Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise

Reflections on what it means to fight a world-building project, and why our stories matter during the fight. At the beginning of last year I released an essay called Projecting 2025. Today I am revisiting that essay and sharing new observations as we move deeper into 2026. We discuss White Christian Nationalism as a world-building project. We discuss the "iceberg" model of conflict and what it means to take responsibility for our own stories floating beneath the water as we fight the good fight. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

On November 7th, the Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice published an article that I wrote about the history of Nemaha County, Nebraska, where my mother’s family has been farming for six generations. The article explores what local and family history reveal about America and how the future of family farmland in Nemaha County points towards bigger questions about the future of rural America. The article offers its research and storytelling as a model for truth-telling in America on our long, ongoing road to reconciling injustice. The article was the result of 1.5 years of research. I wrote the first draft in the days between Juneteenth and July 4th, 2024, inspired by a quote I read in a book by civil rights leader Reverend William J. Barber II about how this period of days between Juneteenth and July 4th should be time when Americans dedicate themselves to the pursuit of true freedom for all. At first, I just shared the research with my family. But then a family member tipped me off that a journal at the University of Nebraska College of Law was accepting submissions of non-traditional scholarship. I sent a draft to the Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice the day my maternal grandfather died, November 16th, 2024. We layed him to rest in Nemaha County shortly thereafter. The piece is dedicated to him. I had no idea I was going to submit this research to a law journal when I wrote it and did not format it with legal scholarship in mind. In a profound vote of confidence about the eventual value of the piece, which I’m sincerely grateful for and humbled by, the editorial team at NJAJ worked with me for the entire year to make the research ready for a law journal. Law journals require a citation for (basically) every single sentence and the citation must specify a page number and sometimes even a specific paragraph. The work had well over 100 sources. As you can imagine, going back over the research to make it law-journal-ready was an arduous task. However, I am glad that the work was pored over by a team of lawyers for the last year. In an age of misinformation, it feels significant that this work was picked through with such a fine-toothed comb. This is not a claim that the article therefore contains watertight, objective, and absolute truth. On the contrary, it is a comment the our methodology of assembling stories. We examined every single thread of information using the journal’s standards for evidentiary burden, asking, “does this story really exist in this source the way we’re telling it?” We changed the document many times to reflect new and deeper understandings. We collected photos of physical documents that only exist in local libraries or family archives. We laid out the map: “This story is documented here. This story is documented here.” You could retrace every single one of our steps if you wanted to. The result is what I’ve been calling my “recreational dissertation.” It is a repository for a tremendous amount asking, seeking, thinking, reading, talking, digging, feeling, and writing. I am going to make other media with this material - media that is more conversational, accessible, and bite-sized. But as the research exists in it’s full form, it’s basically a short book. An audio book you can finish on a few commutes. A slim volume about hyperlocal history you’d find at an independent bookstore.Frankly, I think the research itself is a good read. Yes, it’s dense, but at its core, it is just a lot of stories. A local legend who was fabled to rescue people on the Underground Railroad from drowning in the Missouri River? Secret hobo hieroglyphics? Meth moguls? A cameo appearance by Willie Nelson? This history isn’t exactly dry. It is also important. One of the quotes that I include in the article is from a 1965 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King said: “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house. We are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised.” In the article I refer to this speech to make the following point: if dominant/white society is a burning house, rural and small town America is where you can smell the smoke. I recently saw a video by a scholar named Dasia Sade in which she references this exact same speech from Dr. King. In her video she states: “The house is on fire, so my culture is water. Water and escape. Resistance or escape. That’s it. The people who understand the importance of our culture being water right now are who I am looking for. That’s where I’m at.” Same. Big same. That’s ultimately the goal of all of this work - building a culture of water in the midst of a burning house. If that goal speaks to you, I hope you consider spending some time with this article.To read the full text, go to this link: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/njaj/vol2/iss1/4/ Otherwise, sit back and listen to the full audio version attached to this Substack post and available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. With gratitude,-L.R. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

A very 2025 story about the failures of people in power and how urban and rural struggles are connected. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

CONTENT WARNING: Graphic language, descriptions of violenceSocial media and traditional media alike are buzzing with discourse about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Most of the discourse I’ve seen seems to focus on Charlie Kirk’s character and hand-wringing about political violence. I see all the signs of classic online discourse - people present their hot take and then defend it against detractors.I have seen very little conversation so far that goes deeper and considers, whatever your hot take is, what is the ethical framework you are using to reach that conclusion? What is the worldview that informs your belief? And how does your position serve some kind of strategy about building the world you would like to see? In other words, the bigger questions about ethics and strategy. I often find that conversations on social media fail to examine ethics and strategy. I think this is one of the reasons why social media discourse frequently fails us, leaving us with in-group jargon and sectarian talking points, but not much of a holistic understanding of our neighbors’ worldviews or strategies to solve problems.I would like to see us collectively discuss: what are the ethical frameworks and worldviews that say the assassination of Charlie Kirk is justified? What are the ethical frameworks and worldviews that say his killing is not justified? I would also like to see us discuss: What is politically strategic about the assassination of Charlie Kirk? And what are the strategic pitfalls of the assassination of Charlie Kirk?I ask these questions not as some sort of intellectual “gotcha.” I don’t have the “right answer” either. This is not me pushing up my glasses and going “well, actually…” I ask these questions because I think they are unfortunately very relevant to our current trajectory as a society. I think we are headed into times where more deadly violence is going to happen. I think we will continue to be in the position of responding to violent attacks and, potentially, weighing whether to participate in violence. I think these are questions that people who are in community with each other should discuss. Whoever’s fate is intertwined with yours when the proverbial s**t hits the fan…we should talk about this stuff. Now. We should start working through some of the differences we have about these issues. I care about ethics and strategy because I think it’s going to matter.In this essay I’d like to offer some potential answers to my own questions, not necessarily as an exposé about my own beliefs, but as examples of what a deeper discussion could yield.Off the top of my head, here are some ethical frameworks or worldviews that might justify the assassination of Charlie Kirk:Let’s start with the “violence against fascists is justified” argument. This is the idea that you cannot defeat fascists with persuasion. Whether the violence is in the future or now, it really only is violence or the adequate threat of violence that reigns them in, so the argument goes.There is the argument that fascism is distinct from most other “political differences” or “differences of opinion.” A comedian and influencer named Mohawk Johnson recently posted a video on Instagram articulating this exact point. Mohawk Johnson states:“Instead of saying ‘Charlie Kirk had ideologies or beliefs that I don’t agree with but that doesn’t mean he deserves to die,’ I want you to say what the beliefs are…Don’t be vague…I want you to hear yourselves. And if you still feel that way, fine. But instead of saying Charlie Kirk had different beliefs, say, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that gay people deserve to be stoned to death, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.’ Say that. Type it in the comment section. Type, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that the Civil Rights movement was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.’ Say, ‘Charlie Kirk said that women aren’t good for anything but breeding and they don’t deserve human rights, but I don’t believe he deserved to die.’ Say the stuff he said. Say, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that it was okay that children died from gun violence, because as long as we got to have the Second Amendment that was the price we have to pay, but I don’t believe he deserved to die.’ Say, ‘Charlie Kirk called for public executions…and said that we should bring children to those executions, but I don’t believe he deserved to die…Say the s**t he said, and if you still believe it, fine. But say what the f**k he believed instead of hiding behind the word ‘belief.’”I don’t know how Mohawk Johnson would describe his own worldview. But there is a worldview which argues that the battle with fascism is not really a “sectarian” conflict, it’s not a conflict between social groups that somehow need to find a way to co-exist in the end. It sees fascism as an existential threat. Now and always. This worldview argues that we need to get over any squeamishness about killing fascists and recognize that it is a justifiable form of violence. This ethical framework says: If you’re okay with “historical” versions of fighting fascism, you need to understand you are living through history right now. Another rise of fascism is here and now.Then there is the “oppressed groups will strike back” argument. This line of thinking goes that if you publicly call for certain groups of people to be harmed or killed, then it should be no surprise if someone is violent towards you as an act of preservation and protection. Threatened people defend themselves. Oppressed people eventually lash out. There’s only so far you can push people until they push back. This is nothing new and no cause for pearl-clutching, so the argument goes.Then there is the argument that “people in positions of power are fair game for political violence.” This ethical framework asserts that “ordinary people” or “civilians” should not be targeted for killing, no matter how abhorrent their personal worldviews are, but people in power are acceptable targets. It’s why someone might believe it is fair game to kill Charlie Kirk but not the college students who came to listen to him. It is the ethical bedrock beneath the idea that even oppressed people have the moral responsibility of picking the right targets for their resistance. Slave owners, imperial officers, politicians, cops, corporate executives, soldiers, prison guards, domestic abusers, militias…these people wield direct power over life and death and therefore their life and death is fair game. This argument does not justify assassination for “thought crimes” but rather for “power crimes.” It’s not so much that a target deserves death for their personal beliefs but rather because of their positions of power. This worldview acknowledges the reality that plenty of oppressed people also hold views that are misogynistic, homophobic, or prejudiced towards another ethnic, religious, or racial group. This worldview holds the ethical line that you don’t kill people for being wrong, you kill them for being powerful and dangerous.And to that point, propagandists are sometimes considered powerful and dangerous, and have been punished for their use of that power, even if their influence over life and death is more indirect. One prominent example is the radio DJs who were successfully prosecuted for their role in the Rwandan genocide. Charlie Kirk could certainly be viewed as something of a radio DJ for white Christian nationalism.Off the top of my head, here are some ways that one might view the assassination of Charlie Kirk as strategic:Some people might believe that it is time to give a warning to fascists, to let them know it is possible to kill them.Others might believe in the strategy of using assassinations to inspire insurrection. This strategy is less about proving a point to the enemy and more so about proving a point to the populace - “You can fight back.” The strategy has historical precedent. Assassinations of imperial officials helped spur decolonization in many countries. Assassinations of British officers in India come to mind in particular.But this is also the logic behind the “accelerationist” perspective on the far right. This might be a good moment to mention that the exact political orientation of Charlie Kirk’s assassin is still unclear. Early media reports labelled him as left-wing “antifa” based on what was found written on his bullet casings, but other people have asserted that the bullet casings were references to alt-right memes and that he might be a “groyper.” For those who are unfamiliar, “groypers” are a faction of the far right led by influencers like Nick Fuentes, who believe in “accelerating” a race war, and who frequently viewed Charlie Kirk as being too mainstream. We don’t know the killer’s true motives at this point in time, but we can still safely state that multiple political perspectives may view assassinations as a strategy to foment insurrection.Off the top of my head, here are some ethical frameworks and worldviews that might say the assassination of Charlie Kirk is not justified:One such perspective is that “many people deserve to die but we do not deserve to become their executioners.” This is a point of view that I see articulated by death penalty abolitionists in particular. These activists often acknowledge that there will always be crimes so heinous that death feels fair - but do we deserve to become their executioners? As individuals and as a society, do we deserve to take on that moral injury to our own humanity?Earlier this year I had the unique experience of talking down a teenage boy who intended to kidnap and kill the man who raped his mother. Our conversation focused on exactly this point - maybe the man did deserve to die, but the boy did not deserve to become a killer. Thankfully, the boy changed his mind and decided to seek justice and support his mother in other ways.Recently, I was struck by the case of Brian Dorsey, a man who was executed in Missouri in April of 2024. Dorsey had killed two people in a drug-fueled rage in 2006. He was not innocent. But a diverse array of people, including people who are not ordinarily death penalty abolitionists, advocated for his life to be spared. Apparently he had undergone a transformation in jail to such an extent that prison staff viewed killing him as “pointless cruelty.” The pleas from the prison staff to halt his execution were exactly this argument - “Don’t make us become killers.”This argument also points to the example of Shalom Nagar, a man who was the final prison guard and eventual executioner of Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary Nazi architects of the Holocaust. Eichmann did not experience any transformation while imprisoned in Israel and remained unrepentant to the end. But Nagar was still profoundly traumatized by the experience of being his jailer and killer. His bond with Eichmann was bizarrely intimate - Nagar was tasked with eating the first few bites of Eichmann’s food at every meal to make sure Eichmann was not being poisoned. The two spent 24-hour shifts together in incredibly close quarters, usually mere feet away from each other. Nagar, at the age of 26, begged to be spared from the task of executing Eichmann, telling Israeli authorities that he was not capable of hanging anyone, even an unrepentant Nazi. But his superiors made their orders clear, and he was chosen to complete the task. Eichmann refused a blindfold and looked Nagar in the eyes as he pulled the trapdoor. Nagar was then tasked with taking down Eichmann’s body, wrapping it in sheets, and pushing it on a stretcher into an oven for cremation. Taking down the body involved lifting Eichmann’s head which drove trapped air out of the body in a booming cry. Nagar broke down, shaking all over, and was unable to put Eichmann’s body in the oven. The experience gave him nightmares and terrors for years.Not everyone who kills another human being is an executioner. Some people are just survivors. Take the case of Joan Little, a Black woman from North Carolina who killed a white prison guard while he was threatening her with an ice pick and sexually assaulting her. Joan Little stood trial for murder in 1975 but was acquitted. Joan Little survived her attack by taking a life, but I suspect the psychological experience was very different from that of a pre-meditated execution. Not all killing creates the same type of moral injury.Even some types of pre-meditated murder do not appear to damage people’s humanity. I think of the teenage girl Nazi assassins during WWII as a prime example. Throughout Europe there were these assassin cells made up of teenage girls that were instrumental in resistance to Nazi occupations, using their easy access to Nazi officials to conduct covert assassinations. When I was in Serbia in 2019, I had the honor of meeting a woman who had been part of one of these teenage girl assassin cells during WWII. Her granddaughter was in the process of interviewing the few teenage girl Nazi assassins who were still alive. These interviews painted a picture that, while the whole of WWII was traumatic, obviously, the act of killing Nazis did not appear to cause the same kind of “moral injury” to these girls as the execution of Eichmann later caused to Shalom Nagar.If I had to guess, I would guess that, even though war involves pre-meditated murder of your opponents, people who face invaders often have moral clarity about the war they are fighting: “these are the enemy combatants, they are armed and dangerous, we have no choice but to fight in order to defend our lives and homes,” etc. etc. etc. War is hell no matter what, but sometimes you don’t have a choice - hell simply arrives on your doorstep. It appears to be a different experience for us humans when we willfully kill a person who is an active threat, compared to when we willfully kill a person who has been neutralized, who stands before us no longer armed and dangerous but instead bound in chains. Things change when a soldier from the battlefield becomes a prisoner of war.Or, as the case may be, perhaps we experience moral injury when we willfully kill a person whose rhetoric calls for violence against others but has never wielded a weapon other than words, a person who is the PR for violence rather than the violence itself. In this worldview, maybe Charlie Kirk did deserve death, but we do not deserve to become his executioners. Maybe the Tucker Carlsons, Glenn Becks, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaughs, and Joe Rogans of the world don’t deserve life, but we do not deserve to carry the burden of their deaths.Another perspective says, yes, some people in positions of power might be fair game for death. But deciding at what proximity to power the penalty of death kicks in is actually extremely difficult, and people who pretend it is simple are fooling themselves. One need only look to revolutions in Cuba, China, Russia, France, and Cambodia to see that many people have grappled with this question: how close did you have to be to power to be purged? No one ideology has asked this question either, this has been a reality faced by all different flavors of regimes and rebellions. Syria seems to be in the middle of asking itself these questions right now with the recent toppling of the Assad regime and the installation of former militants as the ruling party. Truth and reconciliation efforts after wars and genocides have also dealt with these questions - just think of the lengthy reckonings that happened in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Colombia, for example. When a war or genocide sweeps up an entire society, who gets punished and how? Do beliefs and rhetoric count? Or does only the body count count? Which words and which actions are considered crimes? Who is a civilian and who is a combatant?This is a worldview that is able to distinguish between different types of political violence. It is a worldview that can speak to the incredibly human reasons why those teenage girls in WWII had a different experience killing Nazis than Shalom Nagar had in an Israeli prison some decades later. Or why Joan Little was no executioner for killing her rapist, but the teenage boy I spoke to would have become one had he killed his mother’s rapist.This ethical framework or worldview might urge caution - do not believe it is easy to draw the line about who deserves death and who deserves life. Do not hasten putting yourself in that position. Be careful what you wish for. Urge caution when it comes to meting out death. Outside of direct self-defense and “just” war, those decisions can cause tremendous moral injury and trauma, and potentially damage collective humanity when permitted on a large enough scale.Off the top of my head, these are some of the potential strategic pitfalls of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:One argument might be that killing people as a way to try and kill ideas rarely works. This argument might point out that killing the propagandist accomplishes very little unless you topple the “regime” that the propaganda is serving. You cannot kill ideas, you can only defeat oppressors until they no longer have any power to oppress. Sometimes this involves violence, like civil war or revolution. But it doesn’t always take violence to make certain regimes, political parties, or extremist movements crumble. There’s no one way to achieve this tactical defeat, this rendering of a political movement as ineffectual or obsolete. You can’t actually get rid of what they think you can just make sure they don’t have any ability to do, so the argument goes.But in this line of thinking, a person like Charlie Kirk did not have the right type of power for his targeting to be strategic. The power of white Christian nationalism, the ability of that belief system to build an even stronger apparatus of power, has not been altered by Kirk’s death, one might argue. One might argue that killing Charlie Kirk has not hurt their infrastructure of power at all and that their ability to do has not been undercut.This line of thinking also ties into the idea that media personalities and activists who are killed often turn into martyrs. They are often the public face of an ideology, the object for people’s emotional attachment and investment in the cause. Their deaths often play out differently than people in other positions of power, like, perhaps, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, who almost no one has turned into a martyr.Some also may question the strategy of trying to hasten an insurrection in the U.S., pointing towards arguments that the general population is not organized enough yet for that to make sense. Or who may want to exhaust other strategies before opening the gates to the hell that is war. Those who open those gates can’t always control what comes through.Time to log offOkay, time to put down the phone and go talk to people. I asked the questions I wanted to ask. My own off-the-dome answers to those questions are by no means exhaustive. I hope you can think of plenty more. I also hope that reading this essay has felt different for your heart and body than consuming social media content about this exact same topic. I hope this space was one where you could think and feel freely and where listening was not threatening. My hope is that, no matter where your train of thought is at, you will take it offline and talk with the people who are shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Ethics and strategy matter. Talk about this stuff now. This is not the last we will see of it.—Episode image is undated photo of women Yugoslav Partisans, WWII This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

A concert I was scheduled to play in Glencoe, IL sparked backlash due to my stances on Palestine. The day of the concert and the aftermath proved an interesting case study in the politics of outrage, conflict, and "the bullet from behind." This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

This weekend Muslims around the world celebrated Eid Al-Adha, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice. Over the years my relationship to this holiday has grown deeper and my understanding of the story that inspires it has blossomed. But it’s a challenging one, one that required a lot of working through before something finally clicked.This essay is an attempt to share what I’ve learned from Eid Al-Adha with a broader audience. Many hearts are troubled these days and looking for sources of courage. I hope to walk you through my understanding of the Eid Al-Adha story and tie it to our present moment in the world. For Muslims, I hope it enlivens your connection to this tradition. For everyone, I hope you take some inspiration, and that you feel more connected to the stories and people in your life who help you face the biggest, hardest questions.This whole essay series, this whole Inshallah & The Creek Don’t Rise project, it’s all about the power of story. And the reality that many communities are facing crises at the same time. And that we need to tell our stories. And that we need each other. Today, we’ll touch on all of these themes through the story of Eid Al-Adha.First, let me tell you about Eid Al-Adha and how my understanding of it has evolved. For some of you, talking about the Quran may be familiar, for others of you, this may be a very strange, new experience. Thanks for diving in. Just remember, every culture has its stories, and every culture can get stuck within its own stories. But some storytellers are able to breathe new life into a story and help their people grow and heal. That’s what we’re trying to do here, inshallah.For those who are unfamiliar, Eid Al-Adha revolves around a story that is shared in both the Quran and the Old Testament: the Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, has a vision that he is commanded to sacrifice his son. In the Quranic version of the story, Ibrahim tells his son about the vision and the son submits willingly to the sacrifice. But God intervenes, provides a ram to sacrifice instead, and blesses them both for their virtue. For Muslims, Eid Al-Adha tends to be a somber, serious festival that celebrates the willingness to sacrifice and unshakeable faith.If this story about Ibrahim and his son causes some discomfort, you’re not alone. It raises a lot of hard questions: “What kind of faith would reward the willingness to commit human sacrifice for no apparent reason?” or “What kind of parent is praised as being virtuous because he became convinced God wants him to murder his child?” Plenty of Muslims ask these questions as well. It’s one of these really, really, really old stories that is hard to grapple with in the modern day, in no small part because of how much damage has been done by religion and people with religious power. Celebrating the idea of religious obedience can get real dicey. But that’s not the only way to understand the story.My first breakthrough about the Eid Al-Adha story came from my experience facilitating the Quran Study at Masjid Al-Rabia from 2018-2020. Masjid Al-Rabia was an Islamic community center in Chicago focused on the needs of marginalized Muslims. Many people who came to Masjid Al-Rabia had been abused in the past and had religion used to justify this abuse. Many came to our Quran Study hoping to work through that trauma and rebuild a relationship to their identity and faith tradition, whether that meant becoming a practicing Muslim again, or simply having a new appreciation for the beauty of their identity, free from the control of their former abusers, free to heal as they chose. The Eid Al-Adha story was always a tricky one. Many people who had experienced abuse being justified by religion found this story troubling and alienating. If the takeaway message of this story is obedience to the point of self-sacrifice, or obedience to the point of committing murder, that sounds a whole lot like real abuse that real people have suffered.In working through this story at Masjid Al-Rabia, I started to really zoom in on the fact that both Ibrahim and his son are described in the Quran as being gentle-hearted. The story begins with Ibrahim having a vision that he kills his son, but to me this sounds more like a nightmare. And Ibrahim, the gentle-hearted man, shares this nightmare with his son and asks what he thinks - “What do you see?” Ibrahim asks (37:102). The gentle-hearted son responds that he believes his father should do as he is commanded and says, “You will find me, God willing, among those who are patient” (37:102). But God intervenes and provides a ram to sacrifice instead.Something about the detail of these people being gentle-hearted cracked the whole story open for me in a new way. I was touched by imagining this as an intimate conversation between a father and son who are close confidants. Ibrahim and his son began to feel so much more like ordinary people. I began to imagine this story as a tale about a very gentle-hearted and loving person having a nightmare about the worst thing that he could ever imagine: being asked to kill the son that he loves. And he confides in his son about what is probably the worst thing the son could ever imagine too - having violence done to him by the father who he loves. Then the father and the son grapple with this nightmare together, affirm their trust in God, and conclude that they would both do what was needed, if that’s what it came to.This is where I really started seeing this story more as a representation of a deeper truth rather than a literal model of what obedience should look like. What is this deeper meaning? For me, this became a story of two gentle-hearted people trying to remain steadfast even as their worst nightmare is coming true. And I also see that the Divine’s main role in this story is intervening and stopping the nightmare from occurring and blessing these two people for their pureness of heart in the face of the unfathomable.In our Quran Study at Masjid Al-Rabia, I think it was far easier to feel kinship to Ibrahim and his son when we thought of them as representing ordinary and kind-hearted people facing their worst nightmare together. Perhaps in the case of this story, the worst nightmare is having to kill one’s own son, or having violence done to you by a family member. But in our discussions we connected this story to a whole range of things, whatever any of us might consider to be our worst nightmare. And what we chose to take from the story was not that we should practice unquestioning obedience, but more that we should ask ourselves - how do good people respond when their worst nightmare is coming true, or the most ultimate sacrifice is asked of them? We began to see the story as an invitation to ponder - What happens when ordinary people are confronted with no other option? When the end of the road comes, what would we give of our life, our livelihood, our liberty, or our love? What would we sacrifice in a situation in which our worst nightmare was coming true?In our Quran study at Masjid Al-Rabia, we started to reclaim this story as being a call to pureness of heart in the face of the unfathomable, not a call to commit the unfathomable. We realized we did not have to see this story as, “You should be willing to kill your kid if you think God is telling you to,” or “You have to let your dad do whatever he wants to you if he tells you it’s what God wants.” Instead, we chose to let the story ask us: “How would you respond if your worst nightmare was coming true?” We were proof that the Eid story does not have to be a call for religious fanaticism, obedience to the death, and pointless suffering. We chose gentle-hearted, poignant, and intimate questions about ultimate sacrifice instead.This was the first breakthrough* I had about Eid Al-Adha while working at Masjid Al-Rabia. But I had another breakthrough recently, this past Ramadan, when I heard someone tell an extremely powerful story and thought to myself: “This is the real-life, present day version of the Eid story. This person’s story describes exactly what I’ve been trying to take away from the Eid story for years.” The person who I met, who I heard tell their story, was Marcellus Williams Jr., the son of Imam Khalifah Williams.Imam Khalifah Williams was wrongly executed in Missouri in September 2024. The campaign for his life to be spared garnered international attention. Even the prosecutor who had originally sought the death penalty fought for Imam Khalifah’s life to be spared. During Ramadan this year, I got to hear and meet Marcellus Williams Jr., his son. His son spoke about his father’s profound faith and unwavering bravery in the face of his fate. Imam Khalifah was a devout Muslim. His last words were, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation.” He frequently made the traditional du’a (prayer), “If life is good for me, give me life. If death is good for me, give me death.” He gave advice to others on death row: “I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay, I’m going to tell you God carries you through all things.” He was a spiritual advisor to many, both inside and outside prison walls, and corresponded with hundreds of people. Close to his death, he wrote a poem about “The perplexing smiles of the children of Palestine,” and how the persistence of their smiles even in the face of genocide strengthened his faith. According to his son, he went to his death peacefully, even telling the prison guards, “Let’s go, let’s do this.” On the execution gurney, Imam Khalifah was dressed in a white robe and had his arms crossed over his chest, the position Muslims take for prayer. From the death chamber, he checked on his son repeatedly, asking if he was okay, asking if he needed to leave. His son stayed.In the case of the nightmare that this father and son faced, the roles were reversed. It was the son who watched his father be laid down to die, and it was his father who went willingly. But I can think of no better example of what the Eid Al-Adha story is really about for me, and what it is that gentle-hearted Muslims all around the world are truly yearning for by celebrating this festival. There is something within our faith tradition that calls us to the type of dignity, grace, and bravery that Imam Khalifah and Marcellus Williams Jr. showed. I see Imam Khalifah and Marcellus Jr. as walking in the footsteps of this sacred story they both held dear. This is the pinnacle of faith that many Muslims aspire to, and which moves the hearts of many, regardless of religious background.But of course it’s not just Muslims who can possess astounding dignity, grace, and bravery in the face of doom. No one culture or faith tradition has ownership over any of these traits. People from all backgrounds show the tremendous beauty of the human spirit in unthinkable circumstances. And ever since I had this breakthrough after listening to Marcellus Williams Jr., I’ve been finding the core human truth of the Eid Al-Adha story everywhere I look.One of the very first people to teach me about the human spirit was a woman who I’ll call Mrs. E. She was a Lutheran elder in my hometown in Indiana, and when I was maybe about 12 years old, she came to tell me and other children about her story. When Mrs. E was a child, she witnessed her family be murdered. She was hiding behind the couch and watched them be killed. In a few horrific moments, she became totally alone in the world. But Mrs. E was not there to tell us about the horror. She was there to tell us about how in the aftermath of this trauma, she discovered that she is never alone. She discovered love. And not just any love, but what she understood as God’s love, the sense of being held in something so much greater than herself, something that is always loving and ever-present. When I was a little older, about 15 years old, I went through some very difficult times with my health. Mrs. E crocheted me a shawl that I could wear in the hospital to remind me that I too am held in love at all times. To go through something like Mrs. E went through and have it turn you into a more gentle and loving person - this is exactly what our Eid story is about, as I now understand it.In October of 2023, I was working at the health clinic of the Inner-city Muslim Action Network on the southwest side of Chicago where many staff and patients are Palestinian. As bombs began to rain down on Gaza, one of our colleagues lost 24 members of her family in a single night. Many of our patients came into their appointments distraught about current events, regardless of whether or not they were Palestinian. As a team, we talked about these very same questions - “How do you respond when someone’s worst nightmare is actually coming true?”So much wisdom was present in the room, and many people shared perspectives that strengthened all of us. Personally, I shared about my time in 2019-2022 working with an underground railroad for LGBTQ+ people fleeing Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The work sometimes involved staying on the phone with people as they made incredibly dangerous feats, like making a run for it from a safe house, or crossing a militarized border, or navigating human traffickers and militias and armies and vengeful families. It meant talking to people who knew they could die at any moment. And unfortunately, some people did not make it. One young man was cornered and killed by the Taliban in real time on the phone with someone from the railroad.Mercifully, no one that I worked with died while on their journey, but I was involved for some incredibly close encounters with death. What do you say in moments like these? You say, “I’m still here. Listen to my voice. I’m here with you. I’ll stay with you.” You say, “God loves you, so so much. We love you, so so much.” You say it over and over again. You say, “We will tell your story no matter what. We remember you always.” I shared this with my colleagues at the clinic just to say: even in the face of nightmare, you can still bear witness, you can still help carry someone’s story onward, and you can always remind others of love. You can be as peaceful as Ibrahim’s son. You can be Mrs. E’s crocheted shawl with your voice, holding someone in love, no matter what.We never know when we may be called upon to respond to nightmare, and what we might find within ourselves in the process. Last month I had the opportunity to meet some organizers from a community group called ROAR. The group is based in the remote mountains of North Carolina and were suddenly thrust into doing emergency response work when Hurricane Helene tore through Appalachia. One of the things that stuck with me from the conversation with ROAR was all the stories of how ordinary people rescued one another. People chose the hard, brave path of going back into the flood waters to rescue neighbors who were stranded on their rooftops, watching the waters rise, unsure whether anyone would come to save them. ROAR’s stories carried the incredible intimacy of those moments - the thoughts, the facial expressions, the words, shared amongst people in their moments of doom, watching the waters close in on them. The grit and resolve of people in the boats determined to save even one more life. And then all the emotions that flow when rescuer and rescued meet. These are moments that are so incredibly vulnerable and raw. These are moments filled with awe and wonder and near-death trauma and the overwhelming force of life.Now when I celebrate Eid Al-Adha, personally, I am celebrating the awful, wonderful intimacy of those moments when people respond to nightmare. From ancient stories to today, I am cherishing the beauty within people’s hearts that is revealed in the ugliest of times. I yearn to echo the words of Ibrahim’s son: “You will find me, God willing, among the people who are patient,” whatever nightmare may be lying in wait. I am fiercely proud of the incredible human beings whose dignity, grace, and bravery in the face of doom are beacons for all humanity. No matter their background and culture. And I am summoned by the story of Eid Al-Adha not to accept needless suffering justified by authority, but rather to consider what sacrifices I would be willing to make in the darkest hour. We pray for such times to pass us over, but when they find us, what is the state of our hearts?We are in troubling times. We need people like Imam Khalifah and Mrs. E and the perplexing smiles of children in Palestine and neighbors with a rowboat to show us the astounding capabilities of our own hearts. We must call one another to extraordinary feats of love, bravery that moves mountains, and peace that defies explanation. We need tools to respond to nightmare with unflinching beauty.This Eid Al-Adha, I wore the shawl that Mrs. E crocheted.—*In 2020 I presented at an Eid Al-Adha halaqa (study group) with Receiving Nur about this very breakthrough. You can listen to that presentation here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

Watch the video version here.Gather around children, it’s story time. [Hi, Sweetpea (the cat).]Okay, story time. So I grew up in a small town in Indiana called Bloomington. And in 1968, I believe, there was a firebombing of a Black-owned bookstore. And after the firebombing, the original owners of the bookstore dedicated the lot where their store had been to become “People's Park.” And they worked with the city to designate the lot as a park that was for the people, by the people, of the people, and wrote it into the deed or agreement to ensure that the People's Park would be open to all people. So, fast forward to my childhood. I grew up during a period of time in Indiana where we were seeing waves of both the meth epidemic and the opioid epidemic. We were also seeing the economic downfall of so much of rural and small town America. We were also seeing nationwide and worldwide wealth inequality get worse. We were also seeing housing crises get worse. I mean, it was everything all at once. And so homelessness in the area skyrocketed. Not only that, but because Bloomington was a university town and hypothetically had more resources, more social organizations, things like that, small towns elsewhere in Indiana would buy people on the street bus tickets and send them to Bloomington. Rather than face their own people who are hurting and suffering within their own communities, they would to send them to Bloomington. But even the resources that we had in Bloomington got overwhelmed, because when the entire state sends people, it wasn't actually a solution. Anyway, unsurprisingly, because People's Park was open to everybody, there were lots of people who lived in People's Park. This wasn't the only place where homelessness was occurring, where there were tents, where there were people living, but People's Park became kind of a focus point. And it also became symbolic because around People's Park there was a bunch of gentrification happening in this university town. People's Park was very close by to the university. And so as we're seeing all of these compounding social crises and homelessness on the rise in Bloomington, People's Park became this area where the state (as in like the city government and the cops, just the government in general) really started to be aggressive about social cleansing. It was sort of like, “we can't have these two things so close to each other,” right? “We can't have this big push at gentrification happening right next to this really high concentration of people hurting in these particular ways.”This was all over town. Encampments started to get swept and the aggression and violence increased, which doesn't solve anything. But the more that people were pushed from place to place in town and kicked out of People's Park, people would get shunted into the woods. But this is where things really turned dark and violent. Because once people were invisibilized in the woods, that's where violence against homeless people really could kick off. And that people could get away with it. And there's been a series of homeless encampments deep in the woods being set on fire. My understanding is that there's a variety of people who have done this. Some off-duty cops and also just some right-wing vigilante types. [Bye, Sweet Pea (the cat).] Yeah, uh pouring accelerant on homeless encampments and setting them on fire in the woods. And as this started to happen, it meant that people understood: once the homeless encampments get successfully broken up in town, the alternative in the woods is so much worse. And so much darker. And people aren't gonna make it out alive. So people increased their defense of homeless encampments in town, resisting sweeps, resisting having the encampments dismantled.And there was a showdown at People's Park - I remember - in 2017, right before I moved away. Where again, people understood this was sort of like the last line of defense. And a prison guard plowed his car through the people who had gathered at People's Park to try to defend it from a sweep. Yeah. He plowed his car through the crowd. He missed me by about that much and took the person right next to me. Thankfully no one was killed.I have told these stories to people in my life in Chicago. People have kind of been surprised and shocked. Not about the whole story, because this happens in Chicago too. Encampments get broken up, homeless people get pushed around all the time. It’s the element of…once you push people into the woods, they become truly invisible. And that this is just a regular thing: that people get pushed into the woods and then set. on. fire. And also people have been really shocked, like, “why hasn't any news covered this? I’m shocked that i've never heard about this!” I’m not shocked. There's so much happening in rural America and small town America that no one is paying attention to. And I didn't even have proof. I didn't even have a news story to point to, to show people in my life in Chicago that this was a real thing, that i wasn't making this up. Until just now. There was a story that was published that was about yet another encampment set on fire on December 18th, 2024. And it had pictures. And I want you all to see this. Please look at this. I've never been able to show people pictures before. But this is what it is. Please just look. I don't know what else to say or to ask. I'm not sure there even is an ask, this is a much bigger thing than all of us. But please look. Because you can. Please look. And thank you for listening. Photo credits: Jeremy Hogan/The BloomingtonianRead the original news story here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

For those of you who are not familiar, the start date and end date of Ramadan changes from year to year. The Islamic calendar is a little bit different from the Gregorian calendar. In 2025, Ramadan is basically the entire month of March. But it used to be over the summer.Some of you may know I'm a musician. I have done quite a bit of touring. And so there was a period of years where I would frequently be touring during the summer - during Ramadan. And I've toured quite a number of rural areas. So I have found myself in situations where it's time to break my fast and I'm in the middle of…rural North Dakota.For those of you who don't know, usually the first thing that you do to break your fast in Ramadan is eat a date (the fruit) and water. There was this one time on tour where I found myself in the middle of rural North Dakota having to figure out how to break my fast just with what was available at a gas station. And I made the decision that the thing that was the closest to breaking my fast with a date and water was…Twizzlers! I mean, it's wrinkly, it's fruit-flavored (the legal definition of fruit here is a little squishy). So yeah, my North Dakota gas station iftar was Twizzlers and water.The most interesting thing, though, is that I later learned that the very first mosque built in the U.S.A. is in…rural North Dakota. That’s right. Ross, North Dakota, population 89, is home to the very first mosque in America, built in 1929.This claim comes with a little bit of an asterisk. Muslims have been in America for a long time, much longer than 1929. Most were people from West Africa brought to the U.S. as slaves or people from the territories of the Ottoman Empire who immigrated. However, these early Muslim communities generally did not have their own mosques. They congregated in buildings that also had other uses or prayed outside. Ross, North Dakota was definitely not the first place in the U.S. where Muslims congregated for Friday prayers. But the first building to be constructed new, with the express purpose of being a mosque, was indeed in Ross, North Dakota.How did this come about?The answer is: Syrian homesteaders. That’s right, at the turn of the 20th century, a community of Syrian immigrants began to settle in North Dakota, and they built a little mosque on the prairie. This community of people from Syria filed claims under the Homestead Act to receive farmland in North Dakota. Many people from Norway, Germany, Ukraine, and other parts of Europe had been doing the same since the end of the Civil War. However, due to the U.S. government’s institutional racism, Syrians only became eligible for U.S. citizenship in 1909, so Syrian homesteaders arrived to North Dakota later than their European counterparts.The land made available to settlers through the Homestead Act was the result of the mass displacement and death inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. Many people forget that as the U.S. was fighting the Civil War it was simultaneously fighting multiple other wars against Indigenous nations. As the U.S. government claimed victory over the Southern Confederacy it also claimed victory over vast territories of Indigenous land. The federal government passed the Homestead Act in 1862, the railroad companies moved in, and westward expansion accelerated.The Syrian community in North Dakota were a relatively late addition to this westward expansion and one that has largely been forgotten. Very few descendants of the original homesteaders are left in the area. The current Muslim population of North Dakota is estimated to be 540 people, or 0.1% of the state’s population. However, enough descendants retained a connection to Ross that, when the original building of the mosque was torn down in 1979, they raised funds to build a small memorial building in its place. This new building is rarely used for congregational prayer but serves as a museum and visitor’s center for the cemetery that is still maintained on the mosque grounds. Prayer rugs are still available for any visitors who choose to pray.In 2016, a journalist who was covering the fracking boom in North Dakota stumbled upon this mosque and its history and wrote a feature about it in The New Republic. The journalist, Cary Beckwith, remarked at how striking it was to find a forgotten piece of North Dakota’s history while writing about a new chapter in the state’s life, one that was bringing more immigrants than the state had seen in a long time. Beckwith noted that while covering the fracking boom they had heard Spanish, Amharic, Bulgarian, and French Creole - but no Arabic. North Dakota, at the time was one of the states who voiced support for Donald Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban” and the governor of North Dakota had sworn to refuse Syrian refugees in the state. Beckwith documented that some of the workers on the oilfields were unimpressed with the historic mosque nearby, with one worker saying, “Somebody should blow that f****r up.”As of 2025, the mosque is still standing. Google reviews from visitors are overwhelmingly positive, from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, who are touched and delighted to find such an unexpected landmark, learn about its history, and take some time for prayer or reflection. I hope it is still standing the next time I find myself in North Dakota during Ramadan. For me, it is a reminder of how disconnected most of us are from the history of the land where we live, and how much of that history is rural. To me, this little mosque in Ross, North Dakota is a reminder that rural America can be such a sign post, pointing to things past, things present, and things yet to come - for those who are willing to notice.SOURCES:https://newrepublic.com/article/128726/north-dakota-prairie-became-home-americas-first-mosquehttps://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oldest-mosque-in-the-united-stateshttps://news.prairiepublic.org/show/dakota-datebook-archive/2022-05-02/first-mosquehttps://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/muslim-population-by-statehttps://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/north-dakota/ross This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

As-salaamu alaykum and welcome to Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise. Just wanted to give a little introduction to what this is.I have been doing quite a bit of political writing recently, particularly in 2024, and been getting a lot of engagement and response to that writing. And so for 2025, I wanted to finally gather the threads of that political writing and create a home for it to continue. And I tend to do audio versions of the things that I write as well, so there's always a print form and an audio form.So it just kind of made sense to create a home for both of these. There's a Substack and podcast, which I'm calling Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise.But just to give you a little bit of background, I grew up in a small town in southern Indiana, and then about seven years ago I moved to Chicago. I've been living primarily on the west side of Chicago for the last seven years. And I am a musician, I'm a scientist, and I'm a community organizer. And some of the things that I've been involved with, as a musician and as an organizer, have been truth and reconciliation efforts.Now, what's “truth and reconciliation”? It's kind of jargon. But it's jargon that tends to be used for processes that happen after conflict, after war, after genocide. It's like a political framework for what happens after,and the day after,and the day after,and the day after.And so sometimes when people are doing intentional processes to try to tell the truth about what happened, and then somehow reconcile with what happened, as a nation, as an ethnic group, as a region of the world, whatever the case might be, sometimes that's called “truth and reconciliation.”So I've been part of some truth and reconciliation projects in the Balkans, in Colombia, and then also did some training with people in Northern Ireland. And one of the things that has occurred to me through those experiences is that…I think the United States really has never had a truth and reconciliation process. For all of the things that have happened here. From the outset of colonization. And so I couldn't ignore the blatant lack of truth and reconciliation in my own home country while I'm participating in some of these efforts elsewhere.The efforts that I was involved in Colombia, in the Balkans…the United States was involved in those conflicts. So there had to be U.S. people involved in truth & reconciliation after. And to me, at least, that just shone the light even more brightly …why not point that inwards as well, right? So anyway, I have an interest in truth and reconciliation processes, having seen what all can go into it, and just feeling that lack here.But then also I feel like I have had a pretty unique vantage point growing up in a small town in a Republican-led rural state, and then moving to an urban area. Not just any old urban area. The south and west sides of Chicago have a very particular history of marginalization, deprivation, segregation…and resistance, and survival, and resilience. It's all of it combined, right?And these are two extremely different snapshots of America. But both are communities in crisis, in their own way. I have been witnessing American communities in crisis my entire life. And the crises are very different, but they're all connected. And over the past seven years of being here in Chicago, bit-by-bit I've been trying to articulate, first and foremost to myself and then to other people in my life, what I've seen, what I've witnessed in both of these American contexts. And how we really know so little about each other.And our struggles are so connected, they really are, but we don't talk to each other, we don't have common ground with each other, particularly this urban-rural divide, which I think is really intense and not named very often. Not explored very often. And so a lot of the writing that I've been doing in this past year has been trying to, in some ways, explain the crisis that rural and small town America has been going through within my lifetime to an urban audience, my community and my connections here in Chicago.But I would like to be a bridge to have that dialogue be both ways. I would like to ask the question, what does truth telling look like in America? I think we need to speak truth to power, but also to each other. We have to let each other know, we have to tell each other what's going on in our communities. A lot more than we currently are. Because we really do need each other. We need each other so badly, given what's coming our way.So the writings that I've done over the last year have been focused on that, and I think will continue to be focused on that. Last year, I wrote this zine in response to JD Vance becoming the vice president and how he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And basically, I kind of like wrote my own Hillbilly Elegy. To try to speak to, I think, all the ways that JD Vance is wrong. But to also try to translate some things about rural America to people in my life in Chicago. I got such a great response from that. People have been so responsive. To really see how our struggles are connected, and see how it all paints a picture of how everybody is being harmed by many of the same bad actors, by many of the same systems, by many of the same culprits, in a lot of ways. It all points back to many of the same common enemies.I also did a huge deep dive into the land that my mom's side of the family has been farming. My mom's side of the family is American and has been farming in the same place in Nebraska for six generations. And I did a deep dive into that land and the history of that land using a truth and reconciliation framework. And that research, inshallah, is getting published in the Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice sometime in 2025. And I would like to do the work of translating that. What's getting published is very scholarly and not super digestible, but I would like to do the work of breaking it down. Not just in terms of what I found, but what that process was like, because I think the more we do that, the more we're going to learn. Not just about what came before, but what is still going on today to disenfranchise and divide us.I'm not entirely sure all of the places that this Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise Substack and podcast will go. We'll see. But that's the general aim of it: An exercise in American truth-telling. Because after all, truth comes before reconciliation. I'm very excited to keep going with it.Also, a little note about the name. There's a saying which I heard in southern Indiana, because southern Indiana is kind of like where the Midwest meets Appalachia. It's actually the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. So it's kind of a cultural combination of both. But anyway, Inshallah & The Creek Don't Rise. It's a play on... “if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise,” which is a phrase in that region of the country. But being Muslim, inshallah means “God willing.” So it's kind of a play on “if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise.” Inshallah, which means “God willing” and “the creek don't rise.”And it's also a phrase that kind of captures what my vantage point is in all of this. Just to give you a little example, in 2016 when I went to Standing Rock to the protest camps that were against the DAPL pipeline, the Indigenous-led resistance to the DAPL pipeline in Standing Rock, there was a contingency of…basically like…radical rednecks that showed up to throw down for that. There was also a big contingence of Palestinian people who were there throwing down as well. And there was some moments when I was there of like, “oh, this person pulled up with the rednecks and is praying with the Palestinians??” And that's very much…that's me. And that's the phrase, “inshallah and the creek don't rise.” I'm the that. That's the me. And so I think it kind of captures a little bit about my vantage point in all of this.I'm not someone who's ever stayed on one side of the tracks. You know, there's the whole idea of being on “the wrong side of the tracks.” I've always been crossing the tracks my entire life, and I continue to do that. And I think we need a lot more of that. And I hope that this podcast serves as a way of telling stories from across the tracks. Inshallah, and the creek don't rise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

As we begin 2025, I see a lot of hand-ringing. “How bad is it going to get?” It’s a valid question. It was a valid question before the election and remains a valid question after Trump’s re-election. That being said, amongst liberals and progressives, especially those who live in urban bubbles or are college-educated/professional class, I am hearing a lot of sweeping fear and despair. This essay is addressed to that fear and despair. I’d like to share my analysis about bad outcomes that I believe are realistic, or perhaps more importantly, who will suffer most. I would also like to offer some perspective on strategy in the face of despair.Let’s begin with the question: Who has the most to fear? Especially right away? I believe the most vulnerable people within the United States in 2025 are the invisible and exploited migrant labor force that our economy relies on, incarcerated people, homeless people, and all people in poverty. In a country of roughly 340 million people, here’s the population breakdown of the groups I just mentioned:* It’s hard to know exactly how many undocumented people should be considered “invisible and exploited migrant labor” but the total population of undocumented people in the U.S. is estimated around 13 million, or 4% of the population (Homeland Security, 2024).* Incarcerated people - the population fluctuates some but is currently around 1.9 million (Prison Policy Initiative, 2024)* Homeless people - the official tally is 770,000 people in 2024 but official tallies of homelessness are almost always an undercount (USA Today, 2024). However, the official 2024 tally is still an 18% increase over the 2023 tally.* Poverty - roughly 38 million people (11.3% of the population) live at or below the official federal poverty line. However, the federal poverty line is a severely outdated tool, and it is estimated that 140 million people in America (43% of the population) cannot afford the basic necessities of life where they live (Fuhrer, 2024).I believe that the right-wing agenda will hurt these groups of people first and most. In fact, a variety of governmental and corporate powers have already been expanding the infrastructure to target these groups of most vulnerable people even further.The Trump campaign had pledged to deport all 13 million undocumented people. This is implausible if not impossible, with an estimated cost of $315 billion (Wall Street Journal, 2024). So, as JD Vance chipperly suggested, they’ll just “start with 1 million” (ABC News, 2024). But I don’t think most of them actually believe they are going to deport all undocumented people, I think that’s a circus performance for the voter base. I really do believe they are fine with the economy still relying on migrant labor so long as they feel like they are in control of it. I don’t think they mind illegal, exploitative labor practices whatsoever. I think they mind the idea that people (especially non-white people) could come here without papers and actually have a decent life. And then have children who become successful (non-white) American citizens.I think their deportation scheme is more about a show of power over an exploited labor base - “we control you, in case you forgot” - rather than a genuine attempt at getting rid of that workforce entirely. A landmark federal court case in 2001 attempted to prosecute managers at a Tyson plant for straight up asking human traffickers to supply them with 500 workers over four months. The court ended up siding with Tyson and essentially rubber-stamped the practice for corporations during the last two decades (Reding, 2010, pg. 153). Trafficking workers and paying illegally low wages to them is not the issue. The issue is that some of those undocumented worker’s kids are integrated into society and have permanently altered the demographics of the country. I think they are completely comfortable with illegal migration so long as those migrants remain tightly in the chains of exploitation that they control and profit from. What they can’t stand is the idea that undocumented people could come here and plant the seeds of generations to come who will be free.While they work on deporting one million people this year, probably making as much of a spectacle of it as possible, they are also quietly expanding other sources of exploitable labor:* Rolling back legislation against child labor (1A Podcast, 2023)* Making it easier for corporations to use prison labor (Marshall Project, 2024)* Criminalizing homelessness, like the June 2024 Supreme Court decision paving the way for more aggressive local laws…which may swell the prison population even more (Berg, 2024)Perhaps they have some ideas about how to replace the workers they may realistically be able to deport. And even though I don’t think they are going to deport and replace all 13 million undocumented people, I think it also suits them just fine to diversify the portfolio of the exploitable workforce, so to speak, with their increasing appetite for child labor, prison labor, and putting more homeless people in prison (labor). They are just paving the way for more widespread and entrenched exploitation in whatever direction they please. They are ensuring they get to do what they want to who they want.And it remains true that the people who suffer the most indignities with the most impunity are people in poverty. Defining socioeconomic status is hard. What is poverty? What is low-income? What is working class? But no matter the label, economic hardship causes people to be even more systematically vulnerable to everything, always, all at once. Poor people are always the most disposable. According to a study from the University of California that was published in 2023, poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in America, more deadly than gun violence, obesity, or diabetes (Brady, 2023).While defining precisely who lives in “poverty” is difficult, economic hardship is undeniably prevalent in the U.S. The official statistic of the federal government is that 11.3% of Americans live in poverty. In and of itself, this ranks the U.S. as the country with the highest rate of poverty in the Global North (Alston, 2018). However, there are some serious problems with how the federal government calculates its official poverty measure (OPM). The current OPM is an outdated metric that has not been updated since it was first developed in the 1960s to determine eligibility for anti-poverty programs. Back then, the federal government estimated that what a family needs to survive is roughly three times what they spend on food, a measure that was fairly accurate at the time (Barber, 2024). However, since the 1960s, food prices have risen fourfold, but median rent in the U.S. has risen more than sixteen-fold (Barber, 2024). Defining the poverty line by multiplying a family’s food budget by three will no longer predict whether a family is going to be homeless next month.Researchers have suggested an alternative OPM, although federal policy has not yet changed. This new proposed OPM asks the question: what is the budget required to cover basic necessities, broken down for every type of family structure (single adult, two parents with two children, etc.), and for every U.S. county (to account for huge variations in housing costs, in particular), and how many individuals and families are unable to afford basic necessities where they live? (Fuhrer, 2024). This massive and complex effort was spearheaded by the Economic Policy Institute and recently released its findings. Using this measure, 140 million Americans would qualify as poor or low-income, which is 43% of the population (Fuhrer, 2024).This is nothing new in 2025. As Reverend William J. Barber II, one of the organizers with The Poor People’s campaign, recently commented: “Our general lament was a cry against our nation’s addiction to unnecessary death. The heirs of genocide, displacement, enslavement, and lynching, we, as a people, had never repented of the violence that was laid out as a foundation of our shared life. Instead, we’d accustomed ourselves to an economy that functions by damning some people to die before their time” (Barber, 2024, pg. 169). Our nation’s addiction to unnecessary death is hardly new. But I believe that people who are economically struggling will be hardest hit by everything: by any and all further tears to our social safety nets, by climate change disasters, by increasing mass incarceration, by assaults to public schools, by neglect for public health, by police aggression, by worsening housing crises, by community violence, by lack of access to reproductive healthcare and early childhood supports, by eroding care for the disabled and elderly, and many other outcomes that may get worse under the Trump administration.That is my sincere prediction about who has the most to fear from 2025. I want to point something out, particularly to readers who may be living within certain liberal bubbles. The migrant labor force, incarcerated people, homeless people, the impoverished - this includes all skin colors, all gender identities, all sexual orientations, all religions, all ethnicities, all ages, all worldviews. It also includes so many children. This is easy to miss out on when we are so separated from one another. Who are the majority of child laborers? Kids from Central America (Dreier, 2023). Who is the single largest demographic of people living in poverty? White people (Fuhrer, 2024). Who is the most over-represented in mass incarceration? Black people (Prison Policy Initiative, 2024). The people at the bottom, “the voice from below,” includes everyone.The people at the top, the people in power, the people in the 1%, remain overwhelmingly white and male; they are not so diverse (Murray & Jenkins, 2024). But it turns out the people at the bottom truly are. There is no majority identity in the lowest castes, it is a plurality. It really is everyone.And while we sit with that complicated reality, The Powers That Be are diligently working on:* Criminalizing dissent and resistance (like RICO charges against Cop City protestors in Atlanta, increasing use of terrorism charges against climate change activists and men named Luigi, trying to classify certain non-profit activities as support for terrorism, increasing penalties for protest tactics like encampments or taking over streets)* Fighting labor organizing (like threatening to call the National Guard on the dock worker union strike earlier this year)* Consolidating power over public institutions and destabilizing “democracy” (such as the efforts to remove anyone from state office who was willing to certify Biden’s victory in 2020)* Denying climate change, barrelling ahead to control and exploit natural resources (like Trump probably cutting Biden’s climate adaptation program)* Paving the way for even more extreme wealth/resource hoarding (like further tax cuts to the rich)* All of the wickedness the U.S. government and corporations do in other countries (where to even begin)We are barreling off of the cliff of climate disaster with no way back.We are headed into an era of global destabilization.We are facing increasing wealth inequality that a U.N. representative recently called a “God-sized problem” (Barber, 2024).Now, a note about pointing fingers.The people in the lowest castes are not responsible for Trump. You cannot blame undocumented people, homeless people, incarcerated people, and poor people for Trump. And you can’t blame children whatsoever. Many liberals/progressives are understandably bitter about what appears to have been a strong rightward shift in the electorate. But the keyword here is the electorate - the people who actually showed up to vote. Only about 55% of the 18+ population ends up voting in federal elections on average anyway, and adults who vote are disproportionately wealthier, older, and more educated (Pew Research Center, 2020). In total, 156 million people voted in the 2024 election, with 77 million voting for Trump (Council on Foreign Relations, 2024).Remember, any statistics that you’re seeing about “such and such percentage of such and such demographic voted for Trump” - that’s only the percentage of the pool who actually voted. The 56% of white voters who supported Trump is 33% of the total white population. Meanwhile, 37% of the white population (66 million) can’t afford basic necessities. The 43% of Latino voters who supported Trump is 9% of the total Latino population. Meanwhile, 66% of the Latino population (42 million) can’t afford basic necessities. The 16% of Black voters who supported Trump is 5% of the total Black population. Meanwhile, 59% of the Black population (24 million) can’t afford basic necessities. (PBS, CFR, USA Facts, Furher). Don’t forget to listen to those whose voices are quieter. And the lowest castes of America either can’t or largely don’t vote.That doesn’t mean struggling people all have “good” politics. That’s not the point. The point is they really don’t have any power over you. They really don’t have any power over the system. And their lack of systemic power, rather than anything they may think or believe, is what makes them so vulnerable to be first in line for exploitation and doom. The man from El Salvador who slaughtered the chicken in your lunch while under the control of human traffickers is not your enemy. The white woman living out of her car in a Walmart parking lot with her two kids somewhere in a methed-out ghost town in rural Kentucky is not your enemy. No matter how mean, unpleasant, prejudiced, ignorant, abusive, or otherwise flawed they hypothetically could be as individuals.But also, it is true that some of the people who voted for Trump may end up suffering intensely under his administration. I would like to challenge the reader, here, to consider that ideological impurity and systemic power are two different things. Put bluntly - you can be wrong about a lot of things AND be pretty powerless.Centering the people who are truly most vulnerable and who truly have the least systemic power means centering the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated, the exploited migrant. Centering these people may mean discomfort. It may mean valuing the lives of people who don’t share all of your values or who may have done bad things. It might mean figuring out how to respond when people who have the least systemic power are still capable of interpersonal harm. Towards each other, towards you. It may mean grappling with the fact that there are no perfect victims, and the most severely victimized shouldn’t have to live up to sainthood for society to pay attention to their suffering. And it means grappling with the fact that some people who are severely victimized are genuinely unsafe to be around. Everything can be true at once and the need to survive continues the day after, and the day after, and the day after.I recently had a conversation with a friend who is a union organizer for Amazon workers in the Chicago area. As he reflected on his experiences with organizing, he said, “You have to be able to hold each other and fight each other at the same time.” We were discussing the fact that all of the ways that people are capable of hurting each other interpersonally still exist when you are fighting the billionaire class. People hurt each other racially, sexually, emotionally, physically, personally, humanly. That can’t be swept under the rug. We have to take ALL of that up, all of that harm that ordinary people can do to one another, when we organize ourselves against The Behemoth that is hurting everyone. Most people don’t have a lot of skill doing that. But if you want to learn from the people who are diving in and trying their damndest, look to labor organizing. Look to their successes and their mistakes. It is just one example, just one struggle, but in many ways could be a very wise example of what we are facing in the bigger picture. The people working for Amazon includes everyone.I would like to challenge the reader - if you are feeling fear and despair, what are you doing to mobilize with all the people who have less systemic power than you do? How are you showing up for the migrant, the prisoner, the unhoused, the truly broke? To quote Reverend Barber II of The Poor People’s campaign again, “Those who profit from preventing moral fusion movements do everything in their power to make division seem inevitable. In times like these, it’s critical to remember the movements that have enabled every stride toward freedom in our nation’s history. Poor and hurting people have been at the heart of every one of these movements” (Barber, 2024, pg. 106-107). Are you willing to look into the eyes of poverty and feel the humanity looking back? Are you capable of showing up for everyone “at the bottom?” The whole plurality of America that finds itself in the lowest of the low? If people like you can’t or won’t show up for the most vulnerable, what on earth do you suggest as the alternative? Who is coming to save any of us?When our collective survival depends on it, really take some time to consider who you are willing to dispose of, who you can actually survive without, and who your life actually depends on. Be careful who you write off as being beyond saving, beyond solidarity, beyond having value. Be careful who you dehumanize. Be careful of the excuses you make as to why YOU shouldn’t have to show up for the difficult work of solidarity, which inherently involves interacting with people you may fear, loathe, mistrust, or in any way view as “other.” Be careful of the struggles you think you should get to sit out. And be careful of nihilism. Particularly if you are a college-educated professional, a middle-class urbanite, or any other person who is not in the lowest castes of people who are first in the line of fire. Don’t voluntarily ignore (or worse, give up) the power you do have. You are so, so needed. We all are.There is a storm coming. Goddamnit, we need each other.“I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars,I am the red man driven from the land,I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek -And finding only the same old stupid planOf dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.”* Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again,” 1936“God of grace and God of glory,On thy people pour thy power…Cure thy children’s warring madness,Bend our pride to thy control,Shame our wanton selfish gladness,Rich in things and poor in soul.Save us from weak resignationTo the evils we deplore…Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,For the facing of this hour,For the facing of this hour.”* Harry Emerson Fosdick, during the Great Depression“Which side are you on?Which side are you on?Don’t scab for the bossesDon’t listen to their liesUs poor folk haven’t got a chanceUnless we organizeWhich side are you on?Which side are you on?”* Florence Reece, labor organizer and coal miner’s wife, 1931 This is a public episode. 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My motivation for writing this booklet is JD Vance becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. JD Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy and claims to be a voice for rural and small-town America. I’m American on my mother’s side, and in that maternal lineage, I am the 6th generation to grow up in rural/small-town America. I cannot stay silent.One of the biggest problems with JD Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy is that it plays into many of the worst right-wing attitudes about poverty. Ultimately, Vance’s take reinforces the idea that poverty is a character flaw and the poor are personally responsible for causing, and solving, their own suffering.The right wing tends to avoid speaking about poverty at all. To the right wing, white poor people are a shameful scourge best kept invisible, a betrayal to both white supremacy and capitalism, and a threat to be neutralized at all costs. Insofar as the right wing speaks of poverty, it is largely to blame poor people of color for all of society’s ills and attempt wholesale character assassination at every turn. In essence, JD Vance just breaks the right wing silence on white poverty by applying this same approach of individual blame to poor white people and implying that the solution is for the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.I’m used to the right wing treating all poor people like a stain on the nation - to be covered up or scourged.I’m used to the liberal elite looking at the poor of rural America with smugness and disdain. “They deserve what they get because they’re all a bunch of crazy Trump voters.”I’m used to urban working class and poor people of color thinking about rural America with some combination of wariness and distrust that I deeply respect but also mythologies that I believe are worth unpacking.In this booklet I have something to say to all three of these groups.To JD Vance and his ilk: This was done to us on purposeTo the Liberal Elite: Stop scapegoating the poorTo urban working class and poor people of color: The house is on fireGroup #1 - To JD Vance and his ilk:This was done to us on purpose.Rural and small town America is a “sacrifice zone” and you know it. You know full well that so many of America’s worst sins are hidden away in its remote areas. And you know full well that all of this has been done on purpose. More than that - you know full well who is to blame.Rural America is witness to this country’s original sins: dispossessing Indigenous people of their land, hiding subsequent reservations in remote rural areas, and denying reparations to formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War - the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule.” Consider the following words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Reparations Fund, 2024):At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today many of these people today are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies NOT to farm, and they are the very people telling the Black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. This is what we are faced with. And this is the reality now. When we come to Washington, in this campaign, we are coming to get our check.All of what Dr. King describes is true. However, Dr. King did not live long enough to see what happened after the 1960s.During the farm crises of the 1970s and 80s many families lost their farms to foreclosure, and much of this land then passed into the hands of ever-growing corporate agriculture (Bennett, 2022). The fuel crisis of the 70s, Cold War-era subsidies resulting in low crop prices, high interest rates, and tight credit all battered rural communities (Bennett, 2022; Green, 1985). By 1977, American farmers had lost $13 billion in revenue, and many could no longer cover the costs of their operation let alone make a profit (Bennett, 2022). Debt skyrocketed and then the foreclosures came. My mother’s family in Nebraska was no exception.My mother’s father is friends with one of the farmers in Brownville, NE who helped organize Tractorcade, a national effort by 5,000 farmers who drove their tractors to Washington DC in 1979 to protest conditions in rural America. The protesters were beaten, tear-gassed, and arrested, but some farmers still stayed afterwards to replant the sod on the Mall that had been torn up by the tractors (Bennett, 2022). In response to the protest, the Carter administration promised to stop farm foreclosures, but soon after the protestors left, the Home Administration resumed foreclosures on farms with past-due loans (Bennett, 2022).Photo from AAM protest in the late 1970s, photo courtesy of AgWebThe protest was associated with the American Agriculture Movement, an attempt to organize farmers into strikes and other forms of collective bargaining under the slogan “Parity not Charity” (Bennett, 2022). The USDA estimates that approximately 1.5 million farmers were involved with the AAM during its peak activity in the 70s and 80s (Bennett, 2022). The collective organizing did not stop with the Carter administration and continued into the Reagan administration, with one of the largest protests of farmers in U.S. history occurring in Ames, Iowa in 1985, with over 15,000 farmers gathered (Green, 1985). Unfortunately, none of these efforts were able to stop what came next for rural America.When Dr. King made the speech cited above, the overwhelming majority of agricultural land was still held by individual white families. By 1990 that number had decreased, with small and medium-sized farms accounting for nearly half of all agricultural production in the U.S. (McGreal, 2019). As of 2022 it is only 18.7% (McGreal, 2019).As of the 2022 Census of Agriculture, 75% of all farmland in the U.S. is owned by the largest 9% of operations, with the largest 2% controlling 42% of all farmland (USDA, 2024). Nationally, the average family farm is less than 500 acres (Shabandeh, 2024). The average size of the 9% of farms that own 75% of farmland was over 1,000 acres, with the top 2% averaging above 5,000 acres (Census of Agriculture, 2024). The total number of farms in the U.S. has dropped from roughly 2 million in 2016 to 1.8 million in 2022 while the average farm size has steadily increased (National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024).Images: USDA Economic Research Service & 2022 Farm CensusA person might reasonably ask - just because the land ownership is different, does that actually mean that people are suffering? And if so, how?Put simply, corporate consolidation in the agriculture industry has destroyed many people’s ability to live dignified lives. The loss of family farms causes ripple effects in local economies as well as the very social fabric of rural communities (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). Wealth becoming increasingly consolidated and extracted away from local economies has a compounding impact, such as decreasing the tax base to fund schools, which fuels further depopulation and job losses in education, health care, and small business, all threatening the viability of life in rural areas (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). The “hollowing out” of rural America has caused far too many rural areas and small towns to become “abandoned, economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems” (Edelmen, 2019). While social ties are often a source of resilience in rural areas and small towns, large-scale economic forces often damage the social fabric of communities beyond any easy repair as well.It’s not just the loss of family farms that has deeply scarred rural communities, it is also changes in agriculture-related industries like meatpacking. These were once jobs that, while difficult, provided a decent living to many small towns and rural communities. Most of those jobs no longer look anything like they used to and have been replaced with poverty wages and questionable labor practices. The book Methland provides one example of a man named Roland Jarvis from Oelwein, Iowa (Reding, 2010, pg. 50-51):In 1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and the wages fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet. His meth habit increased along with the purity of the dope. And then one day he did the math…He was making $50 every eight hours to do a job in which there was a 36% rate of injury, thereby making meatpacking the most dangerous vocation in the country. For this, Jarvis, now that he worked for Gillette, got no medical coverage for himself or his children, no promise of workers’ compensation should he be hurt, and no hope of advancement. With Iowa Ham, every employee had not only gotten benefits; they’d owned stock in the company.Roland Jarvis is just one of many rural people who faced these realities in the late 20th century. Keep in mind that these farm crises occurred largely at the same time as much of the industrial core of the North began to bottom out as well, forming what we now call the “Rust Belt.” Happening at the exact same time was the slow, painful death of the coal industry in Appalachia.In the decades following the Civil War, the burgeoning coal industry in Appalachia heavily recruited recently freed Black people, poor white sharecroppers already in Appalachia, and new European migrants, resulting in one of the first racially- integrated - but deeply exploited - workforces in the U.S. (Hill, 2021). These companies offered equal wages to both Black and white people, albeit extremely low wages, and there was no land ownership involved, as nearly all wage workers lived in “company towns” during the coal boom (Hill, 2021). The 20th century Coal Wars involved multiracial resistance to deadly working conditions, poverty wages, corporate control of every aspect of life in “company towns,” and attempts to squash unionization (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011).Many people know about the assassinations of Black leaders such as Dr. King, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X in the late 1960s, as well as the role of the federal government in their deaths (Haas, 2011). Although less well-known, poor white organizers working in multiracial movements in rural areas such as Appalachia often met the same fate, though more often at the hands of company-hired “gun thugs,” local police, or the Klan, rather than the FBI (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). Someone needs to print me a T-shirt that says: “They don’t need COINTELPRO if they get a corporation to do it for them.” The names of assassinated poor white organizers bear repeating as well - Joe Hill (d. 1915), Frank Little (d. 1917), Sid Hatfield (d. 1921), Harry Simms (d. 1932), Roving Picket strikers (d. 1959), John Howard (d. 1969), Lawrence Jones (d. 1973), Raymond Tackett (d. 1973), Karen Silkwood (d. 1974), James Waller (d. 1979), and many others.A miner in Brookside, Kentucky shows where gun thugs fired into his cabin, 1973Still image taken from Harlan County U.S.A. documentary (Kopple, 1976)People in Appalachia grew accustomed to stacking their mattresses up against the walls of their cabins at night and sleeping together on the floor - a thin layer of protection for when the “gun thugs” would come at night and fire machine guns into their homes (Hill, 2021). It became a nightly ritual when tensions were bad with the mining companies (Kopple, 1976).The well-known protest song “Which Side Are You On?” was written in 1931 by a woman named Florence Reece, a coal miner’s wife in eastern Kentucky, after company thugs burst into her house during the night searching for her husband who’d been involved in recent strikes (Kopple, 1976). Reece scribbled the lyrics on the back of a calendar:Which side are you on?Which side are you on?Don’t scab for the bossesDon’t listen to their liesUs poor folks haven’t got a chanceUnless we organizeWhich side are you on?Which side are you on?Reece and her family lived through a period called Bloody Harlan, a series of executions, bombings, and strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky during the Coal Wars. Reece is also featured in Harlan County U.S.A., a documentary from 1976 that covered the deadly 1973 Brookside Miners Strike against Duke Power Company in southeastern Kentucky, and one of the best pieces of media I could recommend to anyone who wishes to better understand Appalachia and the Coal Wars.By the end of the 1960s, over 7 million white people who had been born in the South had migrated to Northern urban areas, a mass internal migration of largely impoverished, rural white people that is rarely discussed in U.S. history (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). (Compare, for example, the 8 million people who have fled Venezuela since 2019, considered a major international displacement). It was young white Appalachians fleeing the violence and poverty of the Coal Wars who migrated to Chicago and became the primary white presence in the Black Panther-led Rainbow Coalition in the 1960s (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). The Rainbow Coalition attempted to organize poor and working class neighborhoods of all races in Chicago. Whether in Chicago or in Appalachia, government and corporate actors killed many people in the effort to kill these multiracial movements for grassroots power. The Chicago Rainbow Coalition lost a number of members to assassination, including Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark who were killed in 1969, and white Appalachians John Howard and Raymond Tackett who were killed in 1969 and 1973, respectively. (One of the best sources I have found on this unique history is the 2011 book Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power by Annie Sonnie and James Tracy.)Rainbow Coalition members including Fred Hampton (far right) attend a rally at Grant Park in Chicago, 1969 (Photo by Paul Sequiera/Getty Images)A variety of urban and rural communities experienced economic and political sabotage during the 20th century and many have never recovered. For displaced farmers and agricultural workers, for Rust Belt workers whose industries vanished, and for Appalachians in dying coal country, there was no guarantee of finding another “blue collar” career and simply being absorbed into a different workforce as the 20th century drew to a close. And as a result, a lot of bad things happened next.The rise of meth in rural and small town America is intimately tied to its economic crises. The best source I can recommend on this subject is the book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding. As rural/small town residents lost the economic footing they once had from family farms, union jobs, or coal mining, many of these workers began relying on meth to work longer and longer hours for less and less pay. As Methland comments about Lori Arnold, one of the dealers who helped built a meth empire in the Midwest: “In 1987, the year that Cargill cut wages at its Ottumwa meatpacking plant from $18/hour to $6.50/hour with no benefits, Lori Arnold sold a pound of pure, uncut crank for $32,000” (pg. 69). I highly recommend reading Methland, as it is the most comprehensive source I have found to date. But, the broad sweep of the meth story is as follows:* Meth was invented as a pharmaceutical by a Japanese physician in 1898 (Reding, 2010).* Meth was used extensively by all sides during WWII (Reding, 2010).* Meth was legally prescribed in the U.S. through the 1970s and became especially popular amongst agricultural workers (Reding, 2010 & Garriott, 2024).* Meth was made illegal and people who were hooked started making their own in home meth labs. Some biker gangs got involved but it was mostly small-time dealing. This meth is called “P2P” meth (Quinones, 2021).* Organized crime caught wind and wanted “in,” including Mexican cartels. Production ramped up considerably in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of this meth from “superlabs” was ephedrine meth, a different variety than the P2P kind found in home labs. For the first time in history, large swaths of rural America were labeled “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas” (Garriott, 2024).* Corporate interests lobbying against any attempt to regulate pseudoephedrine + the War on Drugs approach of incarceration rather than treatment made everything worse (Reding, 2010 & Quinones, 2021).* Rural communities were already reeling from meth by the time opioids ramped up (Garriott, 2024).* Meth looked like it was receding but since 2013 has rebounded with a vengeance, in no small part due to superlabs figuring out how to make an extra potent and refined version of P2P meth that has taken the nation by storm (Quinones, 2021). An unintended consequence of marijuana legalization in much of the U.S. was that many Mexican marijuana growers switched to producing this new concentrated P2P meth (Quinones, 2021). The rate of meth use is now at an all-time national high (Garriott, 2024).* In recent years many more people are suffering from both meth and opioid addictions at the same time and more and more meth is laced with fentanyl (Quinones, 2021).That’s the quick and dirty overview. For communities living through this, the up-close-and-personal details are even more painful. Sam Quinones, a journalist and author who has written frequently about meth over the past decade (including two books), wrote in a 2021 article in The Atlantic: “You don’t typically overdose and die on meth; you decay.” The gradual decay from meth is devastating and contributes significantly to homelessness and incarceration in rural communities. And the severity of damage is only increasing. Home-made P2P meth and lab-made ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years. With the switchover to this new P2P meth from cartel superlabs, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain. “Methamphetamine damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But [new] P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe” (Quinones, 2021).James Mahoney is a neuropsychologist at West Virginia University who has studied the effects of meth on the brain since the early 2000s. The psychosis he saw from ephedrine meth was bad, but frequently appeared to be the result of extended sleep deprivation, and people in recovery tended to heal completely from psychotic symptoms (much like crack, apparently). However, with new P2P meth, Mahoney says, “Now we’re seeing it instantaneously, within hours, in people who just used: psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, delusions,” and more and more people never recover from psychotic symptoms even when they have successfully ceased to use meth (Quinones, 2021). Quitting meth is a tall order in and of itself, as no medication-assisted therapies are available, such as methadone or Suboxone for opioid use (Quinones, 2021).Nick Reding captured a private thought of many rural Americans when he interviewed the mayor of Oelwein, Iowa about the impact of meth on his community. As the mayor said, “My fear is that there is no solution” (Reding, 2010, pg. 31).For rural communities the various waves of meth and opioids have been particularly devastating. Opioids made their way into rural and small town communities in two ways. The first was as prescribed opioids, and given that occupations like farming and meatpacking carry high risk of injury with little coverage for more holistic healthcare, there was no shortage of patients who needed inexpensive “solutions” for their pain. Additionally, organized crime began to pump opioids into the same distribution networks they had already built in rural America for meth.Nationally, the opioid crisis is the worst that it has ever been, largely due to the rise of fentanyl (Praun, 2023). Between 2018-2023 the rate of overdoses has grown more than 60%, and 105,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2022 alone (Praun, 2023).The result of these spiraling and compounding crises has been a series of negative outcomes for rural and small town America:* Population loss - Metropolitan areas make up 36% of all counties but accounted for 99% of population growth and job growth from 2008 to 2017 (Swenson, 2019). During this same period, 71% of metropolitan counties grew in population, whereas over half of small-town and rural counties did not grow or shrank (Swenson, 2019).* Rural blight - Due to population and economic loss, rural and small town areas are often resource-starved and struggle to maintain public transportation, public works, housing, commercial bases, and education, leading to blight (Swenson, 2019).* Substance use and overdoses - Rates of substance use overall are similar between urban and rural settings but severity of outcomes is different. For example, while rates of using any substance (including alcohol and marijuana) are roughly equal between urban and rural youth, rural youth are 35x more likely to use opioids than their urban counterparts (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019). Additionally, alcohol-related deaths and overdose rates have been higher in rural settings than urban ones for over a decade (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019).* Suicides - Rates of completed suicide are 55% higher in rural settings than in urban ones, largely due to limited access to mental health services, high levels of substance use, higher access to firearms, reduced access to timely emergency services, and higher suicide rates in populations of veterans, Indigenous people, and men in general (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019).* Poor health outcomes and early death - Rural areas experience higher rates of chronic disease, lower access to healthy food, lowered life expectancies, worse maternal and infant health outcomes, and lack of access to healthcare services (Rural Health Information Hub, 2019). Additionally, it is primarily rural, conservative states whose state legislatures refused to expand Medicaid access after the Affordable Care Act (Barber, 2024). Just as one example, my home state of Indiana consistently ranks within the bottom 10 of all 50 states in most health outcomes and was one such state to reject the expansion of Medicaid (Indiana Department of Health, 2022).* Social and political abandonment - The proliferation of rural sacrifice zones has not been accompanied by broader political or societal attempts to provide for the wellbeing of communities undergoing massive economic restructuring (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). Many rural/small town residents struggle with feelings that they are intentionally forgotten and left-behind people of the world, that “nobody cares,” and that there is “no hope” for reviving a place they may have once known as vibrant.* Violence and crime - The average murder rate is 40% higher in the 25 states that voted for Trump compared to those that voted for Biden (Murdock & Kessler, 2022). Most of the states in the top ten for per capita murder rate are largely conservative and rural. This is contrary to the dominant media narrative that Democratic-run states are “ground zero” of violent crime.Image courtesy of Red State Murder Problem* Mass incarceration - Across the board, more rural and more conservative states have significantly higher rates of incarceration than their urban and liberal counterparts. Incarceration has largely been the catch-all societal answer to compounding issues of drugs, poverty, violence, lack of opportunity, lack of resources, homelessness, and the social fabric unraveling throughout rural and small town America. This is just a sampling, but consider the rates of incarceration per 100,000 population in the following states (Widra, 2024):Louisiana - 1067 Nebraska - 591Kentucky - 889 California - 494Tennessee - 817 Illinois - 433Texas - 751 New York - 317Indiana - 721 New Jersey - 270A person might reasonably ask, if rural and small town America are suffering so much, then who are all these factory farms, meatpacking plants, and agribusiness employing these days? By and large, it is less and less U.S.-born laborers. It is more and more migrant laborers, the majority of whom come from Latin America. Against the backdrop of corporate consolidation, slashed wages and benefits, and NAFTA, the labor force in rural America began to drastically change in composition in the 21st century. According to a New York Times article published in 2001, a government study found that 40% of agricultural workers in the U.S. were here illegally, and 25% of all meatpacking workers were here illegally (Reding, 2010, pg. 150). Also in 2001, a CBS news report found that 80% of workers at a Cargill plant in Schuyler, Nebraska were from Latin America and 40% were here illegally. Wages were pegged at $5 an hour (Reding, 2010, pg. 151).The practice soon became rubber-stamped after a series of court cases failed to hold corporations accountable in any way other than “slap on the wrist” fines. Both corporate and governmental leadership agreed to simply look the other way. Methland describes one such seminal case in 2001 (Reding, 2010, pg. 153):A failed 2001 federal criminal case brought against a Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, made clear that corporations would essentially not be held liable for employing or recruiting illegal immigrants to work in the plants. Despite the fact that two Shelbyville managers were caught on tape by federal investigators asking human traffickers for five hundred undocumented workers over four months, Tyson’s defense team successfully maintained that it’s too difficult for Tyson employees to determine who’s who among the legal and illegal employees. The ruling institutionalized the notion that employers of immigrants are not beholden to offering the same rights to workers that other companies must, for the simple reason that they don’t know - and don’t need to know - who works for them.Two decades later, the pattern has only become more entrenched. As University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan says, “Cracking down on illegal immigration would cripple the food production system” (Reding, 2010, pg. 159). Human rights abuses are rampant, from human trafficking to wage theft (National Center for Farmworker Health, 2020). But lest we be tempted to think that only undocumented people face such abuses, let us remember: people can be in the country legally and still be exploited. It happens all the time.For example, the U.S. is seeing an upsurge in child labor, particularly amongst children who are asylum-seekers. Under federal law, these children have every legal right to pursue their asylum cases, but child labor statutes still prohibit companies from hiring them. NBC News recently conducted a year-long investigation about child labor in American slaughterhouses (Strickler, Ainsley & Martinez, 2023). The report found pervasive hiring of children as young as 14. The U.S. Department of Labor estimated in 2023 that around 6,000 children were employed in slaughterhouses throughout the country, but the number is likely higher, especially given that 250,000 unaccompanied migrant children have arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum during 2021 and 2022 alone (Dreier, 2023). NBC News found that the number of children being illegally employed in the U.S. has increased by 88% since 2019. Many of the children employed in slaughterhouses work night shifts between school days. One child laborer described to NBC News that she can make $100 in a single day compared with $1 a day in Guatemala, and she is sending as much of the money home as she can.A series of deaths of children (such as Duvan Pérez at Mar-Jac in Mississippi) have recently garnered media attention to the issue. The NBC report notes that the maximum federal fine for hiring a child is $15,138 per instance. In an interview with NBC, a lawyer representing Mar-Jac commented, “The publicity is far worse than the penalty.” Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Mar-Jac, Hearthside Foods, Gerber’s Poultry, Win.It America, and others in the industry are all currently under federal investigation for child labor violations. At the same time, lawmakers in Republican-controlled states have recently introduced a slew of laws to scale back or repeal child labor laws (1A Podcast, 2023). The Labor Department tracks the deaths of foreign-born child laborers but stopped making the data publicly available in 2017 during Trump’s presidency (Dreier, 2023).Duvan Pérez, age 16, image provided by NBC NewsSome people are in the country legally and have permission to work and are still exploited. The federal government does provide a type of visa for temporary agricultural labor, called an H-2A visa. Approximately 10% of the agricultural workforce in the U.S. is on H-2A visas (NCFH, 2020). However, this visa is the responsibility of the employer and is expensive, costing nearly $2,000 per employee in administrative fees, plus legal requirements to cover travel costs and housing (NCFH, 2020). Between 2010 and 2017, the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. under the H-2A visa program increased by 196% (NCFH, 2020). The H-2A workforce is 93% male and tends to live in temporary housing provided by the hiring company (NCFH, 2020). Despite legal permission to work, many H-2A workers still experience exploitative conditions such as wage theft, substandard housing, and hazardous conditions. A person’s H-2A visa is tied to the specific employer who brought them to work, meaning that H-2A employees are not at liberty to switch employers while in the country (NCFH, 2020). This arrangement makes H-2A employees more vulnerable to exploitation.Whether on a visa or not, this new rural labor force is very different from a labor force that lives permanently in the area, has families, opens businesses, gets counted in the census, goes to school and church, and gets elected to local government. This is not a dig at the laborers, as it is no personal flaw of theirs, and it is also not really a dig at the surrounding local population either, who are not the people deciding whether this migrant labor force stays or goes. It’s a fact about the system.Rural areas and small towns are losing out from the fact that the majority of people performing agricultural labor are not creating vibrant communities where they work. Despite the high volume of people flowing in and out of rural places to work in these industries, they remain largely invisible to the rest of American society, profoundly exploited, and sharply segregated from local populations. For companies whose main goal is access to workers who will accept their low wages and lack of benefits and protections, no matter how temporary those workers are, the system is working just fine. It is not necessarily many companies’ top priority to find a pathway so that the workers and the community can truly invest in one another.It is not that immigrants came to rural America and “stole” all the jobs. It is more so that corporations eliminated the jobs that used to exist, created entirely different jobs, many of them involving illegal labor practices, and then opened the doors for a new workforce to fill those jobs. I think many people, if phrased this way, would agree that a job with a living wage, union protection, and full benefits is a fundamentally different job than working for minimum wage (or lower) with no protections and no benefits. These are different jobs. The old jobs are dead. When talking about this with people sometimes I say: “Is it really that immigrants stole your job, or is it that your job just doesn’t exist anymore? The jobs that immigrants are working are not the jobs that you once worked. And who was it that decided that? Immigrants? Or the company?” But unfortunately demagoguery encourages placing blame on the migrant workers themselves rather than any other hand that has tipped the scales. And the hands have truly tipped the scales towards lots of different people being harmed in rural America. It’s not just one group or another group that is suffering. Misery loves company.A 2021 report entitled “Coping with Stress, Suicide, and Stigma in Farm Country” named the following factors contributing to toxic stress and community trauma in rural settings (Ryder-Marks, 2021):* Chronic population loss due to economic change* Lack of social or economic mobility* Financial uncertainty due to macro and microeconomic factors* Structural racism* Structural marginalization of people experiencing poverty* Climate change and related disasters (fires, droughts)* Mass incarceration* Drugs and alcohol including prescription opioids* Lack of access to health care, healthy food, education* Erosion of social safety nets* “Invisible” populations: migrant workers, prisoners, reservationsThe fact that we so often aggregate data based on race is hiding what is going on with rural America. Although “rural” is not synonymous with “white,” rural areas are proportionally more white than urban areas. Because we always group urban and rural white people together in racialized data, a few things get buried.Take wealth as an example. White people, as a demographic, are becoming more polarized with regards to wealth, with the rich becoming richer, the poor becoming poorer, and the middle class hollowing out. White people, more so than other demographics, were previously centered in the middle classes in more of a neat-and-tidy Bell Curve. This was particularly true from 1947 to 1974 when America had the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class (Hanauer, 2020). White people are now shifting more dramatically than any other demographic towards the extremes of poor and ultrarich. However, lumping extreme data points together can still give averages that seem pretty moderate, even though they do not represent the lived experiences of most people in the dataset. A lot of statistics about “average” white wealth are really an imaginary middle point between extreme wealth and poverty, a middle point that fewer and fewer people are actually living.For example, one statistic reveals that the “average” white family has a $168K higher net worth than the “average” Black family (Kochar & Moslimani, 2023). And yet, somehow, 63% of America lives paycheck-to-paycheck (Picchi, 2023). How do you reconcile the massive difference in “average” wealth compared to the rate of people living paycheck-to-paycheck?U.S. Census data for 2022 contains the following demographic breakdown about the percentage of households (not individuals) that earn over $200K a year (Guzman & Kollar, 2023):22.8% of Asian households12.3% of white households6.8% of Hispanic households6.1% of Black households5.5% of American Indian/Alaska Native householdsHowever, “over $200K” is as high as the U.S. Census data reports. We do not get a breakdown on how high over $200K this income bracket goes. We don’t get census data about the percentage of people who make over a million dollars, or over a billion. (Which is kind of wild, if you think about it.) Only 12.3% of white households make over $200K a year, which doesn’t seem like a lot. But the wealth in the high end of this bracket is ENORMOUS, and considerably higher than the other racial demographics in this “over $200K/year” bracket. Consider the following realities:* The U.S.has more billionaires than any other nation on earth - 814 billionaires as of 2024, including 10 who are in the $100+ billion club (Peterson-Withorn, 2024).* Since the mid 1960s the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have doubled their wealth. (Barber, 2024, pg. 9).* At the turn of the 21st century, the top 20 percent of people held 85 percent of the total wealth in the United States. (Barber, 2024, pg. 9).* Two decades later, in 2023, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned more wealth than 80 percent of the U.S. population combined. (Federal Reserve, 2023)Although some of the ultrarich are not white, the overwhelming majority are white (Murray & Jenkins, 2024). So, this 12.3% of white people who make over $200k a year includes the overwhelming majority of the ultrarich, and when this cohort is combined with the rest of white people to calculate “average wealth,” it brings the average way up - deceptively so.Now consider the other end of the Census data: the percentage of households (again, not individuals, but households) that live off of a combined income of less than $35K a year:16% of Asian households22% of white households23.3% of Hispanic households29.9% of American Indian/Alaska Native households33.5% of Black householdsThese statistics clearly show a disproportionate lack of wealth impacting Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people. That being said, some people would still be surprised to learn that there are nearly double the number of white households living with less than $35K a year than there are white households living with more than $200K a year. Some people might also be surprised to learn the following:* In 2016 there was not a single county in the United States where someone working full time at minimum wage could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment (Institute for Policy Studies, 2018).* While more than 19 million American renters are paying more than 30% of their limited incomes on housing (US Census Bureau, 2022), 600,000 people are homeless and millions more live on the edge of homelessness (US Department for Housing and Urban Development, 2022).* Sixty-three percent of U.S. workers today live paycheck-to-paycheck and 40% have no net worth at all (Picchi, 2023).* The average worker in America makes $54 a week less than they did 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation (DeSilver, 2018).The official statistic of the federal government is that 11.3% of Americans live in poverty. However, there are some serious problems with how the federal government calculates its official poverty measure (OPM). The current OPM is an outdated metric that has not been updated since it was first developed in the 1960s to determine which families could benefit from anti-poverty measures. The federal government estimated that a family’s budget was roughly three times what they spent on food, a measure that was fairly accurate at the time (Barber, 2024). However, since the 1960s, food prices have risen fourfold, but median rent in the U.S. has risen more than sixteen-fold (Barber, 2024). Using a measure that multiplies a family’s food budget by three will no longer predict whether a family is going to be homeless next month.Researchers have suggested an alternative OPM, and Biden adopted this alternative OPM in some of his speeches and 2020 campaign materials, although federal policy has not yet changed (Rizzo, 2019; Barber, 2024). This new proposed OPM asks the question: what is the budget required to cover basic necessities, broken down for every type of family structure (single adult, two parents with two children, etc.), and for every U.S. county (to account for huge variations in housing costs, in particular), and how many individuals and families are unable to afford basic necessities where they live? (Fuhrer, 2024). This massive and complex effort was spearheaded by the Economic Policy Institute and recently released its findings. Using this measure, 140 million Americans would qualify as poor or low-income, which is 43% of the population (Fuhrer, 2024).Of these 140 million, 24 million are Black (17%), 66 million are white (47%), and 50 million (36%) are all other races (Fuhrer, 2024). Given that the U.S. population is 13% Black and 60% white, Black people are overrepresented and white people are underrepresented amongst the poor (U.S. Census, 2022). Additionally, the 24 million Black people living below this alternative OPM line make up 59% of the total Black population of the U.S., revealing the incredible economic disadvantage placed on this community (Fuhrer, 2024). The 66 million white people in poverty make up 37% of the total white population, by contrast (Fuhrer, 2024). However, it is also true that there are over two times as many poor white people as poor Black people, and white people make up the single largest demographic cohort of the poor.Two things about white people are being obscured in most of these conversations about wealth that use “average” data: the extreme accumulation of wealth by one part of white America and the economic downfall of another part of white America. These trends are being obscured in our most commonly-used Census data, for starters, because we don’t distinguish families making $250 million a year from families making $250K a year. This hides the ultra-wealthy. And then in any data that breaks people down into racial demographics, the increasingly wealthy white ruling class is always averaged together with an increasingly impoverished white working class. The extremes amongst white people are smoothed out. The economic inequality facing Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic communities is much clearer in the data at first glance…not that this translates to political and cultural will to do anything about it.No one thing has caused economic inequality in America. It is all connected: technology and globalization killing industry in the Rust Belt and Appalachia, vertical consolidation in agriculture industries of rural America, willingness to commit genocide against Indigenous peoples, willingness to make every possible effort to keep Black people an exploited class rather than full owners and participants in American democracy, willingness to sacrifice the white middle class/working class for corporate gain, willingness to exploit migrants and have the punishment for corporations be a “slap on the wrist” compared to the profits, drugs and the War on Drugs, housing crises, the list goes on and on. It is all connected.Not all poor white people are rural, and not all rural white people are poor. And not all rural people are white, and not all white people are rural. However, there is a connection between race, class, and geography that I think few people take the time to name explicitly. Poor white people are disproportionately concentrated in rural areas and small towns, and their poverty is not a fluke or an accident. By and large, their economic well-being has been sabotaged and little has been offered to them as a solution or path forward. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a Black American clergyman and Civil Rights leader, just published a new book called White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. He writes,“Yes, racism persists, making rates of poverty higher in communities of color. But the same lie that blames Black people for their poverty also prevents us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than ‘whiteness’ and angry tweets to sustain them in an economy where the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and transportation have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for almost all Americans” (2024, pg. xiv).Rev. Dr. Barber II writes, “And this is what you never hear: most of America’s poor are white. I sound the alarm about white poverty because I’m convinced that we can’t expose the peculiar exceptionalism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths pretend to privilege” (pg. 10). America would not hold the exceptional status as the country with the highest rate of poverty in the Global North were it not for white poverty (Alston, 2018).JD Vance wrote extensively about family demons in Hillbilly Elegy and immediately threw his kin into the double standard that is far too common in America: all families have demons, both rich and poor, but only the poor have their socioeconomic status blamed on their most intimate flaws. But blaming all systemic poverty on the personal failings of the impoverished is too simplistic. “The poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world.” - Gustavo Gutierrez (from Foiles, 2019, pg. i).JD Vance has since “bent the knee” to a right wing that wants to place the blame for America’s woes anywhere but themselves. I say to them: Just like you can’t blame all poor people individually for massive economic failures, you can’t blame your problems on immigrants, drag queens, Muslims, transgender children, Black Lives Matter, DEI programs, antifa, birth control, gun control, environmentalists or most of the other boogeymen reviled by the right. Rural and small town America has been sacrificed to corporate greed and cultural apathy. Politicians across the ideological spectrum have been complicit, and it’s been going on for decades. Not everyone who is suffering in rural and small-town America is white, and not everyone who is white and poor lives in rural or small-town America. But in a lot of ways the conversation about the sacrifice of rural and small town America is a conversation about white poverty. White Americans suffering from poverty have a group who is squarely responsible for their pain: the overwhelmingly white ruling class. This is dirt that some white people did to some other white people and you know it, JD Vance. You know it.Group #2 - To the Liberal Elite:Stop scapegoating the poor.You can’t actually blame poor people for Trump, so stop trying. And so many people in rural and small town America can smell your disdain and arrogance from thousands of miles away, they really can, and they know full well that you don’t care whether they live or die. They are the living and dying proof. Stop scapegoating poor people for America turning into a strip mall death cult.A report from Columbia University showed that low-income voter turnout has been at minimum 20% lower than that of higher-income voters for the past 36 years straight (Hartley, 2020). The report also showed that voter suppression measures kept 34 million low-income people of all races from voting in 2016 (Hartley, 2020). In 2016 when Trump was elected, only 55.7% of the voting-age population actually voted (Grimlich, 2020).It’s an oft-quoted statistic that “53% of American white women voted for Trump in 2020.” This is misleading. Fifty-three percent of white women who voted cast a ballot for Trump (Igielnik, Keeter, & Hartig, 2021). In raw numbers, that is only about one-third of the total population of adult white women in America (US Census, 2022). This one-third of white women who voted for Trump is still far higher than any other racial demographic of women (Igielnik, Keeter, & Hartig, 2021). The correlation with whiteness is plain as day. But it is inaccurate to say that the majority of American white women have cast a vote for Trump. They have not. The two-thirds majority of white women are those who voted for Biden or didn’t vote at all. The white women who voted for Trump tend to be older and wealthier than the average American (The Economist, 2024). The white women who don’t vote at all tend to be poor and low-income (Barber, 2024). Pointing this out is not about apologetics for the people whose votes for Trump made their voices loud and clear. It’s about the willingness to question - whose voice isn’t being heard at all?From Pew Research CenterI believe it would be naive to speculate that all poor and low-income people would vote the way Liberal Elites would want if they did begin to vote en masse. However, looking at existing data from prior elections is not speculation. The poor and low-income people that do vote have not been a solid base for Trump. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won every income bracket above $50,000 but lost every income bracket below $50,000 - by more than 9 points (Barber, 2024). The majority of individuals making less than $50K a year who did actually vote did NOT vote for Trump, and this is across ALL demographic lines of race, gender, religion, and geography. Remember, there are nearly twice as many white households making less than $35K a year as there are white households making over $200K (US Census, 2022). White people make up the single largest demographic of poor people - who Trump has never been able to win over. You cannot blame Donald Trump on poor white people.The fact that so few poor and low-income people “participate in democracy” is not a rebuke solely to one party or the other - it is an indictment of our entire society. Alienation from society can occur on many different levels, from neglect and abandonment to downright abuse. Some poor and low-income people are marginalized by intentional efforts to keep them out of the voting pool or dull their impact, such as restrictive voter registration laws or gerrymandering. Other poor and low-income people are marginalized by collective failures to address poverty. When surveyed, most low-income people who do not vote state the following reasons for not voting: they do not feel they are represented by the candidates who are running, or they do not think their vote would make a difference (Barber, 2024).We only need to look at patterns of mass incarceration to help explain why this might be the case for both Black and white people living in poverty. Mass incarceration has been the main “solution” to poverty in both urban and rural areas, orchestrated by both Democrats and Republicans. In liberal states the prevailing poverty is in urban communities of color. In conservative states the prevailing poverty is in rural white communities. Both groups experience mass incarceration.Liberal/urban states have lower rates of incarceration over all, but higher racial disparities, sometimes significantly so. Rural states with higher overall rates of incarceration still have racial disparities, but not at the same levels. Consider, for the following states, the rate at which the Black population is incarcerated compared to the white population (Prison Policy Institute, 2024; Widra, 2024):In these states, the general population is majority white, but the incarcerated population is majority Black (or in the case of New York that does not have a true majority of any race incarcerated, Black people are the single largest cohort, and the incarcerated population is majority non-white). In these states, Black people are incarcerated at 7.5-11.9 times higher rates than white people. Compare this to (Prison Policy Institute, 2024; Widra, 2024):In these states the majority of the population is white, the majority of the incarcerated population is white, and the rates of incarceration are higher. However, the Black population is still incarcerated at 2.9-4.4 times higher rates than the white population.Many rural states have higher incarceration rates in general, and while still disproportionate towards communities of color, have both majority white populations and majority white incarcerated populations. This is compared to more urban/liberal states where incarcerated populations are majority Black, despite the general population still being majority white, meaning that mass incarceration is extremely targeted towards communities of color.What is either party offering immiserated and impoverished people other than mass incarceration? Prisons and policing are the main “solution” being offered in both urban and rural areas to address the shared suffering of poverty, addiction, homelessness, violence, and despair.Does it make sense now? Just one of many reasons why poor Black people and poor white people might have disengaged from voting in general? Let alone the barriers that people with criminal records face in voting at all? Can you see how a broad array of people impacted by poverty and mass incarceration are being betrayed by the political machines that dominate their home states? Can you understand why so many people living in poverty do not feel represented, and even feel that voting wouldn’t make a difference in the issues they face? The biggest battle is not to get poor people to stop supporting Trump - the biggest battle is poor people having a voice at all.So answer me this, Liberal Elite - for all the contempt you have towards “dumb hicks” who are “getting what they deserve” because Republicans keep getting elected - do the Black people in liberal states who are incarcerated at rates 7.5-11.9 times higher than their white counterparts “deserve” what is happening to them because Democrats keep getting elected? So do the poor white communities in Republican-run states with massively higher rates of incarceration really “deserve” what is being done to them either? Or are a lot of ordinary people being betrayed by those claiming to represent them? Is it possible that neither party is truly addressing the needs of people in poverty? What leg do you have to stand on, exactly?Liberal Elite, there is so much you don’t see and don’t know. I grew up in southern Indiana. Remember that Indiana’s rate of incarceration is nearly double that of Illinois and Indiana’s jail population is 77% white. The IndyStar conducted a detailed investigative report on Indiana’s county jails in 2021 (Evans & Martin, 2021). Indiana does not have a public agency that tracks the number of people who die in its county jails. But the results of the IndyStar investigation found that, given what it was able to find from news accounts, obituaries, and FOIA-ing sheriffs and coroners offices, and the data that is available from other states who do bother to track such things, Indiana has one of the deadliest jail systems in the country. Mental health crises, drugs, and poverty land tens of thousands of people in pre-trial detention, hundreds die, and the state doesn’t even bother to keep count.The IndyStar found that many of the deaths were fully caught on the jail cameras. I watched some of them and wish that I hadn’t. Some are tortured to death in restraint chairs, which jailers call “going for a ride.” I watched the death of a white man named Jeremy Oswalt, 38 years old. He’d been in pre-trial detention for 8 weeks. Alone in a cell surrounded by trash, feces, and urine, he’d been handcuffed and strapped naked to the restraint chair. A hood was pulled over his head. Sometimes a jailer would enter the cell and splash a bucket of water on him. He died of hypothermia, dehydration, and malnutrition. He’d been booked after having hallucinations and tweaking at some customers at a convenience store. No one had been hurt. Another white man, Jerod Draper, was tortured to death by six jailers with Tasers while being “taken for a ride” on a restraint chair, a mere eight hours after being arrested for meth possession during a traffic stop. Turns out it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, everyone cries out for their mother when they’re being tortured to death. Some of the footage the IndyStar found was people hanging themselves while jailers just watched.Jerod Draper in an undated family photo (Image source: IndyStar)My first time not being able to make someone’s bail was when I was 19. I had two friends, Andrew and Sarah, a couple, both white, who were about my same age and who were living on the streets over by where I stayed. I didn’t have housing to offer them at the time, but we hung out whenever we could. Sometimes I’d bring food. Sometimes they insisted on sharing their food too, if they had some. Sometimes I’d give them rides. I had a white ‘98 Volvo Station wagon at the time, entirely held together with duct tape, and you had to use a two-by-four to keep the trunk open. Sometimes we’d just chill. I was using a wheelchair at the time and these were the days when I would just park myself in my wheelchair somewhere in town and chill with whoever was on the streets nearby. But with Andrew and Sarah we’d call and text too, when they had phones. Much of their time was spent trying to find jobs and not get beat senseless by the cops who were escalating violence around town at all the homeless people at the time.One day Sarah called me in a panic - Andrew had been arrested on suspicion of a “stolen cell phone” but they found a small amount of meth on him. I went to put money on his books so he could buy socks. It was February and we all know the jails are freezing and they don’t give anyone socks or underwear or anything else besides the basic 1-ply jumpsuit. You have to buy all that stuff in commissary. I had enough for socks and underwear and toothpaste. But we couldn’t make the $2,000 bail. Then he disappeared. Sarah couldn’t find him. Staff at the jail just said he “wasn’t there anymore.” They claimed he wasn’t in their system and refused to say anything else. His cell phone was still confiscated. He simply disappeared. Sarah was distraught. We looked all over town. We never found him. I wonder if the IndyStar did.The location where I last saw Andrew, the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Pete Ellis Drive in Bloomington, IN.Many small towns in Indiana would buy bus tickets for people who were living on the streets and send them to Bloomington, where Indiana University is and where I went to school, because there are more resources in a college town - hypothetically. But too many towns throughout the entire state did this rather than confront the systemic issues at hand. And then we saw the whole thing fall apart - not only did Bloomington genuinely run out of capacity to address all the needs of the people arriving, but also the liberal facade in the university town totally cracked. A lot of the people who weren’t directly impacted by these issues, but had thought that they had liberal ideas about homelessness, suddenly realized they didn’t want to see all these poor people. There’s a lot of transplants in a college town who are not originally from rural areas, who, when suddenly confronted with the realities of rural America, had a very adverse reaction. Everything got worse in 2013 after they found Ian Stark’s frozen body behind the stairs of a “respectable” apartment building near campus. Can’t have poor people starting to die on the literal doorsteps of the comfortable or affluent.The cops in Indiana do the same thing as cops in Chicago where they raid homeless encampments and push people from place to place, or just put people in jail. But in Indiana, the sweeps and raids often end up pushing people into the woods. And that’s where people really become invisible. So that’s where the cops set encampments on fire. And there’s people who don’t make it out alive. And everyone in town came to understand this - if they succeed in pushing people out into the forests, that’s where the violence really escalates, that’s where things really turn deadly. So the attempt to defend encampments in town started to escalate as well. One night in July 2017 we were trying to prevent one of these sweeps that would push people into the woods and a prison guard plowed his car through the crowd. He missed me by inches, carrying away the person next to me.When cops burn you alive in a forest, your skin is the first thing to go. And if that’s not some American poetry, I don’t know what the hell is.In case it still needs to be said, Liberal Elite:No one deserves this.No one deserves this.No one deserves this.Aftermath at a homeless encampment in the woods outside of Bloomington, IN that was torched on December, 18th, 2024. Photo credit: Jeremy Hogan, The BloomingtonianGroup #3 - To poor and working class people of color in urban areas:The house is on fire.At the beginning of this booklet I said that I was accustomed to hearing your wariness, distrust, and mythologies about rural America. I’m not here to try and take away wariness and distrust - those, I respect. I’m only here to talk about the mythologies. I am not trying to drum up sympathy for white people. Sympathy is politically toothless. But I’m not here to lecture anyone about “solidarity” either. I think solidarity is only possible when trust is built and respect is earnt and I’m not going to presume that foundation is already laid.You know the phrase “truth & reconciliation” - I’m only here to do the “truth” part, to bear witness honestly to what is happening to my communities. How you reconcile that truth with your own truth is for you to determine. I’m not here to tell you how to feel. And I’m definitely not here to ask you to care, or to act, or to somehow carry the burden of the suffering I’m telling you about.I’m here to tell truths that might help us all see through some powerful lies from powerful people. These lies have different effects in different communities but they only produce harm.I’ve met a lot of people of color in Chicago who genuinely believe that urban communities are the areas of the country most plagued by violence, a narrative that you hear on right-wing media constantly. The truth is more complicated. Chicago is indeed a tragic outlier with a murder rate far higher than other major cities like New York City or Los Angeles, but it’s also true that the average murder rate is 40% higher in the 25 states that voted for Trump compared to those that voted for Biden (Murdock & Kessler, 2022). Most of the states in the top ten for per capita murder rate are largely conservative and rural. The researchers who published this finding removed the largest cities in these “red states” from the data and the pattern still held, which confirms that it isn’t just the most urban areas in these “red states” that are driving the murder rates: this is rural violence. (See Red State Murder Problem for the full analysis.) Three of the five states with the largest increase in murder rate in recent years are overwhelmingly rural too: Wyoming at 91.7% increase, South Dakota at 69%, and Nebraska at 59.1%. All of this data is contrary to the dominant media narrative that Democratic-run urban areas are most plagued by violent crime, which many people within these communities seem to have internalized as well. Chicago has its problems, but it’s not alone in that regard.For what it’s worth, my friends in Chicago tend to be surprised when I tell them that there is a 127% difference in the rate of violent crime between the wealthy, majority-white suburb of Deerfield, IL (near Chicago) and the significantly less wealthy, majority-white town of Bloomington, IN where I grew up (according to 2022 data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation). Some friends in Chicago are surprised to learn that the first shooting I ever witnessed was in Pigeon Hill, a neighborhood in Bloomington with mostly Section 8 housing, at the age of 12.So I ask you: Who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?When asked, “What area of the U.S. has the highest rate of children in the foster system?” I believe that many people would name a community like the South Side of Chicago. Some would do so out of overt racism. Others would do so out of the opposite - the desire to name the impact of white supremacy on communities of color who have their children taken away from them at disproportionate rates, which is true. However, neither group answered the question correctly.The area of the U.S. with the highest rate of children in the foster system is rural West Virginia (Amorbieta, 2024). The state is 93% white and ranked 49th in the country in terms of median income (U.S. Census, 2022).So I ask you: Who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?My friends in Chicago are not surprised when I talk about the Islamophobic hate crime I survived in 2016 when two white men in a pick-up truck attacked me on a rural road in Indiana. However, my friends in Chicago *are* surprised to learn that, in the rural, overwhelmingly white county where I was attacked, 27% of all children have a household member who is incarcerated and 51% of all children have any family member who is incarcerated (Keesler et al., 2021). My friends are also surprised to learn that this county has no public transit. None whatsoever. Anywhere in the county.So I ask you: who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?Photos of the attackers’ truck, State Road 37, Indiana, July 22nd, 2016It is a well-known fact that the War on Drugs has been a major driving factor in mass incarceration over the last 40 years. It is also a well-known fact that there are blatant racial disparities when it comes to sentencing drug crimes. The most notorious is the sentencing difference between crack and cocaine. Although crack and cocaine are the same substance, crack is associated with Black users and cocaine is associated with white users. And lo and behold, you have to be caught in possession of roughly 18x more cocaine to be sentenced to the same amount of time as crack possession (Nellis, 2024). Crack possession is sentenced with 18x harsher sentences than cocaine. What is far less known is that cocaine is not just a “white people drug” - it’s a rich white people drug. Poor white people don’t do cocaine, they do meth. And turns out, there is not a similar racial disparity between crack and meth. Nationally, people serve roughly the same amount of time for crack and meth (Bjerk, 2017). Cocaine users get off easy compared to both groups.Again, I don’t say this with any kind of demand to you - I make no demand on your time, energy, care, or mercy. I say all of this simply to pose the questions: Whose bad behavior is being hidden here? Who is getting away with harm? Could it be that the same bad actors are hurting multiple different communities in different ways? And they’ll pick whatever reason they want to justify the damage?Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II writes (White Poverty, pg. xvi), “I take on white poverty as a declaration that Black people may have problems, but we are not the problem. Other people face the same struggles we do.” I think I understand the Reverend’s point - the existence and prevalence of white poverty helps combat racist myths that paint Black people, and Blackness itself, as a problem. However, I am cautious about the word “same.”I don’t think that people of color and white poor and working class people are experiencing the exact same struggle. When communities of color experience poverty, violence, and mass incarceration, it is so often for the mere fact of skin color - it is racism. Poor white people are not experiencing these things because of racism against the color of their skin. But it is also true that the color of their skin has not prevented them from experiencing poverty, violence, and mass incarceration. And this is awkward and hard to talk about.White supremacy built a system where whiteness was constructed to give white people safety, abundance, and the presumption of innocence (aka impunity) while denying these exact things to non-white peoples. So how do you talk about white communities who have been stripped of their safety, abundance, and presumption of innocence? How do you talk about white people who do not have access to these things and are not lying about that, but at the same time are not experiencing any of these bad outcomes because of racism? I can’t claim to have it down perfectly, but I would like to suggest we need something besides pretending this group of people doesn’t exist or the same old tired right wing approaches of putting blame in all the wrong places. Talking about white poverty in rural and small town America is not easy, and as a nation we don’t have much practice doing it well. There’s a lot of potential to step on people’s toes - and traumas.I have a memory from Indiana: During Black Lives Matters protests in 2014, a friend of mine was approached by Black organizers, most of whom were from out-of-state, to “self-organize” poor whites who had also suffered police brutality and get them to show up for BLM efforts. My friend gave it a shot. He built a relationship with the mother of a young, unarmed white man who had been shot and killed by police. The mother was overjoyed that finally someone had come and talked to her. She was very eager to tell the story of her son’s death and the senselessness of it, the cruelty of it. She was open to the idea of speaking with the mother of a young unarmed Black man who had recently been shot by cops in Indianapolis. Both grieving mothers were open, as it turned out, and connected with one another.My friend spoke with the white mother about throwing her weight behind BLM events where the mother of this other young Black man was going to speak. The white mother was enthused and even offered to talk about her son and his death and the brutality of police violence. The response from the BLM organizers, however, was, “This is not a space that centers white bodies.” The white mother’s response was, “What the heck does that mean?” And from there, the entire effort fell apart. This was not a gap that could be bridged. No one involved had much practice bridging the gap, to be honest. The only people who built a true bridge were the two grieving mothers - privately, intimately, as only grieving mothers can. The political contradictions, however, were beyond anyone’s skill at that point. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this encounter since: How do you help a poor white mother contextualize her son’s death so that she understands why it’s not her turn to speak at a BLM protest? Or, how do you help BLM organizers who aren’t from rural America to understand enough about police brutality in this context that they actually welcome a white mother weighing in? How do you help everyone on all sides articulate why Black kids and poor white kids get killed by cops, when the reasons are different but the outcomes are the same? These are the questions that I am trying to prepare for in doing all of this thinking and processing. Ten years later, in 2024, have we made any more progress?Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1965 speech (Barber, 2024): “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.” Dr. King feared that by trying to integrate with white society, “we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised.” I consider his words prophetic.The people who benefit most from white supremacy and capitalism have never wanted the common people to see that the house is on fire. Hiding the suffering of rural and small-town America hides how high the flames are.When the powers that be (whether that be right wing politicians or mainstream identity politics) act like white people don’t experience poverty, that white families don’t get their kids taken away, that society cares when white people get addicted to drugs, or that white people don’t experience mass incarceration, they may also be convincing people that the “house” (aka majority white society) is not on fire. In particular they may be convincing white people who are still living comfortably and don’t feel the flames.When I talk about the suffering of rural and small-town America, I’m not doing it to compete with anyone’s pain. I am only here to say - the house *is* on fire.YOU feel it. I feel it too. And turns out, none of us have been lying about the burning we’ve been feeling our whole lives. Dr. King was right about the burning house, and so are we.Since 2020, six people in my life have been shot. Those six people who were shot are exclusively Black people from Chicago and white people from Indiana.I’m doing this because I want EVERYONE I love to make it out of the burning house alive.References1A Podcast. (2023, April 27). New state laws are rolling back regulations on child labor.National Public Radio.https://www.npr.org/2023/04/27/1172544561/new-state-laws-are-rolling-back-regulations-on-child-laborAlston, P. (2018). Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on his mission to the United States of America. United Nations General Assembly. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536?ln=en&v=pdfAmorbieta, M. (2024, June 13). A foster care system in crisis: West Virginia faces a legal reckoning. NBC News.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/foster-care-system-crisis-west-virginia-faces-legal-reckoning-rcna147227Barber II, W.J. (2024). White poverty: How exposing myths about race and class can reconstruct American democracy. 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Farms and Farmland. 2022 Census of Agriculture.https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_FarmsFarmland.pdfUnited States Department of Housing and Urban Development (2022, December 19). Annual Homeless Assessment Report, Press Release Number HUD No. 22-253. https://archives.hud.gov/news/2022/pr22-253.cfmWidra, E. (June 2024). States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2024. Prison Policy Initiative.https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

Today I want to tell you about a violent coup and massacre that happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. It’s little-known incident but one that reveals a lot about American history.* Wilmington, NC circa 1898North Carolina in 1898 was in the middle of Reconstruction after the civil war. Formerly enslaved people and their descendants were growing a middle class as well as a political class - Black people in North Carolina were actually voting, holding office, opening businesses, and building generational wealth. This was true other places in the country as well, it wasn’t unique to North Carolina. But Wilmington was emerging as a center of Black success in the area.* Black residents of Wilmington, 1890sMost Black people at the time voted Republican and most Black people who were elected to public office were Republican. Just as a quick reminder, political parties were different back then - I’m way over-simplifying here but essentially in 1898 the Republicans were the party of the Northern Liberal Elite, the party of Lincoln and the triumphant Union, and Democrats were the ruling class of the South.* Prominent North Carolina Republican, John C. DancyHowever, there was also an upstart third party at the time - the Populists, also sometimes known as the People’s Party. This was a party whose main base was white farmers in the West - a region of the country that was the most recently colonized and whose political character hadn’t yet been fully captured by either Northern Republicans or Southern Democrats. The Populists ran on a platform of economic disillusionment, a sense of betrayal by the establishment of both the North and the South that was letting railroad companies, land speculators, and robber baron industrialists run roughshod over common people everywhere in the country.* Banner of the People’s Party, 1890sAlthough the Populists had their main base out West they soon began to make inroads with poor and working class people in the agricultural South and industrial north as well. Not only that, but they began to build a coalition with Black Republicans in southern states to form what was called the Fusionist movement - an attempt to defeat the Southern Democrat establishment by joining forces between poor whites energized by the Populist party and recently enfranchised Blacks energized by the Republican party.* People’s Party presidential campaign materials, 1892* Populist convention in Nebraska, 1890And guess what - the Fusionists started to succeed. In North Carolina, Fusionists won every single statewide office in North Carolina including the governorship between 1894 and 1896. Wilmington was no exception, where Fusionists swept to victory in local elections and ousted Southern Democrats from control.* Fusionist governor of North Carolina, Daniel Lindsay Russell* Fusionist mayor of Wilmington, Silas WrightThis provoked white supremacist fury. Southern Democrats began to issue direct threats about the upcoming 1898 elections. For example, Democrat Party leader Daniel Schenck stated: “It will be the meanest, vilest, dirtiest campaign since 1876. The slogan of the Democratic party from the mountains to the sea will be but one word … [racial slur]”* Anti-Fusionist cartoon, 1898Prominent Democrat Alfred Waddell railed against Black male suffrage and the “race traitors” who enabled it, stating: “We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the * Alfred WaddellThe sentiment was echoed by prominent white members of the community, both men and women, including Rebacca Cameron who opined in an open letter, “Our old historic river should be choked with the bodies of our enemies, white and black.”* William A. GuthrieWhite Populists in the Fusionist movement attempted to fight back with their own publications and speeches and rallies - consider the following speech from white Fusionist leader Oliver Dockery:* Oliver DockeryHowever, such protests were of no avail. On November 8th, the day of the election in Wilmington, white supremacist mobs armed to the teeth blocked every road leading in and out of the city and turned away would-be voters with gunfire. The Fusionist governor of North Carolina came to town personally to try to help calm the tensions but a mob swarmed his train car and tried to kidnap and lynch him, and he barely escaped.* White supremacist mob on election day in WilmingtonThe white supremacist mob declared Democrat victory for the few candidates that had been up for election, but the majority of the local government remained Fusionist because the mayor and most of the city council hadn’t actually been up for re-election. Newspapers at the time called the results fraud due to widespread voter repression.* Call for a mass meeting of white men on November 9th* One of the individuals that the White Declaration of Independence demanded be expelled: Alexander Manly, a mixed-race man who publicly defended interracial relationships in a newspaper editorialThe group’s demands were not met, and on the morning of November 10th, 1898, a mob of 2,000 white supremacists orchestrated a violent coup of the elected Fusionist government, forcing the elected officials out at gunpoint and installing their own Democrat mayor and entirely Democrat city council. They then proceeded to rampage through the town, destroying Black businesses and homes, and massacring local residents. The death toll was never confirmed but is estimated to be as high as 300 people murdered.* News coverage of the massacreIn the wake of the massacre, residents appealed to President William McKinley to send federal help, and received no response. Thousands of residents fled the town. The massacre emboldened voter suppression efforts across the state and by 1899 the Democrats had re-taken control of the entire state government in North Carolina. They immediately set to work passing legislation that we now understand as “Jim Crow” laws, codifying segregation and white supremacist dominance in nearly every aspect of public and private life. The rest of the South followed suit. The Fusionist movement never recovered anywhere in the country.(Originally posted on Instagram, July 2024, @lyn_rye_music)SourcesGoldstone, L. (2020). On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights. Counterpoint Press.DeSantis, J. (2006, June 4). Wilmington Revisits a Bloody 1898 Day and Reflects. The New York Times. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

So I’ve been thinking about America’s supreme difficulty with truth-telling. And, seemingly, the lack of capacity as a society for truth-telling. Especially about this society’s history. And how this is coming up with books about racism in the United States being banned from schools and curriculums, and things like that. Just all of this erasure, just all of this combating against truth-telling about United States history that’s going on in education right now.For some context, I spent part of my childhood in England. I went to school there when I was eight years old. And I was reflecting on a series of books that I remember reading as a school-child in England…which again, doesn’t have the greatest reputation for truth-telling either. But this series that I remember reading as a schoolchild in England was called Horrible Histories, with the tagline “History with the nasty bits left in!” I read it when I was eight years old.And I was thinking about how much reading that series impacted me as a child and how much truth-telling there was. And how, even as a children’s book, this series makes Ibram X. Kendi’s “Anti-Racist Baby” book look like a cakewalk. Alright, they really do mean history with the nasty bits left in!But I wanted to share with you some of this book. Because it just feels like something that I never encountered in America as a child. Now, I think there’s criticisms to be had of this series. And obviously the bar is set so low. I’m not saying in broad strokes that England has this better figured out than America, necessarily, but this is clearly something that I never got in America.And clearly we’re still struggling with this.So I just wanted to give you an example of this book. And I’m reflecting on how much it must have shaped me at the age of eight being exposed to stuff like this. How it probably set me on the right path.So, this is Horrible Histories “The Barmy British Empire” by Terry Deary.Is it really that hard to tell children the truth?(Originally posted on Instagram, March 2024, @lyn_rye_music) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com

Bismillah.I open with an intention. This story I offer with the humble hope that you might be nourished, that you might find even one more little gulp of strength or courage to keep fighting, if you are weary. If this story speaks to you, then take whatever you need from it.The story is a lesson that I learned as a Muslim. It is a lesson I learned from being at Standing Rock in 2016 at the Indigenous-led camps resisting the DAPL pipeline. That’s not directly related to Palestine but of course all of these struggles are related. It’s all connected - Indigenous sovereignty, ending occupation, and just the basic principle that anyone who has a sacred relationship with the land doesn’t try to brutalize it, whether that’s by setting fire to olive groves or poisoning the Cannonball River with a pipeline.I want to position myself in this story. As I tell it I am trying to bear witness, which I think is a responsibility that we have as Muslims. I’m here to testify to what I saw and what I learned - that’s all I am, a witness.I was at Standing Rock in November 2016 during a particularly violent time in the struggle. Hundreds were injured; people lost limbs and eyes from concussion grenades and rubber bullets; people went into cardiac arrest and hypothermia from water cannons in the North Dakota winter; people got long-term lung damage from tear gas and the 40,000lb of Rozol (a prairie dog poison) that was illegally dumped on the camps. The Morton County Sheriff’s office started to include assault rifles with live ammo in their riot gear. This violence occurred during struggles over the pipeline site and equipment but also at the camps and the police barricade around the camps. This barricade prevented emergency vehicles from using any main roads, meaning that medical help took over 2 hours to arrive despite there being a hospital relatively nearby.The lesson that I want to share with you comes from November 20th, 2016 when we tried to move a few concrete blocks on Backwater Bridge to allow emergency vehicle access right before a blizzard was set to arrive.The militarized response to this attempt to move the barricade was just sadistic. There’s no other word for it. Hundreds of people were injured that night alone. Some ended up in critical condition. It’s truly a miracle that no one died.Me and my partner at the time were standing by the pick-up truck that had been part of the attempt to pull a piece of the concrete barricade away. A cop threw a concussion grenade directly at us. It exploded, knocking me down from the force. But for my partner, it burned the skin off the back of her legs.For a while I felt so guilty. Why her and not me? Why did she have to suffer and I had not a scratch? And why couldn’t I get over that sick feeling - in the context of hundreds and hundreds of years of colonial violence and lethal capitalism and the utter doom and destruction inflicted on so many, this is what I’m hung up on? This is what I can’t get out of my head? You start to feel guilty about feeling guilty. But this is what listening to the screams of a loved one will do to you. Like anyone who still has a soul, the burning and tearing of my beloved’s skin burned and tore my heart.How do you not become paralyzed by this wound on the inside? How do you stop yourself from drowning in this feeling of powerlessness, this feeling of guilt that someone suffered and you were spared?And this is how I learned my lesson - we later learned that that first concussion grenade that hit us was the start of a full-on onslaught of that truck, targeting it because we were using it to clear the barricade. If we hadn’t gotten out of there after the first grenade we would have suffered much worse. My partner was much smaller than me. I carried her out of there before the rest of the attack began. If I had been the one injured, she would not have been able to do the same. When I learned this, I remembered the ayah from Surah Al-Hajj:“They are those who have been expelled from their homes for no reason other than proclaiming: ‘Our Lord is Allah.’ Had Allah not repelled the aggression of some people by means of others, destruction would have surely claimed monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which Allah’s name is often mentioned. Allah will certainly help those who stand up for Him. Allah is truly All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” (22:40)God repels the destruction of some by means of others. This is the lesson I learned that cured the wound in my heart and saved me from drowning in that paralysis.There is no shame in being put in a position where Allah can use you to repel the evil of others. God defends some by means of others. So if you are the means, don’t hang your head, just do whatever it is that you are in the position to do. Yes, you are not the one with the power. You may not have any idea how your action played a role in repelling the evil of others. This is not what you control. But if you have been put in a position to do something, anything, it means you have a chance of being that means.Even if it is carrying one person away from a condemned truck. Even if it is one less bomb that Israel has in its arsenal. Even if it is one inch closer to ceasefire, or one inch closer to liberation.The cries of our beloved ones will always burn our hearts. If you have been spared, be the means. Without shame, without fear. If you have been spared, you are the means.Ameen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lynrye.substack.com