What About the South? | A Letter to the Movement from Reece

Our first post was a Black Organizers call to action! We wanted to start a community dialogue by writing letters that shared thoughts, truth and our power. We’re excited to share one of our first letters and encourage everyone to keep writing. This Black channel is ours to create a dialogue that inspires and challenges us. We want to discuss all matters of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography as it relates to our movement work. It’s a space for us to support, provoke, laugh, and challenge each other. It’s ours for what we need it to be. To write your letter – Click this link: Letter to the Movement from a member of the Black Organizing Community. Thank you to all those letter writers out there, keep them coming! We’ll share others in the weeks to follow.

Dear Movement Community,

How are you? I am doing good work in amazing places. I’m also having fun ☺

I write to share something important. We need to start discussing how we can end the manipulative cycle of oppression that has been concentrated in the American South. How can we move past the idea that the only place that progress can happen is above the Mason-Dixon line? How can we develop leadership in places that we’ve long isolated as “too far gone to be saved” without trying to change them into something they are not? How can we deal with the underground economies that have emerged in these places as systems made of real human beings instead of criminals?

If we don’t, the current and future impact to our work will be an America where wage slavery, inequality, and terror as social policy is an expected norm not just nationally, but internationally. Southern states currently serve as incubators for terrible political and social ideas and these “experiments” are being used to incorrectly define the birthplaces of many of our social movements toward equality. I’m confident that our friends and family who live there know this history as the real definition of these places, but we need to make sure that the rest of America knows it as well.

One last thing, I love you and I don’t really know you (well, I kinda know one of you.) Take good care of yourselves and each other. 🙂

In struggle,

Reece

Restaurant Opportunities Centers United