A Queer Black Mobile Homecoming

[Duncan Grant]

The Meaning of Life: The Value of Social Organizing and Spiritual Transformation

Our journey focuses on the social organizing strategies of non-conforming black women in the 1980’s and earlier. This means that we are interested in how these elders socialized, how they intervened in and created social institutions for themselves and for us. This means we are not only interested in how these black feminist radicals attempted to smash the state. We are also interested in how they made strides towards REPLACING the state by creating their own methods of childcare, health and wellness, spiritual eclecticism. We are interested in how they fed each other, loved each other, raised children together, created publications, created jobs for each other, supported each other’s endeavors. We want to know how they created the societies they needed, because we believe that their inventiveness holds the seeds to the society we ALL need. This means that while we are very interested in working with elders who were involved in radical and feminist political organizations, we will want to know what happened between meetings, how people celebrated each other, what the culture of their organizing was in addition to their explicit political campaigns and interventions.

We have noticed that the social organizing history of women of color (in general) and queer black women in particular has been left out of the historical narrative and we argue that because the social lives of people impact their political analysis and access and change the possible ways they will navigate everything, food, health, love, work, literacy etc. an emphasis on social, emotional, spiritual and practical community labor is political.

We have also noticed that the spiritual work that black queer people have done, and what we understood to be the spiritual leadership of black queer people in transforming the world, has often been overlooked. Mentored by scholar-practitioners M. Jacqui Alexander and Akasha Hull, we center the spiritual motivations and strategies that live in our communities, building and understanding, and affirming a practice of community as communion.

Much more here. Be sure to visit the "We Are..." tab.