The Roots Coalition: A Queer Lesson in Movement Building

At first glance it appeared to be a normal conference room and as I walked in the loathsome college lecture flashbacks began. Then I realized: the room was full of queer people. We were everywhere. My first People’s Movement Assembly was stuffy, the room had no inches to spare and we were jam packed inside, but it hummed with excitement. We are all radical queers and we were all gathered to discuss movement building across and between our communities. Many of us shared the question that filled my mind: how is it possible to build a movement which encompasses the vast landscape that is queer identity? I went to the United States Social Forum in search of intentional queer organizing and found the Roots Coalition. They are attempting to prove that we, by the nature of our naturally fragmented communities, can work separately but we must also work in unity. The word queer itself is problematic, as some of the older people in our communities denote queer as a slur and not an identity. Many of our communities have different needs which cannot always be reconciled. But if we try we can find common ground amongst LGBTQQAI (Lesbian, Gay Bi, Trans, Queer Questioning, Asexual and Intersex) people and use our identities to connect and not divide.

I contacted Caitlin Breedlove after she and her colleagues at Southerner’s on New Ground (SONG) released the Trans Report, a document which quantifies the experience of 127 Trans people who are from or currently living in the South (avaiable on SONGs website). The following interview consists of her explanation of the formation and progress of Roots, the Queer PMA, and an introduction to the Trans Report.

What spawned the Roots Coalition and how is it organized?

If you know much about groups that make up the roots of the Coalition you know that we actually do a variety of different things. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, for example, focuses on legal services for marginalized Trans and gender nonconforming people. Affinity is focused primarily on African American lesbians and they do work in Chicago. FIERCE is a Trans and Queer youth organization. SONG, the organization I work for, is a Southern Regional organization. So both in terms of local and national organizing, we do a variety of different kinds of work with different people. But basically what brought us together as a coalition is the fact that we are all interested in alternative visions of what it looks like to build strong infrastructure for our communities. We see two specific needs: one, to build infrastructure and create new and inventive ways to build our own communities and two, on a resistance level, to challenge neoliberalism, particularly how it affects our communities. We define neoliberalism pretty simply as all of the facets of capitalism and imperialism that put profit over people.

We are interested in challenging neoliberalism from our perspective. We have two arms within our coalition which work together to create the change we envision. One of our arms is the community schools team. They are building a curriculum that centers on base building and recruitment of LGBTQ people of color (POC) in our different organizations. The idea is to make a super curriculum that takes all of our gross curriculum and puts it together to create organizational spaces to do political education with our folks. For us this means a space to do visioning, to do listening, to understand more about the issues that our communities are experiencing. The community schools arm is dipping into the well and bringing forth what is often at the bottom. Our communities are often put at the bottom and we are trying to illuminate what is really going on “down there” and how we can envision the future together.

The other arm, which I am the temporary point person for, is the campaign piece. That is the arm that is engaged in revisioning. We are interested in campaign strategies, policies, and struggles that are really impacting LGBTQ people of color. We are focused on campaign development We picked the umbrella of identity policing and surveillance to work under. We are looking at different trends, policies, and situations our communities are dealing with that involve identity policing. One concrete example of that would be SB1070 and that kind of legislation in Arizona that creates regional and immigration profiling. Another example is the Real ID which is less well known currently. [The Real ID card] is legislation that would create a central ID. This would mean that everyone's gender and sexual history, felony history, criminal history, medical history (things like how many abortions you have had), political history, all of your personal and professional information would be available to the government and easily accessed by one swipe of the card.

That kind of surveillance has always been a fundamental ark of fascist regimes throughout history, particularly in our communities. By our communities I mean it greatly affects communities of color, formerly incarcerated communities, and gender non-conformant communities, in intersextional areas of struggle. The coalition itself is still in development but that is a little more about where we are and what we are working on.

How did the social forum play into the organization’s progression?

We have been in formation for the past three years and a majority of our groups are funded through the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice which, for folks that don't know, Astraea is the kind of foundation that is really working to deepen and support left political LGBTQ organizations. They paid for some of us to get together and think through the idea of forming a coalition, and then they provided seed money and infrastructure support. In the process of forming we tried to figure out our main criticisms of top-down, mainstream white male run LGBT initiatives. Well, one of our main criticisms is that no one has asked us what we think, no one has asked us about issue development, no one has asked us what the most pressing issues in our lives are, what is important to us, they have just told us what to work on. So we thought from the very beginning we need to do things differently. We represent different groups, we represent different communities and we represent different pivotal strategy. From the very beginning we want to think about how to do things differently. So we thought the Social Forum would be a great place to do some listening and get feedback, particularly on some campaign ideas.

Now what happened was, it turned out there was no LGBTQ People's Movement Assembly (PMA) in place. For folks who don't know the PMA is a process that came out of the social forum to help communities come together and speak for themselves about key issues, key resolutions and strategy. We use the PMA platform to demonstrate our demands and the support we need in order to move forward with other groups at the Social Forum. We realized that no one else was stepping up to facilitate the Queer PMA, which in itself is significant and speaks to how those of us on the left in LGBTQ communities are not working as well together as we need to be at this point. We are so incredibly overrepresented number wise. Some people estimate that over 1/3 of the 18,000 at the Social Forum were LGBTQ which I think speaks drastically to how incredibly involved our communities are, not in single issue politics, but around self determination and liberation in general.

I point this out to bring attention to the fact that we are not as organized within our own communities, given our numbers, that we need to be. So we thought, our plan was do this training and feedback workshop at the Social Forum, but there is this big gap. We are not the best or biggest coalition but we were the only ones who seem to be ready to hold the Queer PMA.

What we did was an experiment, a hybrid of a PMA and a platform to gather feedback on our campaign ideas. This approach had pros and cons, but we were able to make a resolution called the Self Determination Resolution, that overall incorporated the voices of more than 500 LGBTQ leaders on the left, primarily immigrant and working class people of color. This was possible because some of the ROOTS groups were able to do feeder PMA's and were able to feed that information into the conversation. SONG, for example, did a 127 person PMA with Southern Trans people who wouldn't have a chance to go to the forum and was able to feed that information to the more then 400 people who were at the PMA. So that is how we used the forum and actually more then 500 is a pretty conservative estimate, it was probably upwards of 600 people. We saw that as a big victory, to be able to get that kind of information out there.

Thoughts of the queer people’s movement assembly?

I think the PMA process is really promising. I think that it is a process that is still in progress. However, I think it is a key process that creates the opportunity to move the Social Forum as a whole from a collection of workshops that are individual, to a site for discerning some sort of direction for the left. I think that is really exciting, especially considering how much privilege the United States as a nation has as a whole and how incredibly behind we are in the World Social Forum process. There are countries involved in civil war that are able to hold forums and come up with directions that the US is not able to do so I think that is really exciting. It is not about a perfect process, it is messy and its about understanding that self organization means that if we don't like it or think it is not good enough, we will take it upon ourselves to make it better. We can't just be critical, which so many of us are so good at being, myself included. We have to actually be working for change. In retrospect we realized that trying to make a PMA and also get this other feedback was trying to do too much. But the goodwill that people had to work with the process I think really spoke for the need for some kind of national voice that does LGBTQ and POC led work specifically.

Do you feel that queer and trans voices were heard at the forum?

I feel that a lot of our voices were heard and I think that, like I talked a little bit about before, sometimes we are not as organized as we need to be, especially given how many members of our community attended the forum. However, I do think that we still have a lot of work to do that is on us. It is not anyone's job to create the kind of safety and infrastructure that we, particularly Trans and gender non-conforming folks, need. I know there were incidents with bathrooms (all bathrooms at the Social Forum were supposed to be gender neutral but they were never marked as such). That continues to be an issue. I think we made progress, and that it is really on us as communities to make sure that we are leading and that the forum gets it right. Overall, I think that it is always going to be a mix. Negative things and positive things are going to happen but I think that there is real progress in the forum process.

What are the next steps for the Roots Coalition?

The next steps are to make a timeline of the first year of the community schools and build a website. The campaign team has to decide on our first action step but we still have some research to do. Our biggest next step is to figure out, between now and next March, entry points for individual leaders and other groups to get involved with the coalition. We have created some already but it is key to build entry points not only for people to enter the work, but also to integrate and come up with things like infrastructure and decision making processes before we start opening it up beyond 14 original groups. So we've been struggling with getting ourselves to the point where we have everything ready to open the coalition. In terms of our development, we are really excited about that because we feel like there has been a real positive response, even when we have made mistakes and moved slowly, there has been real positive response to the concept of us doing this work.

How did the Trans Report fit into the social forum?

We brought the Trans Report, to the forum as a way of including the voices of Southern Trans people who did not attend the forum in the PMA and the resolution making process. The actual resolution that came out of the national queer and trans PMA, which was also the national Queer youth PMA, is available on www.pma2010.org.

What kind of responses have you gotten from the community?

We have gotten really positive responses overall. Particularly from Trans leaders that work with SONG who have documented how they are going to use it. They have talked about using it with allies and using it within their groups. We are working on doing something in Atlanta with Trans people of color leadership to talk about the report and its usage and talk more deeply about conditions in the places that are discussed in the report. The response has been overwhelmingly positive and the Northern allies have appreciated the opportunity to understand more about Southern conditions without having to take our members aside and ask them a whole bunch of questions. Southern Trans and gender non-conforming communities had a lot of research collected about them. Not much of this research has benefited them and very little that has used to hold people accountable to the work. At SONG we feel like we have this information and now we can weave it into our work and be accountable to it.

When I spoke with Caitlin she informed me that the Roots Coalition is made up of 14 Roots which are LGBTQ, primarily people of color led groups. The groups themselves are: Queers for Economic Justice, Southerners on New Ground, FIERCE, Affinity Community Services, National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, The Audre Lorde Project, The First Nations Collective, Disability Justice Collective, Esperanza Collective, Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, Austin Latino Latina Lesbian & Gay Organization, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, Center for Artistic Revolution and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. You can find out more about these organization from the resource links on SONG's website (www.southernersonnewground.org) or through a simple yet fulfilling web search.