Can you be BLACK and Work Here?: Social Justice Activist Organizing and Black Aurality

Abstract

How can social justice organizations organize without marginalizing identities and concurrently tend to the blindspots that arise when intersectional identities are not taken into account? Black (here, BLACK) music, with its rudimentary foundation in black sound, gives a framework for organizing without institutionalization, structuring without strictures. The aurality evident in black sound resists: moans, hollers, shrieks, cries, falsettos, melisma, modulations, inversions, choruses, repetitions, improvisations, and rhythms defy limitation, the strictures of subjectivity, structures of power, demeaning discourses. This essay gestures toward a theory of social justice praxis based on black sound. It will demonstrate that organizations should be intentionally attentive to the aurality, in this case, of black sound and how this sound voices the problematics of institutionalization. Black sound creates “dark points of possibility” for insurgent action, for social justice activism that fully accounts for the intersectionalities white social justice organizations often occlude, that must be heard outside the bewildering gaze of white, gay normativity.