I have been thinking about Singing Resistance and trying to understand why it has been bothering me so much. I believe deeply in the need for people to resist what is happening in this country, and I believe we need courage, relationship, collective action, and practices that help us remain capable under pressure. My concern is not that people are singing. My concern is what happens to relationship when a practice is taken from one history and deployed in response to another community's crisis without the people carrying either history being central to what is being built.

Singing Resistance is a contemporary protest formation that has spread through communities organizing against ICE raids, immigrant detention, deportation, and other forms of state violence. Participants gather publicly and use collective singing, often drawing on freedom songs and call-and-response traditions, as a way to build courage, reduce isolation, and create a sense of collective presence. In some places, these gatherings also connect participants to broader forms of organizing, mutual aid, rapid response, and civic action.

A while ago, we were at an event in Cincinnati where a performer spoke repeatedly about having played a critical role in the founding of Singing Resistance and about the impact of its protests against ICE in Minneapolis. She sang many songs that I immediately recognized as part of the African American freedom-song tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. In that presentation, none of the songs I recognized from the Black freedom-song tradition were situated within that history or attributed to the people and communities who had carried them. One song was attributed to a White woman musician. The others were simply presented through the performer's own voice and interpretation.

I looked around the room and made eye contact with several Black women. We eventually huddled together in the back of the room and talked about what we were witnessing. What struck us was not simply the absence of attribution. We were watching the historical, spiritual, cultural, and political genealogy of these songs disappear while the space itself offered no corrective. A rich tradition carried through Black struggle had become the material through which one contemporary account of resistance was being narrated. At the same time, what was happening to immigrants through ICE had become the backdrop for the emergence of a new but very old kind of protagonism in social change, once again organized around the suffering of people of color. What I recognized in that room was a form of protagonism I have been seeing more often in social justice spaces: communities carrying the history or the consequences become the grounds for action while someone else becomes the central political actor.

There is a long and profound African American tradition of singing as a form of survival and resistance in this country. Spirituals developed among enslaved African Americans, and across generations Black communities carried music as a way of holding memory, grief, faith, courage, political knowledge, and collective capacity. During the Civil Rights Movement, spirituals, gospel, and other Black musical traditions became freedom songs used in mass meetings, marches, jails, organizing, and moments of profound danger. They helped people sustain courage and unity under harassment and brutality.

These were never simply songs. They lived inside churches, families, local organizations, SNCC organizing, political education, mass meetings, marches, jails, and communities that had been struggling together over time. The original SNCC Freedom Singers themselves emerged directly from that organizing ecology, using music to educate communities, raise resources, sustain demonstrators, and carry the movement outward.

That history matters because Singing Resistance is now being presented as a new formation emerging from Minneapolis while many of the practices that make the formation recognizable and powerful come directly through Black freedom struggle. The issue for me is deeper than giving credit. A movement can acknowledge the Civil Rights Movement and still separate Black political practice from Black political authority. Blackness can remain everywhere in the form while Black people become peripheral to the formation itself.

And I want to say this clearly: Black erasure should not happen in our name.

If people are organizing because of what is happening to immigrant communities, then our suffering cannot become the justification for reproducing the erasure of a people whose struggle has given this country so much of its political language, practice, courage, and movement knowledge. We should not become the moral reason for a form of resistance that diminishes Black authorship, Black leadership, Black memory, or Black political authority. Resistance to our erasure cannot be built through the erasure of Black people.

There is another relationship here that concerns me just as deeply. Singing Resistance is being organized in response to ICE and the targeting of immigrant communities. I am an immigrant, and I know that immigrant communities are not simply people who need to be protected. We think, organize, strategize, build institutions, take risks, survive governments, cross borders, understand state violence, care for families and communities, and carry political knowledge developed through experience. Many of us come from communities with long histories of colonialism, dictatorship, war, displacement, migration, organizing, resistance, and collective survival. We are not simply the emergency around which someone else's political life should organize itself.

When a movement forms around what is happening to us without immigrant leadership, knowledge, and consultation being central to its development, I also want to say: not in our name. Our fear, our families, our detention, our deportation, our uncertainty, and our grief cannot become the moral ground for a movement in which we are not helping determine what resistance looks like. Immigrants cannot become the reason for resistance while immigrant political knowledge remains secondary to the people doing the resisting. Solidarity with us cannot mean acting around us.

This leaves us with a structure that I cannot ignore. Black freedom struggle becomes the source of much of the political technology being used. Immigrant communities become the perceived present emergency. And other people can end up becoming the protagonists of the resistance. Yet crisis has been pervasive in Black communities through policing, incarceration, displacement, state violence, and the long consequences of racial domination. Where has the urgency been for that? And immigrant detention, incarceration, and removal have also been taking place for decades, often in plain sight, while much of the country learned to live around them. Why does this become an emergency only now?

This is what troubles me about the current moment. The songs create courage. The gathering creates belonging. People who have felt frightened and isolated find one another and begin to experience themselves as capable of acting, and there is real value in that. But we still have to ask what kind of coherence we are creating and what is happening in the relationships around us as we create it. Feeling connected to one another does not necessarily mean that we are in right relationship with the people whose knowledge we are carrying or with the people whose lives and futures are most directly implicated by the struggle.

I keep returning to coherence as a relational question for precisely this reason. Coherence is not simply the experience of feeling whole inside a group. We can create enormous coherence among ourselves while producing attenuation elsewhere in the relational field. We can become brave together while failing to remain in relationship with the people whose practices helped make that bravery possible. We can believe that we are standing with immigrants while never allowing immigrant knowledge, leadership, strategy, or assessment of consequence to substantially change what we are doing. Internal coherence does not tell us whether we are behaving coherently in relationship.

Solidarity asks more of us than that. People cannot become props in our own experience of becoming courageous, good, or politically awake. Black struggle cannot become the historical backdrop through which other people discover resistance, and immigrant suffering cannot become the contemporary backdrop through which other people discover themselves as resisters. People who carry knowledge, history, and consequence have to remain subjects in the relationship.

This is why attribution matters, but attribution by itself is not enough. Leadership matters. Consultation matters. Genealogy matters. Authority matters. Consequence matters. Relationship matters. There is a difference between learning from a tradition and extracting a useful practice from it. There is a difference between standing in solidarity with a community and organizing around that community. And there is a difference between being moved by another person's suffering and entering into enough relationship with them that their knowledge and experience can change what we understand our own responsibility to be.

I want people to resist ICE. I want people to refuse the normalization of what is happening to immigrant communities. I want people to stand with us, organize with us, protect one another, and refuse to abandon one another under pressure. But I do not want that resistance built through Black erasure, and I do not want immigrants made into the moral justification for a movement in which we ourselves become peripheral.

Not in our name does not mean do nothing. It means do not erase Black people while claiming to stand with immigrants. It means do not erase immigrants while claiming to protect us. It means build with us, and remain in relationship with the people whose histories, practices, knowledge, and sacrifices make the work possible.

We need movements right now. We need courage, and we need people willing to act. Precisely because the moment is so serious, we need forms of resistance that deepen relationship rather than reproduce the erasures we say we are trying to overcome. The structures we build while resisting the world we have are already part of the world we are making.

Some may interpret me as raining on the Singing Resistance joyful emergence. I'm willing to run that risk to make sure somewhere that feeling that brought immigrants and Black women together in the back of that room in Cincinnati gets named and shown for what it was. A shared effort to create coherence in the presence of the colonization of our forms of resistance while using some of us to justify it.

A loving future asks more of us than feeling solidarity. It asks us to practice it.