orientation, principles, practices and possibilities towards our roles in advancing anti-racist, multi-racial organizing.
As SONG leaders wrote in the 1990’s, “We are a part of each other.” We invite you to join us in wrestling with these questions and engaging these ideas, experience, thoughts, and theories in practice:
- What does white leadership look like in this time? As white people in the movement for Liberation, what is our role in this time (not for all time)? How does our feminist, pro-poor, pro-Black, pro the oppressed, pro-queer and trans politic inform not just what we think or say, but what we do?
- What is the greater organizing and work needed in this time from white people, so that we can move beyond just safety and survival and into leadership in the struggle for Black lives, immigrant lives, and trans women of color lives?
- What are the key fights in our time that we white people can engage to advance broad movement goals that confront and dismantle white supremacy and structural oppression?
As with all of our tools – we welcome further conversation, engagement and feedback. For more information on this tool, or to continue the conversation contact takeaction@southernersonnewground.org
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