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If Progressives Don’t Try to Win Over Rural Areas, Guess Who Will

I’ve been out there organizing for 20 years. I have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups.

Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

Mr. Goehl runs a federation of community-based organizations across the country that bring poor and working-class people together to win economic and racial justice.

This summer I visited a bunch of small towns across the country, and I saw signs that white nationalists are becoming more active. Just drive by the town square in Pittsboro, N.C., at 5 p.m. on any given Saturday and you are likely to see white nationalists rallying to protect a Confederate monument.

This weekend, I’ll head back home to southern Indiana, where members of the 3 Percenters, a far-right militia, showed up with guns and knives at the Bloomington Farmers Market earlier this year. The leader of the white supremacist organization American Identity Movement even paid a visit. I’ve been organizing for 20 years in rural communities and have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups.

While Congress advances an impeachment inquiry into possible high crimes by the president, I believe his most destructive acts are his fanning the flames of racism and emboldening white nationalism.

I run People’s Action, a coalition of 40-some grass-roots organizations across the country that bring poor and working-class people together to win economic and racial justice. We are rare in that we work in both urban and rural areas; many of our peer organizations are largely urban.

As part of this work, our organizers had over 10,000 conversations with people in small towns across the country over the past year. We spoke with neighbors in Amish country, visited family farms in Iowa and sat on front porches in Appalachia — communities that have experienced hard economic times and went solidly for Donald Trump in 2016.

Although these communities may be fertile ground for the Trump administration and other white nationalist organizations, they are also places where people can come together across race and class to solve the big problems facing everyday people. That starts by recognizing one another’s humanity — and with honest conversations.

At a trailer park home in Michigan, a white man told canvassers from our local affiliate group, Michigan United, he did not want undocumented immigrants receiving federal benefits or wage protections. Yet, as he continued to share, he revealed that his father had immigrated to this country and had done well by the family. He then admitted a sense of shame for struggling with addiction and poverty. In a single conversation, he realized that he actually identifies with immigrant workers, and maybe his views on immigration are not set in stone.

For those who have given up on rural communities: Please reconsider. So many of these places need organizing to win improved conditions. Despite the stereotypes, rural people are not static in their political views or in the way they vote. Single white rural women and young rural white people represent two of the greatest leftward swings in the 2018 midterms, moving 17 and 16 points respectively toward Democrats. They played a key role in Democratic wins across the Midwest.

In front-porch conversations, the most common thing we hear is, “Nobody ever asked me what I think.” That’s a problem. Because white nationalists are filling that vacuum. They’re organizing around people’s pain and using racism to help make sense of changing economic conditions and racial demographics. We are also up against the outsized influence of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, as well as the white nationalists online.

Soon after the president was inaugurated, an organizer from North Carolina found a flyer and shared it with me. It offered support to people struggling with addiction: “We care about you. Let’s work together to stop this epidemic.” The sponsoring organization? The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I wish this was an aberration, but unfortunately it’s becoming more and more common.

Roughly speaking, we encounter three broad categories of about equal size when we’re door-knocking. The first is the group of people who are with us on economic, racial and gender justice, but often feel unseen by big-city progressives. A second group is as conservative and in some cases as openly racist as you might expect. And then there’s a group in the middle who supports expanding public health care, raising wages and taxing the wealthy, and is conflicted about immigration, and possibly about race, guns and religion.

We start by engaging with people around the issues that came up most often during our front-porch conversations, like polluted water, health care, low wages or addiction. When enough people say, “There are way too many factory farms in our county” or “We need to raise wages so people can make ends meet,” we work together to create a plan to get results. That may be urging local officials to pass a resolution for a moratorium on factory farms or a living wage at the county level.

The groups that form are almost always multiracial — small-town America is more racially diverse than many might think — and in the organizing process people build relationships often across economic, religious, racial and ethnic lines and begin to develop trust.

As we make tangible impact, people start to see one another in a different light. That’s when we start having tough conversations about how racism is a big reason we haven’t been coming together all along. To be clear, some folks leave. But an amazing number become part of a growing community of people who choose to defy expectations and live in a more inclusive America.

Small towns have been doing just that. In June of 2018, my organization’s affiliates staged nearly 780 rallies across the country to protest the family separation crisis. Half of the rallies were in counties that voted for Donald Trump. Small towns like Angola, Ind., and Ketchum, Idaho, with populations of 8,000 and 2,700 respectively, were among the communities that came together to support migrant families.

People followed those rallies with rural cookouts, deep in so-called Trump Country, to gather and talk about family and the plight of migrants, and pass the hat to post bond for migrant families.

That same month, Jeremiah Jaynes, a seventh-generation resident of Haywood County, N.C., traveled from the hills of Appalachia, where he grew up planting tobacco and raising chickens, to Washington. Across from the White House, he spoke on behalf of small towns at the “Families Belong Together” march, along with celebrities, activists and immigrants rights groups.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t see the big picture,” he said in a gentle southern accent. “I used to think immigrants were a burden on the economy. I used to think it was us against them.”

Mr. Jaynes, a member of our affiliate organization Down Home North Carolina, was the first speaker to admit his thinking on immigration had evolved. “But I now know that’s just a big con,” he said. “Immigrants are poor people just like me, and pitting us against each other isn’t the solution. I know who is really hurting my community, and it certainly isn’t desperate families and toddlers in cages.”

In all these conversations, people recognize that the enemy is not one another but the big corporations — driving up health care costs, taking away jobs, polluting air and water.

As Mr. Jaynes continued, the crowd got what he was saying. It’s not where you start but the destination that matters.

George Goehl (@GeorgeGoehl) is the director of People’s Action, a national multiracial, poor and working-class people’s organizations.

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