If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking a lot about the South this week. Hearing SCOTUS further gut the Voting Rights Act was infuriating. Then watching state after state pause their elections to re-draw maps with no voter input, in order to eliminate Black electoral power, has been devastating. I’ve also had to call in fellow liberal-left Northerners stereotyping and worse.
It’s time to get clear about what our stakes are, as white antiracists, in organizing for racial justice and collective liberation and what that looks like across our country broadly.
What a moment to be reading Song For a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Anti-Racist Solidarity From a Coal Miner's Daughter by SURJ National’s Cultural Strategist, Beth Howard, who speaks to exactly these themes. In this memoir, she shares her pathway to antiracist organizing, which is inextricably linked with her experiences growing up in Appalachia. In her own words, “I’m committed to racial justice because I am a working-class white Appalachian, not in spite of it.”
You may remember Beth’s viral piece, Rednecks for Black Lives, written in Summer 2020 as a call for white antiracist solidarity. Surrendering the people of the South to be organized by MAGA or left behind is not an inevitability, and is certainly no formula for victory – and Beth has proven that with her work at SURJ (here’s her on Instagram this weekend speaking out).
Get your hands on this book (or e-book, or audiobook!) and get inspired, then join the Calling In team to reflect on the memoir and how it models what multiracial solidarity can look and feel like. We’ll meet Wednesdays June 10 and June 17, 7:30–9:00 PM on Zoom. Come either week or both – Beth herself will join us June 17th for a Q&A!
Hope to see you there!
- Kristin & the SURJ NYC Calling In Team