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| The author buying bao at the Farmers' Market |
Every
Saturday morning in summer 2019, from 8 AM-12:30 PM, I sat twenty feet away
from white supremacists selling vegetables. As the founder and lead organizer
of No Space for Hate
(NSFH),
an organization that seeks to counter white supremacist recruitment and
organizing in the local community, I challenge, on a daily basis, community and
local government toleration of white supremacy in my community of Bloomington,
Indiana. Our organization employs multiple tactics on multiple fronts,
encompassing policy changes, educational workshops, direct action,
collaborations with local food pantries, and more. Besides my activism, I study
insects in 12th to 15th century literature, focusing specifically on insect-human
encounters through critical animal studies lenses. I’m working on my second
chapter. To add to the conversation about what it means to be a public facing
medievalist who is also Asian American, I offer my perspective as a graduate
student who has been involved in extremely dangerous and intense anti-racist
work. This blog post is about being a graduate student, a medievalist, and an
activist in my local community. I discuss the importance of academic engagement
in social justice causes outside the academy, and challenge its members to
support graduate students as they do dangerous, anti-racist work outside the
academy, and not just inside it.
Nazis at the Farmers' Market
In
May 2019, local activists revealed that Sarah Dye and Doug Mackey of Schooner
Creek Farm were members of the American Identity Movement (AmIM), formerly
known as Identity Evropa. Despite initial denials (they’re not Nazis, they’re identitarians), the farmers confirmed in August that they were
indeed members of AmIM. City government professed an inability to
deplatform them from the market, claiming that white supremacy was a matter of
belief, rather than actions. Since I mobilized the community in response to the news
that they were white supremacists, the Bloomington, Indiana Farmers’ Market—the
main site for their business—has become a hotbed of “controversy.” Sarah Dye
granted multiple RedIceTV interviews and used her farm’s Facebook page to
disseminate propaganda, invited AmIM president Patrick Casey to the market,
collected local armed Three Percenters to support the cause, and staffed
her stall with a rotating array of violent white supremacist organizers.
As
the founder and facilitator of the NSFH movement, I’ve been extremely visible
and in the forefront of the fight against normalizing white supremacy in
Bloomington and increasingly beyond it. Because I have been so public and so
visible, I’ve been featured in all of Sarah Dye’s RedIceTv interviews, with all
of the ensuing calls to violence. My picture has been posted on-line and in the
community, alongside racial slurs. National Vanguard, a neo-nazi group called
me a full-time anti-white activist and a non-Jewish front for Jewish groups. A
group called “Hoosier Anti-Antifa” circulated a call on Facebook to get me
deported. I’ve gotten death threats over email. The Youtube comments on the
RedIceTV page, not to mention the Schooner Creek Farm page itself, always post
death threats. I regularly learn a fascinating array of creative ways to be
murdered. I’ve had to shut down my Twitter account.
To
a certain extent, none of that is surprising or new, as the constant white
supremacist backlash to recent moves in medieval studies has shown. I’ve been
lucky to have the support of my department as I navigate these threats.
However, I was and am surprised by the silence from many academic communities
and from scholars who have job security - both at Indiana University and at
other institutions. I am surprised by their fear of venturing any public
support, based on their desire not to attract white supremacist attention,
opting rather to have the brunt of white supremacist hostility fall on me and
other public-facing activists of color disproportionately. I am surprised by
the constant claims from inside the academy that Sarah Dye was too attractive,
too nice, too normal to be the face of white supremacy. In fact, some faculty
have been openly hostile. But while I write my dissertation, teach my classes,
and go to conferences, I continue to show up at the Bloomington, Indiana
Farmers’ Market every Saturday morning to challenge the acceptance of white
supremacists in our community. This uncompensated labor is an indescribable
burden. Indiana
University-Bloomington has one of the lowest stipends for graduate students in
the humanities in the country, leading my colleagues to organize around issues
of working conditions.
Town/Gown Connections
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| Handmade Buttons |
I
admire how many medievalists advocate engaging the public through social media
and in the comments of news articles. My priority, in addition to working on
the ground to defend my local community from white supremacists, is training
new activists for in-person work. Being a member of an academic institution
means also being a member of the community in which it is located. Getting
involved in local activism is a way to avoid the town/gown division. Activism
in the Midwest, something that folks in Bloomington view as one of the strongholds of the Klan, involves cultivating a lot of
well-meaning white people into becoming better allies. Related to the legacy of
the Klan activity in Bloomington, overtly racist actions are not a new feature
in Bloomington, either: I recently learned
that a market and cultural center founded by black student activist Rollo
Turner was firebombed by the Klan in 1968, and that there has been nothing of
its type in the city since. Members of No Space for Hate, most of which were grad
students, initiated a program called CRiSP, which helps connect leftover
produce from Saturday farmers’ market sales to food pantries. We’re proud to
help support one of the only food pantries in the area, Pantry 279, that comes up with creative ways to help people who would
otherwise slip through the cracks of bureaucracy. Unlike the Salvation Army,
they do not require birth certificates or citizenship paperwork to help
families with holiday gift-giving, and are therefore better able to serve
undocumented immigrants, families escaping domestic abuse situations, or anyone
who doesn’t have the “right” papers. We’ve fundraised for
local indigenous communities and immigration causes. In a predominantly white
community, I am helping my friends establish a market for and by
people of color.
These
material actions have facilitated countless positive community connections and
activism. Seeing what can be accomplished by facilitating these connections, I
thus advocate for meeting people where they are, with compassion and empathy.
It is important to recognize my tactics as both a personal choice and also one
that’s born out of precarity. I cannot afford to look “uncivil” as a graduate
student, but that does not stop the accusations of incivility. Beyond my lack
of “civility,” I have been accused of carrying coronavirus and have undergone
threats of deportation. I have been told that I will never get a job in
academia. I have been made to feel as though I have to give up those dreams and
make a choice between academia and anti-racist activism.
Fighting Nazis in Indiana/in the Midwest/in a former stronghold
of the KKK that is still predominantly white has taught me that the work of
combating white supremacy involves real generosity of spirit: of meeting people
where they are, of including as many diverse perspectives as possible, of the
value of incremental change, of collaboration rather than dictatorship, of
building rather than burning, of long, sustained progress, of forming unlikely
alliances, of doing the behind-the-scenes work and labor that doesn't
"happen" on social media. Week after week, I sit twenty feet away
from Nazis in refusal to normalize their presence in my community, but I also
congregate with people that I would never imagine could sit in the same room
together. I do this in order to build deep,
often painful but productive connections with individuals who would have
never envisioned themselves equipped to do anti-racist work.
There’s
a cost. It’s impossible to understate the toll it’s taken on my personal and
intellectual life. There are no rewards or accolades for my bravery. I have
lost my health, my friendships, my relationships, and job opportunities. We’ve seen how many
senior scholars in the community exhibit some ugly flexing towards graduate
students. There’s
a difference doing this highly intense and potentially violent (for me)
anti-racist work as a graduate student in Indiana, and not as a tenure-track or
tenured professor. Therefore,
I ask: How do we support graduate students as they do dangerous, anti-racist
work outside the academy, and not just inside it—work that incurs real dangers
but also cultivates town-gown relationships and communities? How do we
empower them to do very visible and public anti-racist work while doing
research, teaching, and trying to pay the rent? For me, who has been told to
“stop organizing around white supremacy,” keeping silent is not an acceptable
answer. What kinds of public support can academics who have job security,
better health insurance, and higher salaries than a grad student stipend,
provide to graduate students of color who have chosen to stick their necks out
to protect their communities? What kinds of public statements of support? What
kinds of intellectual resources can or should be brought to bear on outreach
about the issue? What kinds of material options exist for support?
These
are urgent questions. While we consider them, I will be helping other artisans
and community members of color in Bloomington build a market that models values
of inclusivity and belonging while working towards racial justice. I urge you
to join me.
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| Cops Bust Unicorn Protesting White Supremacy at Indiana Farmers' Market |
Resources:
●
Southern Poverty Law Center report, Identity
Evropa rebrands to American Identity Movement: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/03/12/white-nationalist-group-identity-evropa-rebrands-following-private-chat-leaks-launches
●
Unicorn Riot, exposed private Identity Evropa
messages: https://unicornriot.ninja/2019/neo-nazi-hipsters-identity-evropa-exposed-in-discord-chat-leak/
●
NBC, October 2018 report on Patrick Casey: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/white-nationalist-leader-plotting-take-over-gop-n920826
__________
About the Author
An alum of Providence College, Abby moved to Bloomington 7 years ago to attend Indiana University as a full time PhD Candidate in the Department of English. She is working on a dissertation focusing on 12th-15th century human-insect encounters across medieval literary genres through ecocritical and animal studies lenses. In recognition of her public service, Indiana University awarded her with the Martin Luther King Jr. Building Bridges Award (2018) and the John H. Edwards Fellowship (2018-2019).
Thanks for doing everything you do.
ReplyDeleteRight on, sister! Power to those who give a d**n. People with open-minds and open-hearts used to flock to Bloomington because it used to be a safe-haven for people to escape their small-town attitudes towards homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. Now, more and more, Bloomington has turned into this capitalistic, egotistical, faux-liberal environment with ultra-conservative right-wing views. We don't have a democratic mayor who ensures ways to protect its citizens. Also, I was told that a "Board" doesn't have the power to instill policy changes on this level, but that it is up to the city council to change rules and regulations. I want the old Bloomington back! Extract the mayor!
ReplyDelete