Working for Racial Justice and Coming Back to my Southern Roots
How Shared Interest Storytelling has Helped Me Embrace All of Who I Am
Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ), my community organizing home, uses shared interest storytelling as a powerful tool for organizing white people in the fight for justice. This involves talking to each other about what we have to gain by fighting for racial justice and against rising authoritarianism. This names our “skin in the game” and moves us beyond flimsy allyship into deep commitments to multiracial organizing for justice.
In our work together, we tell our stories. Below is the story I told last week. It was my first time doing this story share.
You may not know this from how I speak, but I grew up in South Carolina. It’s not an accident that I don’t have a Southern accent. For much of my life, I have tried to distance myself from my Southern roots.
I was ashamed of the bigotry. I was ashamed of seeming poor. I was ashamed of seeming uneducated. I am an academic, and I have always needed to perform being smart. In academia, we have to put on the performance of knowing what we are doing. So early in my life, I learned that having a Southern accent would mean people would immediately judge me.
I grew up in Lugoff, South Carolina, which is a super rural place. It was a brutal place for a queer, trans person to grow up. I knew that I wanted to get out of that small town as soon as I could, and I knew that my grades were my ticket out of there. So I put on a mask, and I distanced myself from my roots, to survive, to keep myself safe. But that also meant distancing myself from so much of the beauty of where I am from. Not only the natural beauty but the warmth we greet our neighbors with. The way we feed each other when we are sick or grieving.
Leaning into the discomfort of making calls to other white people with SURJ has invited me to stop pretending I’m not from the South.
It has helped me connect back to my family, to my own roots. In March, I visited my Paw Paw’s farm in North Carolina, and I was out in the field planting onions with my Dad. I had dirt under every fingernail. The sun was in my eyes. I was making rows with a hoe, and watching my 92-year-old grandfather toodling about on an old blue tractor in the distance.
I had never planted anything on the land my family owns before. It was so simple, so startling. I was coming back to something important, putting those onions in the ground.
I never would have done that before. My Paw Paw was a tobacco farmer, and I was a smart kid. I knew that cigarettes were bad and hated what they did as a kid. As I learned about the brutal history of tobacco, even on small farms like his, I wanted to distance myself even more.
But SURJ has made me realize that other Southerners can also see the lies we have been fed. SURJ has helped me see what we are working towards, and when I look around me, I see others who grew up like me. I can feel us reclaiming our dignity, healing ourselves and our ancestors.
I hear southern accents on the other end of the line, in my pods during phone banks, and my own starts to fall into a lilt with theirs. I remember what it meant to go to church. What it meant to live close to family.
I have always pretended to know what I was doing, and doing that meant pushing away my roots. But I am coming back to them. I am beginning to really know what I am doing without abandoning any of the pieces of myself—even the pieces that hold a brutal history. because entwined in those brutal histories, there was always beauty. There were always people like us standing up, standing together for what was true, what was right, what was liberatory. Working with SURJ has helped me rethink my stereotypes about my own people and see us for our fierceness, resistance, and fight for liberation.
I am energized by how we might build a new culture for future generations to look back on and to be proud that we were a part of multiracial organizing for justice in this country. I hope people like me don’t have to grow up with that need to escape those places where I grew up. My wish is for them to be proud of their people and their homes without that pride being built on the oppression of others.
My Dad and I have started to talk about politics, while we put plants in the ground. This is something we never did before. My dad was a lifelong Republican who was troubled by the fascism of Trump. He says he is growing more left but never “as left as me.” And that is okay. We are starting to tell our stories of shared interest, just like I do with folx on the phone. Even though we might be very different, we can talk about our stake in the fight. We all stand to gain from a world that is more just for everyone.
In the work I do on somatic abolition, we talk about building embodied antiracist culture for white people. Often we need to do this work before we are able to go into multiracial spaces without blowing our trauma through other bodies. Part of this is learning to hold both the brutality and beauty of our histories. Coming back to my roots is a part of this.
My Paw Paw’s farm is in the western part of North Carolina. We were likely a buffer for rich people in genocidal land grabs of United States history. I don’t know the exact history of our family, but it is likely we were part of the Scots-Irish settlers funded to be an armed human buffer. My ancestors were likely tricked into being the middle managers of atrocities. I am thinking a lot these days about what it means to be a descendant of that, especially given our government’s involvement in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I want future generations to look back on our lives and saw how we chose differently this time. Instead of siding with elite interest, we stood up and stood together to be on a different side of history as we watch the horrors repeat.
One piece of that for me is recruiting white people to “Defend the Squad,” to stand behind our most progressive Congresspeople fighting for justice for all in this year’s election. Every week we make phone calls, share our stories of our stake in the fight, and collectively push for a more just world.
So with that, I ask you. Can you join us?