The myth of progress exposed
How big money and identity politics left us a mess to clean up
It’s 1986, and I’m sitting through another Rainbow Coalition meeting in Des Moines. It’s a Saturday and Jesse Jackson’s running for president.
One speaker after the next opens with some descriptor like this:
“I’m 1/16th Cherokee.”
“I have Tourette’s Syndrome.”
“My daughter’s married to an African American man.”
Most of these people are white, employed, healthy and college educated. Most of the crowd is white too. Their only struggle is how to be relevant in a Black-led national organization of people of color.
That was my introduction to identity politics.
Nearly 40 years later, my outside work offered the perfect metaphor:
This is your progressive community. Hit play to see your progressive community on identity politics.
When I was in college, I befriended a grad student from Zimbabwe, a dark-skinned Black man with a shiny bald head and captivating accent. One day, I announced I wanted to be “a worker.” I could never be a worker, he said, because I had choices and they don’t. But I could use my white skin and college education to help workers, if that’s what I chose to do.
It was my first lesson on privilege. For the next 40 years, I’d find ways to put it to good use. That’s not tokenism or being a white savior; it’s what solidarity looks like.
My first year after college, I was a community activist (in other words, I couldn’t find a job). Then a union picked me up. I enforced union contracts for white welfare workers in Western Iowa. I went on to organize Latino and Black janitors in Newark, New Jersey and finally to represent Black hospital workers in Chicago while also serving as the communications director for the entire 25,000-member union. Between jobs and since those days, I applied what I’d learned to whatever community I lived in.
As a writer, I lifted worker voices. As an organizer, I used my skills and at times my skin color to help them gain fairness, respect and a voice with their bosses. These were things they all wanted.
Sometimes I could convince them to march on the boss to make a demand. Boss comes out of his office, surprised. Uncomfortable silences. Shifting feet. No one looking up. The boss, sometimes calling security, telling them to get back to work if they had nothing to say. Someone finally muttering a polite request. Others following with clearer voices, becoming more demanding, feeling safer the more they talked.
Their jobs were at stake and still they stood there, together.
When it worked, it was magical. And it stayed with them. Once they saw how scared their boss was, (calling security on his own janitors? Really??) and tasted that power of having each other’s backs, they were changed forever.
This ain’t that
Flash forward to 2025. Only five short years after George Floyd’s death, Me Too, court victories and DEI initiatives, and everything’s getting dismantled by one man’s signature.
Why was this victory so brittle?
The firewood I’m splitting gives me a hint. No two logs are the same. Heavy, thorny honey locust, dense yellow mulberry, light box elder, splintery white ash that shreds like wooden threads, knotty cherry twisting in the splitter.
Maybe it was a “me too” (small case) problem like the one at that Rainbow Coalition meeting. At some point white, trans or gay, college-educated people needing “safe spaces” became more visible, more pervasive in (white) work and (white) life than high-school-educated Black men dying on the streets every day.
On the flipside, each piece of wood is not so unique they have nothing common. None of them can stop me from picking it up and splitting it. And they’re all headed to the fire eventually.
When will we figure out we’re all headed to the fire?
Because it was built on a house of cash. Tax-dodging billionaires used their foundations to pour millions into the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Anyone could file non-profit papers, think up projects “centering” identity and get a grant. Meet the metrics and you’re golden. SOCIAL JUSTICE HERE, Mon - Fri, 9 to 5.
The money was there for the picking. I know. I was running a nonprofit at the time. I read hundreds of Requests for Proposals. Find a way to twist your mission into being relevant to an under-represented (including LGBTQ) group and exponentially increase your odds of funding.
Did Black and Brown people need and deserve serious historical rebalancing, paid for by all of us? Yes! This is not about that, because that will never be enough.
This is about power, not a pay off, because billions of dollars later, what capacity do we have to fight the good fight now that the money’s gone?
How many organizers can knock on doors, meet workers at a factory gate or visit moms at the playground and move them to fight for their own economic and social justice in their community?
How many can get working people to risk their livelihoods to march on the boss? Organize fired federal workers to shut down major highways? Get anyone to walk off the job en masse?
How many can organize market farmers to throw tomatoes at elected officials who’ve burned them? Get students to walk out of schools where books are banned? Stuff congresspeople’s offices to stop tariffs from driving us all into poverty?
If you can count how many, we’re in trouble.
Know your enemy
South Carolina State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter once told me, “White people don’t talk about race because they’re afraid of being called racist. Black people don’t talk about race because frankly, we’re tired.”
Thanks to Gilda, I’m no longer afraid of being labeled. It’s our job to call out injustice in whatever form we see it, now matter what we look like. That includes the damage identity politics has done to this country and the backlash that gave us Trump 2.0.
I know white people making change. Some are even straight.
Jess Piper is a rural progressive straight white woman who doesn’t pretend to be a farmer just to ramp up her credentials.
Adam Kuznia is a straight, white, open-minded male farmer and writer who just wants an Ag category in Substack.
Matt Russell is a progressive white leader, a farmer, a writer and gay, but he never leads with “gay” because that’s not all that defines him.
Art Cullen is an old, straight, white guy who can tell a story of Storm Lake’s immigrants that’ll make you cry and call your legislator.
Denise O’Brien, the grandmother of organic farming in Iowa, the straight, white, feminist founder of the Women Food and Agriculture Network.
Our enemy is not our community, as my old friend Ruth B. Anderson (remembered here) taught me. We can’t get distracted by people who aren’t woke enough. It’s not old civil rights activists who can’t keep up with pronouns that defy grammar. Or the white woman who crosses the street - not to avoid a Black man a block away - but to get to the damned Post Office.
Our enemy is out there where oligarchs in power are taking everything from all of us, one identity at a time.
Eighty years ago, Pastor Niemöller called it. Here we are again. Listen to the dead. They’re watching.
So what next?
Organize! But first detox from identity politics we’ve indulged for too long.
Example: I was proud to participate in our local Hands Off! rally. Yet, each person named their own issue. Older person? Hands off our Social Security! Young woman? Hands off our bodies! Black person? Hands off our civil rights! Trans kid? Trans rights are human rights!
Hands Off! was ingenious and invigorating. It was also a sign of long-term failure. We did not bring people together for each other around a single unifying issue like our lack of access to resources and power. We came together for our own issues.
We have not yet become greater than the sum of our parts, but we can.
Building something sturdy
Here at Draco Hill, it’s all about firewood right now. Can you tell? Cutting it, splitting it and storing it for the future. We sell it to Hipcampers and reduce our winter energy expenses. Both make a farm more economically sustainable.
You could say it’s not relevant to farming. We’re not planting and growing it. I can’t talk seed or fertilizer rates about it. (It does makes me hurt as much as any other farm work around here, though.)
Yet firewood makes us more successful. It’s as relevant as my college education and white skin. It will help me and those around me live a better life, the way it’s meant to. But if we don’t stack it well and with intention, individual pieces will sit on the ground and get eaten by worms and fungi.
Out of this firewood of different sizes and weights and the odd pieces we’ll use for kindling, out of the backache, stiff fingers and hydraulic oil stink in our sinuses, we can use our skills and vision to build something beautiful and sturdy, if we don’t catch our hand in the splitter first.
Strength is like a good firewood pile - all of us leaning on each other, holding each other up, in whatever weather and any time, comfortable knowing we can’t do it alone.
Learn how to organize!
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This statement right here: We did not bring people together for each other around a single unifying issue like our lack of access to resources and power. We came together for our own issues.
The Right is already unified.
They’ve rallied around one issue: Power. Control. White Christian Nationalist rule.
They don’t need separate silos because their silo is the entire damn barn.
Meanwhile, the Left is out here trying to:
Protect books
Protect bodies
Protect truth
Protect identity
Protect speech
Protect water
Protect everything
And we forget that the thing that ties all of that together is:
Access to power and resources.
And the comparison to a pile of stacked wood is Chef's Kiss!
"…individual pieces will sit on the ground and get eaten by worms and fungi."
Ah, but those are regenerating the soil, so not really a loss. 😉