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All right, welcome everyone. So my name is Anika, and I’m the Outreach and Training Director for the Race Class Narrative Action Project. We’re really excited to be doing a piece for a board organizing during their October publication for rural organizing. And I am joined by some amazing organizers, not only across the Midwest but also in the South. And we are here to just share their story to talk about who are in these rural communities that they’re organizing, what do they look like? What are they doing? How are they building power and moving us towards a multiracial constituency that we all need and can have the things to make us thrive and live in this country. So I’m just so excited to share their stories with you all. And so before I pass it to them, I’m going to pass it over to my colleague, Adam Kruggel, from People’s Actions to introduce himself and also share more about the deep canvassing work that they’re doing across the Midwest and in the South.
Thank you so much, Anika. My name’s Adam Kruggel, and I’m on the national staff of People’s Action, and it’s a joy to be able to share the space with you. And we have People’s Action is one of the largest community organizing networks in the country. We have 54 member organizations in 30 States and about a million members across the country, and we’re really building a force to help build governing power, to put people and plan it first and sort of at the heart of that, we have seen over the last three years, we’ve really tried to build a much, much more powerful, multiracial working-class movement that really spans cities, suburbs, and rural areas and small towns. And over the last three years, our member organizations like Don Home, North Carolina, and Michigan United have helped to build really what we believe is the largest progressive rural organizing effort in the country.
And a key part of that, and this is, we have been one of our closest and deepest partners in this effort has been Faith in Minnesota and the Race Class Narrative Action, and a core part of that is we fundamentally believe that we need to be building like… We need to be doing race-conscious, multiracial organizing in rural areas. It’s crucial, or there’s like a moral urgency in terms of beating back the rise of authoritarianism and white nationalism. But also it’s a political imperative. If we really, really want to build a much larger, enough power to really transform these communities and our States and our country. And so we have been really invested in helping to integrate the tool of Deep Canvassing, like building much a deeper transformative relationships that are really deeply grounded in empathy and compassion and shared stories and really helping build a sense of what we call building a bigger we and we’ve used Deep Canvassing and really integrated a lot of the insights from the race class narrative and from race Class Narrative Action to really begin to talk about how can we talk about race in a way that brings us together more powerfully, helps inoculate against the ways that we’ve used race to divide us and put us against each other and sort of rebuild a sense of our linked faith and common future, and also restore the idea that we can really have a government and an economy that cares for all of us.
So incredibly excited for this conversation. I’m really grateful for all the amazing work and for the partnership with Race Class Narrative Action and Faith in Minnesota.
Thank you so much, Adam. So the first I’m going to hand it over to is my colleague Alexa from Minnesota and Isaiah to talk about the organizing they’re doing in greater Minnesota and how they are building a multiracial constituency to build state power.
Awesome. Thanks, Anika, thanks, Adam. I’m really excited to be here with all of you. So I’m Alexa Horwart. I’m one of the lead organizers for Faith in Minnesota. And I started organizing in rural communities and small towns across Minnesota about eight years ago in part because we kept hearing it. So I come from rural communities, my family is sort of scattered across rural Minnesota, Iowa, and North Dakota. And the town that my dad grew up in Hope, North Dakota actually, almost doesn’t exist anymore. And I grew up taking trips out there.
So, but part of the reason I decided to organize in rural communities and small towns is because there was a story being told about the people I come from that was used to lower expectations and leave a set of people behind. So what I mean by that is we would advocate at the Capitol for expanding healthcare, for raising the minimum wage for climate action, paid family leaves, and racial equity. And we would hear consistently from rural legislators that people in their districts didn’t want that, didn’t want to set up those things. And we didn’t have the people power to prove them wrong but knew it was wrong in our guts. So I started to organize in small towns in Minnesota. This was probably a familiar story to people across the Midwest. So these are communities of 20, 30,000 people, and then some larger metropolitan areas where over the past three years, the demographics have shifted dramatically from being 99% white to now 20 years later being 60% white with large Somali immigrant communities and Latino immigrant communities.
And at the same time, what we’ve seen is that economic structures and safety nets of these communities have been deteriorating. And so when I started to go out and meet with people and have really deep conversations, there’s a tremendous amount of pain. And over the past eight years that I’ve been organizing, I’ve seen an increase and that pain being weaponized and organized. So in rural Minnesota and in small towns in Minnesota and across the Midwest, across the country, there have been indifferent pockets, pretty robust white nationalist organizing. So we see in Minnesota speaker circuits who go to churches and draw crowds of hundreds of people talking about anti-Muslim, trying to teach people lies about Islam. And this has, for a long time, gained traction in rural Minnesota and was incredibly painful.
Abdulahi will talk a lot about this, but it has been incredibly painful for immigrant communities who have come to find rural Minnesota home. And what is also true is that because this pain has been weaponized and used to lower expectations and turn us against collective solutions, it has also hurt white people in these communities. And so our commitment, Abdulahi and his partners, and with Faith in Minnesota, we’ve been building multiracial leadership teams all across the state and doing deep work around how do you build these kinds of relationships where white folks in rural communities understand that the story about their immigrant neighbor being at fault or to blame for their economic pain is wrong and that they have a right to their pain, but that, that pain is actually what connects them to their immigrant neighbor. And that work is incredibly challenging.
It requires a vigilant and constant dismantling of shame and going deep into people’s pain, which for all of us is hard. And for white communities who where I come from who have a tremendous amount of shame around the pain that they feel economically because they believe that because they’re white, they should be doing okay. That work has been a long project and a beautiful project. And because of that work and the deep roots of that work in 2018 with Race-Class Narrative research with Anat Shenker-Osorio and other brilliant folks, we were able to create a campaign that we used as the closing argument of the election in Minnesota in 2018 called Greater Than Fear. So we implemented lessons of Race-Class Narrative, which is that white people are being told stories about race all the time.
And when the left or Democrats do not lean into conversations about race, do not take on race explicitly and cast a vision about multiracial solidarity. We will continue to lose, and the consequences are devastating and violent. So we used this campaign as the closing argument of the election to give Minnesota a set of tools to say, “We’re better than that. That is not who we are. And we are ready for the future where we are all in it together, where we see collective solutions as a benefit to all of us, every single one.” So with that, I’m gonna pass it back to Anika, I believe.
Thanks so much, Alexa. And as you noted, you’ve been working deeply with Abdulahi, enormous work. And so I’m going to go ahead and pass it next to him to share the specific work they’re doing to organize against the rise of Islamophobia in greater Minnesota.
Hi, all this is Abdulahi Farah. I am the lead organizer with Faith Minnesota, and specifically, I organize the Muslim base, which is called Muslim Coalition of Faith in Minnesota, and also Isaiah. And I basically organize in the Metro Area and also across the state in the rural areas where many of our communities chose to make home. And since the rise of white supremacy groups, it’s been sort of we haven’t been like… Islamophobia has been around, but we haven’t been the main target. But since the Trump Administration, we became one of the targets, specifically here in Minnesota, because he chose to actually come here several times to mention the community, the Somali community, and so forth. One of those has been when he came to the airport and actually talked about the community, and within less than a year, my mosque was actually bombed, which was not that far away from the airport.
So we definitely saw that the uptake in hate and directed at us and so forth. And so that’s actually how I got involved in the work by knowing that we have to claim our voice that we have to step in, otherwise these basically groups would just kind of be more bold and to instill more fear in our community, but also to feel like they have a right to hurt communities and so forth. So one of the things I would say, just as I’m going to share just a series of specific stories, one of those stories I’ve been sort of like I said, my mosque ever since it was bombed it became a target of whites and white supremacist groups and hate groups online.
And so some of those people have been showing up in front of the mosque and so forth. And they’d be connected to also the mosque in St Cloud, which is in the rural area in Minnesota, where they were showing up at city council hearings just to push back and basically bully the community over there. One of those incidents where when Christ Church happened the shooting Christ Church, the St Cloud mosque tried to get a security car for their mosque for safety reasons, but we had groups come and actually say that they’re implementing Sharia law, even though they’re not, they were basically trying to keep themselves safe. Another, I think with the Race-Class Narrative, as we were pushing and organizing our community, that we are Greater Than Fear that we will not step back.
We organized across the mosques in Greater Minnesota and even in the twin cities to hold a big Eid event, and Eid is once every year we have two holidays and one of the big holidays to actually have it in US Bank Stadium, which is downtown to show the community here in Minnesota, that we are Minnesotans like everyone else. And to also show solidarity, we had one of our taglines was, is for everyone. And so we invited everyone as well. It was picked by one of those Right-Wing Radio or TV groups online, which was third real talk. And they were talking about how we were going to take over the downtown and slaughter cows and all kinds of things, and basically created fear. A lot of our community members were again afraid to come together and actually celebrate together.
But we had the Narrative of Greater Than Fear. They actually helped us to push back against that hate and to actually hold an event that was well attended. Over 34,000 people came in the downtown to actually celebrate and claim their voice and say, “We’re great at a fear” Many politicians showed up, many people showed up, but that was kind of an epic moment for our community to say whether we are in Greater Minnesota and whether we’re at downtown, that we’re all connected. We’re here to build our community and our power and that no matter what fear tactic, whether it comes as a dog whistle politics, or if it comes from the right-wing groups, it wasn’t going to stop us. So this is kind of some of the examples in also building, we recognize building solidarity in Greater Minnesota with Alexa. It’s one of those things that can push back against this type of hate.
Thank you so much, Abdulahi. Thank you so much for sharing those really painful and also joyous stories of the organizing you all have been doing. I’m going to pass it to Mahs North Carolina because it’d be remiss if we didn’t include aspects of the South and the amazing role organizing that is also happening down there.
Hello everyone. Thank you so much, Anika. And everyone that’s on the call today. I’m Mahsima Hallaji. I am an Iranian immigrant that grew up in Alamance County, North Carolina. In 2018, I came back to my roots here in the South to organize and challenge some of the discomforts that I had felt my whole life as an immigrant in my community. I think that challenging that discomfort has been something that’s become like a bigger vision focus for me in this Deep Canvassing work. And just in general, for our team here in NC we have found that that discomfort that we all share is not imaginary and that we’re actually stronger when we talk about these things.
One stat that I just want to share is that here in North Carolina, 45% of people, almost half of the people that live here that we have surveyed on this issue, believe that the federal government has not represented them. And I think that that really shows that we have more connection here in the South than most people think, specifically in rural communities where we’ve seen folks be just franchised for years on years. And similarly to Alexa’s findings, we found a lot of pain in our communities because of that. And to communicate around it has not been easy because you don’t want to take away people’s pain. It’s actually what is what connects us, and there’s a lot of hope in it. So yeah, just been able to have these conversations and really challenge that by doing the exact opposite.
So some of the things that I feel like is important to share in terms of Deep Canvassing here in the South is that a lot of us really do have complex feelings about the government. And we’re still learning about what that actually means. But people really want to see a prioritization of economic solutions. And it’s actually interesting how that’s so deeply tied into race and prejudice and how that’s been used against all people. And there’s just this huge relationship between this economic strife participating and coming together and the hope that there is in that. And yeah, just to say that a lot of people that we’ve talked to on the right, what they always say to us is that they identify with President Trump because he speaks against the government and says that the government has not represented the people. Yeah, just gonna leave it at that and let maybe Anika take it back.
Thank you so much, Mah, for sharing that story and the personal relationship that you have to this work. So the next person I would love to bring to the floor is MariaElena from Michigan United. And I saved the best for last because I’m a Michigander myself. So I’m very excited about the great work that you’re doing there, so much so that I almost want to move back home. So MariaElena, please take it away.
Awesome. Yeah, thank you for the introduction. My name is MariaElena. I do a Deep Canvassing and Overdose Crisis Organizing with Michigan United and a little bit about myself really quick so that you understand why I’m into this work. I’m originally from Puerto Rico. My dad was from Puerto Rico. My mom was a German immigrant. And living on the Island, I realized that there was a lot of disparity with access to resources. My mother actually developed cancer when I was very young, but because she was an immigrant and we lived in a very poor neighborhood. She, unfortunately, passed away because we didn’t have access to those resources, the resources existed, but we weren’t qualified to grab those resources. And then the same thing happened to my father. He started developing really severe dementia and Alzheimer’s, and again, the resources existed, but we did not have access to it. And he also, unfortunately, passed away a couple of years ago. And that really started getting me on this track of thinking if the resources exist, why can’t we use them? And why are there so many people in our communities, including myself, who have preexisting or other financial needs, and why can’t they get the resources if we know it’s there? Why is there this false narrative of… why is there this narrative of false scarcity? And that’s one of the things that actually got me all the way here to Michigan. So I moved from Puerto Rico to Florida for high school. And then, right here to Michigan for college, I wanted to study public health to understand what resources people in rural communities had compared to people in cities and the differences between race and ethnicity and gender.
I wanted to see what our communities were getting and why there was this false scarcity narrative. So that’s actually how I ended up doing Rural Deep Canvassing in Michigan. So I wanted to see why there were people voting against themselves here in Michigan. In Michigan, we actually had people vote against their basic rights. So instead of having universal healthcare or voting for better social security and stuff like that, people were voting with this mindset of, “There isn’t enough to go around. I need to worry about myself and not about the people around me.” So instead of being focused around our communities, people are being focused on themselves, and I wanted to see why this was happening. So with the Deep Canvassing that we did here in Michigan in rural areas, it really showed us that there’s a lot of diversity. I mean, a lot of us already knew this, but there’s a lot of diversity when it comes to race, class, where people come from, and with this, we saw that there are multiple issues affecting these communities.
Overdoses are an extremely impactful thing in the rural community here in Michigan. Immigration is a really big issue. Access to economic resources is also really big one here. And there’s actually a ton of immigrants here in rural Michigan. And we met a lot of them on the doors, as well as a lot of white folks that we were talking about as well. So it’s really important for us to do this work, especially coming from a different perspective. We want to have a very big… Here in Michigan, we have a very diverse Deep Canvassing group where we have people from all backgrounds, all ages, all classes, so we can better empathize and understand where people are coming from every aspect. And when we go and knock on these doors, we want to really ask these voters about their experiences as a person, as what have they gone through financially?
Do they have family that immigrated here? What is their health situation? Do they have access to the resources they need? And we started seeing that this is a really important conversation for us to have because people’s views on what is going on in the world is based off of the experiences they’ve had. So this narrative of false scarcity came from them themselves, not being able to access these resources that they knew were there. And the media decided to point the fingers at other people, the politicians, the big pharma, they said, “Well, poor people are taking these resources or immigrants are taking these resources,” instead of looking deep at the bigger picture, people were just starting to point a finger and scapegoating. And that’s why these conversations are so important because we have to go in there and talk to them like, “Hey, what did you go through as a child? Or what have you gone through in your life that impacts your views on society?” And that’s where Deep Canvassing is also really important because we’ll go in and meet, for example, as an immigrant from Puerto Rico, I’ll talk to them and say, and we’ll talk about my history with my medical health and their history with their possible medical health or whatever story they may have. And that way, we can dig deeper to understand what issues actually matter to them and what do they actually need. And no matter what side of the scale they’re on, whether they’re Republican, Democrat, more left-leaning or more right-leaning, everyone wants their voice heard. And everyone has been hurt by this system because as I’ve been mentioning this entire time, the resources exist and they’re not being allocated properly because of the system that we live in, because people don’t understand that they’re being fed false information. We need to come together as a community to get through this. And instead of just being individualistic and fighting for things that only one person needs, we want to fight for stuff that everyone in the community needs. And so that everyone’s voice is held, everyone’s voice is heard, and we can hold these politicians accountable or these big companies that are trying to hurt our communities accountable. And what’s that I’ll pass it right back to Anika.
Thank you so much, MariaElena, and for everyone’s stories, I feel so inspired just to hear. I mean, this is the first time I’ve been able to hear all of your amazing stories in one space. And I hope that everyone here was able to listen. That’s also inspired and proud to be in community with all of you. And so before I kick it back to my colleague, Adam, to wrap this up, I just wanted to say that what I heard from everyone stories is that there may be one dominant narrative out there that the opposition is saying, and then there might be one idea of who lives in these communities. And we are constantly pushing back against those dominant frames and dominant ideas of who lives in rural communities. I myself was a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who grew up in West Michigan. We are not highlighted in these stories about who lives in rural America and what story that actually moves us and our people. And so I am just so inspired that all of you are on the ground building the multiracial power that has always existed and calling to live our stories through this powerful framework of saying what is actually happening and how we are much stronger together. So I just wanted to weave that all in there and say, thank you so much for the work that you’re doing. And Adam, what’s in store. What’s next step.
Yeah. Well, I would just say, first of all, once again, thank Alexa and Maria Elena, and Abdulahi and Mahsima for all of your amazing work. And they’re like the path forward for us as a country. There is no credible path for us to build a functioning, multiracial democracy with a livable future if we are not building powerful multiracial alliances in rural communities. And so the work that you’re doing is absolutely crucial for the future, not only of our democracy but really of our planet. And so the work that you’re doing, in terms of building deep, meaningful relationships, helping really cultivate the sort of power of empathy and compassion, and then helping people build a new worldview where we see how our fates are linked, where we see that there is actually, we can live in a world shared abundance and that we can actually have a government and an economy that works for all that is absolutely crucial.
And so I just want to name the work that Faith in Minnesota led in 2018 with the Greater Than Fear campaign and the work that Michigan people’s campaign and Down Home North Carolina and other groups have been doing in terms of really testing this in the political realm. What we’re seeing is that we can do this. This is not only, there’s a moral urgency and imperative to this, to make sure that we can build a world where people… The sacred dignity of everyone is treated and honored, but also that this is how we can win elections. And so the work that the people on this call are doing is actually breaking the vicious cycle of sort of strategic racism and division that’s been used for decades and really centuries to consolidate power. And we’re building a new virtuous cycle where we can actually win elections around a vision and a message of hope around empathy and compassion.
And that’s really I think what’s going to be most exciting to see in this election or these next couple of months, the work that you’re doing is really laying the foundation for this seismic change in our political landscape. And so just really grateful for all the work that you’re doing, incredibly grateful for Faith in Minnesota and Race-Class Narrative action for the groundbreaking work that you’re doing. And then obviously for all of the organizations around the country, Michigan People’s Campaign, Down Home North Carolina, all the hundreds of organizations that are really tilling the soil for this dramatic change in our country. So thank you so much.
All right. And with that, I think we’re right at the time, and that’s a wrap, so thank you, everyone.
Thanks, everybody. Great to see you all.