From the Office

Right now, I sit in a 100+ year old building, in the old offices of the 1930s CIO, in the office of Mr Dick Law, a Finnish lawyer and organizer whose wife Laura would be murdered in the wake of both of their activism over half a century ago. Her murder was never solved. By happenstance, that office is now rented by Chaplains.

I am looking over a tired old town, one of many in these United and divided States. Dozens of people living on the streets are visible, walking up and down the streets. It was a cold night last night. The pharmacy looks almost new and some of the houses of the hill look passable, but the rest of the town is full of gutted buildings and tired projects.

The people here are not really what they are stereotyped to be by the AP newspaper articles and national pundits. They are mostly working class and poor, sons and daughters of union workers, in a blue dog democrat town turning red for lack of better options. They are Native and majority white, but our children are increasingly brown as immigration continues to the area. Our opinions are diverse and often, we are thrown together for survival, whether we like it or not.

We are stubbornly stuck in the crosshairs of global capitalism; abandoned by an extractive industry that still owns the majority of the land, with no replacement economy except for drugs and prisons. The forests are young after years of overharvesting, the coasts have been overfished (although we still bring in sizable harvests), and we are all a little bit tired. Environmentalists love to visit the area to take pictures of its amazing beauty, but care little for the people who also are part of the ecosystem. While a few Seattle based bands mock the town of Aberdeen, not many people think of the place beyond “the city you drive through to get to the beach.”

We have been abandoned by capital; we have been abandoned by politicians; we are mocked by pundits.

We have also been abandoned by organizers.

The left loves to mire itself in constant self reflection. Constant facebook posts about intentions and who did things right. Constant one-upmanship around identity politics. Constant critique of anyone doing anything. Constant arguing around protest: is it good or not, who should lead it, how should you get arrested, and the list goes on. Constant smug comments critiquing every single thing. Everyone is vying to be the expert while everyone agrees that movements should be ‘leaderless.’ Everyone wants autonomy, no one wants to follow. Everyone wants individual expression, everyone needs to be right. We argue endlessly about language and tactic.

And here in the old office above Heron Street, I am tired of listening. To all of it, honestly.

Because while all the pundits and self proclaimed experts and leaderless movement builders are talking and arguing and endlessly extrapolating, my people are dying. I’ve buried 15 people or so in the last year. The oldest was in his 50s. The youngest was 24. Poverty and the drug economy and abandonment have created generations of trauma and death in my community. All of the kids I work with are in and out of jail, and many started their jail career at 10 or 11.  The native nations of this community are mired in deep poverty and camps of the forgotten and addicted grow along our riverbanks. White kids in my generation turned to white power gangs and ran drugs; the next generation are joining well networked gangs to find some sense of survival and way forward on the street. The opiate crisis has slammed this community and too many of those I bury are from overdose; after all, we have twice the state average of overdose death.

So to the white, liberal, urban organizers:

 Do something. Anything.

Don’t pretend that your identity crises and critiques and endless self reflection are helping anything, are building anything.

Ground yourself in a real community; a flesh and blood one, where people make mistakes, where white power gang members and Surenos meet and shake hands, where homophobes go to their daughter’s gay wedding and clap, where Trump voters and anarchists build homes together.

Shut up. Please.

In my community, and in communities like mine all over a nation that is now nearly 50% low income and poor, there are leaders. They are raising kids and they are in jail and they are stocking the supermarket and they are in all the places that no one looks for leaders. Because all those terrible things I listed above are true, but not the whole story. Out of the pain and darkness, leaders are arising and they will change the world.

Listen to them.

They really do have something to say.

Step out of your silos—whether those silos are universities, hipster coffee bars, an institutional church—those places meant to be white and cultured and upper crust. Stop talking to each other. See the world around you. Listen to the people you are used to talking about.

And, and, there are some things we could really use from you.

Remember how the right built up to the moment we are at right now for 35 years? Remember the jail ministries and the protests and the coffee table conversations and the popular books and magazines and the devotionals? (I do) We’ve got some catching up to do.

Start doing some of those things.

We need Bible commentaries—popular ones that can go on the shelf in the local bookstore and in jails—that tell people that Jesus was on the side of poor and struggling people. We need devotionals that address our trauma and our loss and our pain and tell us God is on our side. We need to hear from others who have dealt with trauma, addiction, and homelessness, but we also need Bible scholars to tell us that there are ways to read the Bible that can give us hope. We need to hear that God is against racism, materialism, and militarism. We need to hear about a God who takes sides. We need think tanks, people, think tanks of scholars (ones educated in universities and ones educated by the hard knock life) who can write magazines and who can put out solid web information, who can analyze our political and economic situation. We need some external acknowledgement of our collective trauma.

Sometimes, we need you to show up to let us know we are not alone. Build relationships. Sometimes, we need you to help fundraise for local efforts, or to assist us with your expertise in law or science or economics as we seek to build a better world, as we seek to transfer wealth back into our community, as we seek to end the street to jail pipeline. If you are from a small, abandoned community, consider returning to one, stymying the brain drain poor communities face when all their brilliant lawyers and doctors leave town for better fields.

Protest when you want, but don’t stop there. Continue your internal dialogues on facebook if you need to, but please, please, do something. Listen. Write. Come. Act.

From here in the office on Heron Street, in the long shadow cast by ghosts of radical, murdered organizers, surrounded by poverty and death, surrounded by new leaders and abiding hope, we are asking you to stop talking to each other for a moment, turn and listen, and act.

A Redneck Reflection on the Past Week

Ever since the civil rights movement, groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers have been telling white people to look to and take care of their own communities. And, consistently, white, mostly middle class, liberals have marched in the streets, presented themselves as allies of black communities, and signed people up to vote. They are quick to denounce open displays of white supremacy and quick to denounce poor white communities as gun toting, bigoted racists. But they have never been quick to do what they were asked to do: take care of and do the hard work of working in white communities.

I am a redneck. I grew up target shooting with shotguns and rifles, grew up in a majority white rural community—and I grew up reading white power materials and using racial slurs, alongside listening to sermons that said we were all created equal.

I now work very close to where I grew up, as pastor to a very poor, heavily criminalized, majority white community. A lot of the young people I work with have been recruited into white power gangs: everything from the KKK to the Skinheads and Peckerwoods to the newish Thor’s Hammer. They are not the face of the alt-right; most of the folks who gather in places like Charlottesville are middle class armchair racists turned activists who join neo-Nazi, Patriot, and White Nationalist groups for ideological reasons. My kids join white gangs that run drugs, provide protection in prison and on the streets, and give them somewhere to belong.

Because no one answered the call 100 years ago, and again 50 years ago, to organize in white communities, my kids have few alternatives to white power gangs. The left has abandoned white poor communities, time and again, to deepening poverty, to heavy criminalization, to hunger, to police violence—and to the Skinheads.  

Young white kids join white power gangs for similar reasons that black and brown kids join black and Latino gangs: for protection, for belonging, for economic survival. Of course, they have an added, deadly commitment to white supremacy. It is especially easy for young people who have grown up in rural, white communities to join white supremacists: the racist structure of our society insure that many of them have not had much contact with people of color. At least, until they are incarcerated.

Kellan Howell interviewed several former neo-Nazis about how to confront the recent public rise of white power protests. They said, in part:

When it comes to engaging with far-right extremists, Meeink and Angela said it's all about making them feel human again.

"Maybe, a simple kind word, a simple act of compassion, and that is not an easy thing to do," King said, adding that her own transformation came after a Jamaican woman in prison asked her to play a game of cribbage…

…Both Meeink and King say that a rough childhood and feelings of isolation and emptiness led them to seek solace with white power groups, but they say people who have had similar experiences can help show those who are currently struggling that they don't have to turn to hatred to find purpose.

My work centers in part around this work. While our ministry reaches a number of native kids who are frequently the target of racial violence (including a young kid who was just killed in a racially motivated vehicular homicide), the majority of people we work with are white. Many of them are, or have been, members of white power gangs. We focus on “making them feel human again.” None of them are, first and foremost, white supremacists. They are young people who have been beaten time and again by the police, who have been jailed from the time they were around 13, who got their first felonies as teenagers and who have never had a stable life since, who run drugs because there is no other economy in town, who have experienced extreme violence and abuse, who have lost their parents and their children to a system that offers them no first chance, much less a second. They are tired. They are brave. They are angry. In jail, they have native friends and Latino friends who have experienced the same thing and sometimes they have each other’s backs.

But they have never had the opportunity to see that, perhaps, they have more in common with poor communities of color than they have with the wealthy and powerful leaders of organizations like the KKK, the Patriots, and other alt-right groups. The white supremacist plan to divide and conquer the poor has worked. Sometimes, anyway.

These young people are mostly tired. And out of hope. They spend their days surviving for one more day. They want so much more, they deserve so much better. They are hungry for something better. They are hungry for hope. They are hungry for a way out of the violence, the terror, the damning struggle to survive. In the coming struggle for the soul of a nation, we have a choice. We can abandon them to the alt-right. Or we can invite them into a better world.

I came back

I came back

To land my ancestors stole

To the land I have always called home

Where the woods sing wild songs

And my grandfather is buried.

I came back

To crumbling buildings set against

The backdrop of stunning mountains

To fields left fallow and barns left empty

To streets where children go hungry

I came back

To loggers and carpenters living in tents

Camping on the mill sites they used to work

To kids hustling without any jobs

Shooting up in back alleys

I came back

To angry city councils and death threats

And police beating up our children

To baptizing babies stolen by CPS

To burying kids just after their 24^th birthday

I came back

To smiles that could light up a room

And survive dark and filthy jail cells

To sharing food in crowded tents

And laughter around campfires

I came back

To courage that can move mountains

And survive the deepest pain

To flags raised high over razed campsites

And welcome mats that say “Come back with a warrant.”

I came back

I came back for love, I stay for love

I came back for broken hearts

I came back in honor of the courage of

Moms who fight for their children

Kids who say fuck the police in the middle of a beatdown

Poor grandmothers who cook for the community

Young people creating sanctuary in an old church

I came back.