Sticking Up For Our People
If we want democracy to triumph over authoritarianism, we have to care about people. Even when they're wrong.
This is the story of how I spent the hours before the first night of Chanukah with a coal miner’s daughter, grating potatoes and debating the state of Israel.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017 was the only night when enough people were available to hold the monthly meeting of the Letcher County Culture Hub. This was where representatives from local businesses, community centers, cultural organizations, and volunteer fire departments across this Kentucky coalfield county came together and share a meal and strategize. Our shared goal: to build a cultural and economic future different from the county’s extractive and exploitative past. A future where — as per the Culture Hub’s tagline — we own what we make.
It was also the first night of Chanukah. You may not be surprised to learn I was the only person present for whom this presented a conflict.
I nonetheless agreed to attend and facilitate the meeting, under one condition: that we celebrate the holiday together! We would light the menorah and say the blessings, thanking God for a miraculous victory over those who set out to destroy my people’s culture and heritage. Then we would share the quintessential Ashkenazic (Central-and-Eastern European) Jewish Chanukah dish: fried potato latkes.
Everyone readily agreed. As I have discussed elsewhere, Letcher County is one of the most open-minded places I know.
No one was more excited than Gwen J. Johnson. Gwen was one of the founders of the Culture Hub, and she remains one of its leaders. She is a self-described “hillbilly woman,” the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, a connoisseur of music and moonshine. She spends most of her waking hours at the Hemphill Community Center, in the shut-down grade school in the coal camp where she grew up and still lives. Like many community leaders, Gwen has no official title at the Center. But where she leads, many follow.
Once upon a time Gwen dealt drugs to feed her family. Now, with support from the Culture Hub, she was using those same entrepreneurial instincts to start a catering company. As she often explains, she and her neighbors had always cooked meals together for big events. “But we never called it caterin’. We just called it cookin’!” By the end of 2022, Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery and Catering would be employing seven people, including several who are recovering from addiction and incarceration.
When I told everyone that night I would be making latkes, Gwen smelled a new recipe. She asked if she could help cook, and was undaunted when I told her we’d have to meet two hours early and grate a bunch of potatoes and onions by hand.
Gwen showed up uncharacteristically on time, bursting with glee. I soon found out it wasn’t just about getting to fry up some potato pancakes. She told me, she was so excited to be with me tonight! After enduring oppression for so many years, for so many generations, my people had finally won! Just like in the Chanukah story!
Just days ago, you see, Donald Trump had recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
I sat there a second, silent. It’s not that I was shocked to hear a viewpoint I disagreed with. I had plenty of experience responding to political provocations in lighthearted, jokey ways that kept feelings from getting hurt, kept us from getting distracted, and kept our eyes on the prize — whatever we were organizing together to achieve.
But this felt personal. And it was just me and Gwen — the person who put up homemade Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA pride signs in her coal camp’s community center, and menacingly dared anyone to take them down. We had been in each other’s homes, gotten to know each other’s families, sung old gospel hymns, given presentations on both coasts, stood together side-by-side against doubters and detractors from the left, right, and center. I trusted her. So I let my guard down a little.
Gwen could see I wasn’t sharing her joy. She looked confused, deflated, even a little hurt. I told her I didn’t see this as a victory. I saw it as a defeat. That made no sense to her. As we sat there grating, I tried to explain.
My grandmother got out of Germany in 1939, when she was twelve years old. She never saw her parents again. She supported the state of Israel without question, all the way until her death in 2017, just a few months previous. Israel was the place of refuge that she and her family never had. I understood that.
At the same time, I have been to the West Bank. I have seen what it’s like to live under military occupation. I have walked under the nets installed over the alleyways in the Palestinian section of Hebron, to protect people from the garbage dumped on their heads by the Jewish settlers living above. I have met people who had gotten stopped at arbitrary military checkpoints, dragged from their cars, and beaten. I have worked with former soldiers who were thrown in jail for refusing to run those checkpoints.
Yes, I told Gwen, we Jews deserve a home and a place where we can be safe. We just don’t get to take it away from other people in the process. Seizing Jerusalem by force was a major step in the wrong direction.
I could see Gwen listening, straining to see what I saw. But she didn’t get it — why I, whose family had lost so much, was turning down such a great victory for my people. And I didn’t get it, either — why she, whose people had been made to suffer for so long, was ignoring the suffering of so many others.
That’s about where we left it that day. Not unfriendly, but unresolved. We kept on grating potatoes and moved on to other topics. In the months and years to come we would revisit the issue occasionally, only to find neither of us had moved much.
A few years later I got an inkling of where Gwen was coming from. It was during the 2020 campaign, when a bunch of my friends shared the meme that said: NOT ALL TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE RACIST BUT ALL OF THEM DECIDED THAT RACISM ISN’T A DEAL-BREAKER.
It made me mad. Which made me surprised. It surprised my friends, too. For them the meme was refreshing. It cut through the bullshit. Yes, people and politics are complicated. But the bottom line is, you vote for him, you’re complicit. You’re wrong. You’re part of the problem.
I found it simplistic and cruel. It split the world into us and them, good and bad, innocent and guilty. It encouraged us to pass swift and merciless judgment on tens of millions of people, our fellow citizens, who we’ve never met and don’t know anything about.
Okay, sure, my friends replied. But wasn’t it . . . true?
Imagine you are about to drown, I told them. Suddenly you see a hand reach down in front of you, ready to pull you out. But the moment before you reach for it, you look up and see that it belongs to David Duke.
Do you grab hold?
I would. I think most of us would. And I would question anyone who said refusing the hand, and dying, would be the right choice — morally, ethically, or politically.
There were plenty of people who voted for Trump who were actively hateful. And there were plenty more, as per the meme, who were willing to hold their nose if it meant lower taxes. But there were also a good number, like Gwen, who were holding on for dear life.
Gwen speaks of Trump with disgust. She calls him “a groper of women.” When she first visited Western Massachusetts as part of the Hands Across the Hills cross-partisan dialogue and exchange project — she is now a board member — her biggest fear was “maybe they wouldn't be able to forgive us for voting for President Trump.”
All the same, I have never heard her say she regrets her vote.
Her reasons were simple. For most people living nearby, the coal industry had long been the one and only source of a reliable living. And Hillary Clinton had come to visit during the campaign and vowed: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Republicans jumped on it immediately. It was all over TV and radio and social media. On Clinton’s birthday every voter in the area got one of those greeting cards in the mail that plays music when you open it. Only this one didn’t play music. It just played Clinton’s voice, over and over again: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business . . . ”
Gwen has no more love for the coal companies than she does for Trump. She has seen them break her loved ones’ bodies, poison their land and water, bust their unions, trap them in debt, and chase out any other economic opportunities that could have offered them escape. Nor does she harbor any delusions about coal’s contribution to the global climate crisis.
But if it meant local people could feed their families, Gwen was going to do everything she could to keep those coal companies in business. Trump may have been dangerous in an abstract sense, but Hillary Clinton had literally promised existential doom right here at home.
By that logic, Gwen had voted for Trump for the same reason she has photos of Mother Jones, John L. Lewis, and RFK hanging next to her desk. Solidarity requires sacrifice.
I am convinced this is all a setup. Get any of us in a place where we’re desperate enough, and we might do awful things and support awful people in order to survive. But how did we get there in the first place? How have so many of us, in so many communities, gotten to the point where we can see no choice but to accept the suffering of others in order to protect our own?
Surely it’s not a coincidence that this situation is so very useful to the coal bosses, and their counterparts in every other industry, and their backers in politics and punditry?
Much more on all this another day.
For now, a few takeaways:
1. We can disagree and still be allies.
A common and controversial saying among community organizers is no permanent friends, no permanent enemies.
It doesn’t mean we use people and toss them aside. It means we work together where we agree, acknowledge where we don’t, and don’t let the latter get in the way of the former.
There’s an unspoken assumption in some social justice circles that in order for anyone to work together on anything, first everyone has to agree on everything. So if you’re working with someone who is wrong on one issue or another, that means you necessarily agree with that person on that issue, and you are therefore also wrong.
This kind of tortured reasoning is not only nonsensical; it also does serious harm to the causes we care about, by robbing us of so many would-be allies. Again, it almost feels like a setup.
I still think Gwen is dead wrong about Trump, and about Israel. She may well think the same about me. That’s fine. There are lots of other issues where we fully see eye to eye, and we do lots of work together on those.
Being clear about where we disagree, and that it’s okay to disagree, makes for stronger public relationships, not weaker ones. (It works for private relationships, too. Try dating an anarchist.)
2. Don’t blame the people without power.
I never agreed with my grandmother about Israel, either. But I didn’t push the issue. I knew where she was coming from. And I hope you will agree that holding her to blame for the oppression of Palestinians would be ludicrous.
Yet in so many other situations we do exactly that. We give in to the temptation to blame oppressive political situations on people without power.
Here’s a story I heard from someone who was there:
Several years ago a group of visitors was taking a tour of a rural Southern social justice organization. It was known for its work bringing together poor and working-class people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, to learn from each other and craft their own solutions to the challenges they faced. More recently, though, the organization’s staff had seemed to be turning away from those whose viewpoints did not match their own. One of the visitors, perhaps sensing this shift, asked the staff member giving the tour about the organization’s relationship with the people who lived nearby — mostly poor, white, and conservative. “Oh, we don’t really have one,” the staff member replied. “They’re kind of backward and simpleminded.”
This is elitist and wrong. Racism and xenophobia are problems caused by rich people. And again, it is very much in the interest of those rich people for us to blame the poor for the mess they made.
Even so, when I hear Gwen talk about Trump or Israel, it’s so easy for me to get down on her, to dismiss her positions as provincial or narrow-minded.
Of course, unlike Gwen, I have not spent my whole life defending my neighbors against starvation.
3. Put people ahead of abstractions.
Local attorney Tyler Ward, a friend of Gwen’s and mine and a fellow participant in Hands Across the Hills, was once asked by a reporter why he voted for Trump.
Tyler said his grandfather was what folks used to call a “yellow dog Democrat.” That is, he’d vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket. His grandfather “always said that Democrats care about people and Republicans care about money. ‘But now it seems the roles have been reversed,’ Ward says: Republicans care about people, like coal miners; Democrats care about intangibles, like climate change.”
Whatever we may think about this argument, Tyler is right about at least one thing. People who come from professional-class liberal backgrounds — like me — are trained to put intangibles over people. We learn from an early age that the most important thing is to get the right answer. It doesn’t matter if we alienate our classmates along the way; we’re not here to make friends. If the evidence-based metrics demonstrate that coal mining is not a best practice, then putting the coal miners and coal companies out of business is in the best interest of everyone. Oh, you disagree? Well, you’re simply wrong.
This outlook, honed with years of practice into foundation-pleasing prose, soon lands us in positions of institutional authority. From there we get to impose our data-driven decisions onto people and communities who don’t have the same access to power that we do, usually without their consent.
And then we wonder why they resent us.
If we want democracy to triumph over authoritarianism — if we want a future where we own what we make, where we are free and equal co-creators of our communities and our future — we have to care about people, even when they’re wrong. And we have to build solid relationships with people, even those people, before we get into the intangibles.
This is the lesson people like Tyler and Gwen have taught me. They didn’t offer me their trust because I had an advanced degree in a relevant field, or because I offered results-based accountability, or even because I was right about all the important issues. (They may beg to differ!)
They took me in because I showed up, and kept showing up, and listened and cared even when I disagreed, and did what I said I was going to do. Because I didn’t do things to them or for them, but with them.
This is the task that lies before all of us: to build strong and trusting relationships, within communities and then among them. There are no shortcuts. It is long and slow work. At first it can feel provincial, working person-to-person and organization-to-organization in a narrow geographic area, while resisting the urge of funders and media to “scale up” too quickly.
But it won’t stay that way. Given the opportunity, real community leaders will always look outward for allies. And the relationships they build, with neighbors across the country and beyond, will be every bit as close and personal as the ones they’ve built with their neighbors across the street.
Five years after we made latkes together, Gwen still sticks up for her people as doggedly as ever. Only now “her people” includes working-class Indigenous environmentalists in Virginia, poor Black farmers in Alabama, and yes, wealthy white liberals in Massachusetts.
Not to mention a couple of queer Jews in Philadelphia, friends of mine, who feel pretty much the way I do about the state of Israel. One of them is a very skilled baker. Gwen, of course, was all ears.
And so it was that a bakery in a community center in a Kentucky coal camp started baking the best challah to be found for at least a hundred miles in any direction. It flew off the shelves. The locals couldn’t get enough of it.
Only trouble was, they weren’t sure how to pronounce the word “challah.”
So instead they called it — and still call it — “hillbilly honeybuns.”