White liberals like to do a lot of their work in communities of color, but this election has shown us that white progressives have the most work to do in rural white communities. (Thread...)

Communities of color have shown us that they’re doing their own work and doing it well.
But we have a major deficit in white communities, particularly in rural white communities—of creativity, of compassion, of critical thinking, of care.

t’s easier to go into marginalized communities—white saviors—and feel good about the work we do. But those communities feel so good to work in precisely because they have so much creativity, compassion, care, critical thinking.

It’s much more difficult to deal with the spiritual and political toxicity in white communities. More dangerous, more emotionally treacherous. But that’s really what we must do next

You’re not going to change red state culture campaigning for presidents. You need to do it by working with young people. Changing a culture. The few after school programs in rural white communities are often evangelical church-related, or focus on gun culture in some way.

There are amazing teachers in public schools, but this is not the work they're given the freedom to do in rural white communities.
You won’t sway the votes of MAGA voters with logic or numbers or a pandemic that has killed a quarter of a million of their fellow citizens.

We’ve learned that. We need a revolution that brings art and history and science to the young people that live among the MAGA crowd, that sets them up for a higher education that makes them critical thinkers. Not political work, but heart work. Mind work.

Our communities are sick. We like to believe we can heal other communities, but we're not dealing with our own.

When I was 14, at Detroit Catholic Central, a predominantly white Catholic school on the edge of the Detroit/Redford border, I had a white teacher named Mr. Bean. He had us reading W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X and Dudley Randall and Angela Davis. Changed my life.

Gradually—a few years later, it doesn’t work overnight—this changed the way I thought about race and understood American history and embraced creativity and found my work.

I’ve lived in rural Midwestern communities most of my adult life now. I’ve been thinking of an initiative that draws on my past experience as public humanities professional, rural arts center director, and teacher of creative writing that confronts what we need to confront.

Stay tuned. Help out. More soon.