You Belong Here – Organizing White People for a Multi-Racial Democracy, with Erin Heaney

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.

[00:00:08] Erin Heaney: I think that the, our opposition has been very clear with a story about who is to blame for our suffering, for the suffering of working class white people, right? They’re like, they have a very clear message, right? The left hates you. The system is right against you and the takers. Code for people of color are to blame or it’s queer people in this moment, in particular, trans people, right?

[00:00:28] They’re very clear. That is who’s causing your suffering. They’re wrong. They’re lying, but they’re disciplined and they have a much larger, larger echo chamber.

[00:00:52] Scot Nakagawa: Welcome to the anti authoritarian podcast, a project of the 22nd century initiative. I’m Scott Nakagawa, one of your hosts. 

[00:01:00] Sue Hyde: Hello friends, I’m co host Sue Hyde. Scott and I first joined forces about 30 years ago to help defeat anti LGBTQ ballot measures proposed by Christian authoritarian groups. 

[00:01:13] Scot Nakagawa: It was as true then as it is now that those of us who believe in democracy make up a supermajority of people in this country.

[00:01:20] The challenge is, how do we go from being the majority to acting like the majority? 

[00:01:25] Sue Hyde: We dig into strategy questions like these and prescriptions for change. We talk with expert guests and commentators whose scholarship, political activism, and organizing Define the cutting edge of anti authoritarian resistance.

[00:01:41] Thank you for joining us.

[00:01:47] Scot Nakagawa: We know by looking at the demographics of the MAGA movement that it started out being very middle class and even upper middle class We saw that during the 2016 election when Trump was running against Hillary Clinton and it was revealed that his base was better educated, better off than most folks.

[00:02:05] Turns out that this is what’s true of reactionary movements in general. Surprise, surprise. Reactionary populist leaders prey on anxiety and particularly what people call status threats. So the more status one has to protect. The more vulnerable folks tend to feel and the more likely they are to fall for reactionary populist appeals.

[00:02:27] But then, the populists organize downward and try to build a base among those who are members of the working class in order to legitimate the claim that they represent real Americans. So, they start off with those who are relatively privileged, and then once they build the base, they start to organize downward through the class ladder in order to build a working class space to make the argument that they are the real people, and that the real people are reacting against the fake people.

[00:02:58] Perceived elitists like unions, for example, or governments. Um, but when the populists start to organize downward, there’s always a chance that we could beat them to the punch. And so maybe our efforts to reach out to working class people need to be a higher priority than we think it is in the fight to protect democracy.

[00:03:18] And in particular, the effort to reach out to white working class people who seem to be those who, uh, uh, MAGA movement considered the best prize. So, to talk about this with us today is Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ, S U R J, Erin Heaney. 

[00:03:36] Sue Hyde: SURJ organizes in majority white communities to undermine the power of the right and the authoritarian movement.

[00:03:46] And they bring millions of white people into a multiracial movement In her time at Surge, Erin has shepherded significant growth and strategic shifts, including the growth of the Surge Chapter Network to over 150 local groups. The launch and growth of surges electoral organizing programs, and the robust centering of an expansion of surges organizing in poor and working class.

[00:04:15] Rural and southern communities. Thank you for joining us today, Erin. 

[00:04:20] Erin Heaney: Thanks for having me, Sam Scott. I’m so happy to be here. 

[00:04:23] Scot Nakagawa: Well, we’re happy to be here with you, too. So, um, I’m going to open up with a question. What is surge and why is it so important to organize white people on race, class, and gender justice?

[00:04:35] Erin Heaney: Well, Serge is part of a big, broad movement, um, fighting for racial, economic, and gender justice in this country. You know, we think that the way we win that, um, is through large multiracial movements. And we see time and time again, as you’ve alluded to, Scott, That, you know, white communities organized by our opposition get in the way of us winning on every issue that we care about, right?

[00:04:59] Whether it’s climate change, economic justice, reproductive justice. And I would say in this moment, the fight for democracy itself, right? Our opposition is counting on the support and mobilization of white communities to block progress, right? And so often, as you alluded to, right, Scott, it’s not, you know, the fact that they’re white tends to be the elephant in the room.

[00:05:18] We don’t often talk about that. Um, and, you know, Serge, we don’t think it’s white by chance, right? We know that people in power use racism as a strategy, right? Sometimes you talk about racism as a set of behaviors and certainly that’s true, but racism can also be used as a strategy, right? To convince Working class white people that we have more in common with kind of a tiny group of white people at the top, as opposed to, you know, the multiracial working class that we are very much a part of.

[00:05:45] And that’s been part of the strategy since the foundation of our country, but there’s some really particular ways in which our opposition is using the strategy, you know, in this moment. And so I think this is part of what we have to contend with if we’re going to actually defeat them. So I think, you know, for us to win on any issue and to prevent us from, you know, falling into authoritarianism.

[00:06:04] We have to organize some percentage of white people. Not every white person, not everybody, but we certainly need more folks than we’ve got with us. Right now in order for us to win, so that’s the work of search. We organize and predominantly white communities. Yeah, to bring a suicide more white people into the fight for racial, economic and gender justice and it surge.

[00:06:24] We do that by really going through and not around the issues that our opposition is counting on to keep us divided. So for us, that means. We’re talking deeply about the issues that are impacting people’s lives, but we also talk about race and gender because we know our opposition is all of the time, right?

[00:06:41] So we try to help people in over, in overwhelmingly white communities understand how race and gender can be used to keep us divided when, when we really have everything in common. We were founded in 2009, after Obama was elected and in the era of the Tea Party, which is You know, seems pretty mild by today’s comparisons, but we saw the ways in which the Tea Party and other forces around them were using, um, race very much to undermine support for the Affordable Care Act in the very racialized ways in which that was happening.

[00:07:15] And that’s how we got started. And today, you know, we’re organizing many different, I would say, strategic segments of white people, you know, progressive white people who want to get off the sidelines and action for racial justice. You know, most of our work today is really organizing white working people, um, who are largely unorganized and Scott, as you said, we’re in a foot race, right?

[00:07:34] Is our opposition going to organize them? Or are we? And so that’s what surge is up to because we know when we, um, go through and around the issues that our opposition is using to divide us, people at the top lose their most powerful tool. 

[00:07:45] Sue Hyde: So, Erin, uh, you mentioned a couple of things, but I wondered if you would want to expand on that.

[00:07:52] on what issues really animate the white working class at this moment in, in our history? 

[00:08:00] Erin Heaney: Yeah, well, I think the issues that animate the white working class in many ways are the issues that animate, I think, all working people, right? People, I think all people want to live with dignity. They want to be safe.

[00:08:12] They want to find belonging. Um, and so when I think about, like, even my own family, which is a white working class family, you know, they want to make enough money to live on, they want good schools, they need health care and like a really safe, affordable place to live. And I think those are issues of the multiracial working class.

[00:08:28] You know, sometimes conversations about the white working class can leave that part out that the multiracial, the working class is actually multiracial. And, um, I think sometimes when we talk about the white working class, we also tend to really center on the conversation about white privilege and white privilege is real and it can be very deadly.

[00:08:45] But what we see at Surge is that it’s not actually handed out equally within white communities. And the current system as it exists now really is not serving the needs of poor white people in this moment. You know, just like it’s not serving communities of color. You know, before the pandemic, there were 65 million low income white people in this country, right?

[00:09:03] And we know in the South and in rural communities, you know, those rates are even higher, right? Um, and so people are watching their loved ones, you know, struggle with Hunger, low wages, no access to health care, you know, disinvestment in housing. Um, and so we really think that our best bet at search is to organize white communities who really have the most to gain from a change in the status quo.

[00:09:26] And so, uh, and, and, you know, as, as you all alluded to, the right relies really heavily on organizing those folks to provide a base of support. And that’s increasingly true. So I think, you know, we, we kind of obsessively quote Linda Burnham at Surge, who kind of wrote in the, the, I think it was a lead up into the 2016 election, which was quite a while ago at this point.

[00:09:49] But, you know, she’s, she kind of warned us that, you know, the power of the right can’t be undercut unless we Cut. You know, we are actually able to take a large segment of their base with us. And she, she said, white rage is lethal to democracy. And if we are not organizing white folks around their suffering, we can be sure that someone else is so I think we need to be organizing people around the issues that are deeply felt by them.

[00:10:16] But I think we also need to search. We think we need to tend to the thing that Scott said, which is this. Uh, this piece around status feeling like they’re gonna lose their status and that we can’t underestimate, um, the psychological wages of whiteness, right? How deep that kind of solidarity across lines of race can be because it’s been so heavily manufactured and invested in.

[00:10:38] Um, so maybe I’ll can I tell a quick story about one of the ways in which of course, 

[00:10:43] Scot Nakagawa: sure. 

[00:10:44] Erin Heaney: Okay. I mean, one example, I think of this as we’ve been organizing in Tennessee now for, I don’t know, almost a decade, and organizing kind of white, poor, working class people away, away from the far right. You know, we started organizing there after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a little town called Bedford County, overwhelmingly white, very poor rural place.

[00:11:05] And the Klan, the Ku Klux Klan was very active there after the Unite the Right rally. And so we started knocking doors and talking to people about what they thought about the fact that both the Klan was in their community, and We asked them about what was happening in their community. What were they struggling with?

[00:11:21] And we knocked hundreds and hundreds of doors and found that people were really, um, eager to talk with us about race, which maybe might be surprising to some of our listeners. But we’re also very concerned about housing. People were living in really terrible housing conditions. And so we brought people together to start organizing and to put pressure on the landlords and the city council to do more in that community.

[00:11:44] And through that work, we won all kinds of things. Tons of people got to stay in their homes during COVID. Uh, the city council started putting pressure on the landlords and people really saw the power of coming together. They also started working with their neighbors of color who were also facing very similar issues, right?

[00:12:02] Uh, it had all kinds of spillover effects. People began to develop relationships across lines of difference and with the support of our organizers began to build with people, um, people of color largely who are living in cities facing similar challenges. And so we, we saw people’s views on race shift quite pretty dramatically, and we saw really lots of ways in which People began showing up for each other.

[00:12:25] City Council tried to pass an anti immigrant bill, um, by some of our opposition and our overwhelmingly poor white, uh, base of members came out to block it because they understood through this organizing that their true enemies were the landlords and the people in power, uh, not their neighbors who were also struggling with similar housing issues.

[00:12:44] So I think it’s an example of like how we can marry Talking about race with really, um, organizing around issues that deeply matter and are impacting the lives of poor white people. 

[00:12:54] Sue Hyde: And Aaron, I’m curious. Were you able to replicate that in other communities in Tennessee? 

[00:13:03] Erin Heaney: Yeah, they are now, um, they have launched a rural renters union across the state of Tennessee, and so have started reaching out to other people across the state, um, who we know are struggling with similar issues and have had, you know, Uh, close to a thousand conversations already this year with people in other parts of the state.

[00:13:20] Um, and so the hope is to grow a base, um, across the state that’s going to be able to advocate and bring more people into our movement and also combat against a lot of the racist divide and conquer messaging that people are getting, um, in the absence of kind of a different poll. 

[00:13:34] Sue Hyde: That is a great example of Surge’s work.

[00:13:37] Thank you. 

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[00:14:32] Thanks for listening.

[00:14:39] Scot Nakagawa: Okay, Aaron. So I think, you know, this already, but I live in a trailer park that is mostly white, older, and extremely conservative folks here depend on social security. And Medicare, um, they live mostly on fixed incomes and they are for the most part, um, Republican voters and very committed Republican voters.

[00:15:02] Sarah, let’s go Brandon signs and MAGA signs all over this place. Yet these folks who are my neighbors. Would never dream of mistreating me. They might yell at me because they’re weeds in my lawn, but they would never actually mistreat me. Um, nor mistreat people in general. Um, but they are exactly the base for strong man, reactionary populist politics and have really gone for the appeals of what people call ethnic entrepreneurs, people who use division, particularly around identity, particularly around race, in order to be able to turn politics into a way of making money through fundraising and also in order to be able to create allies among those who are very wealthy.

[00:15:49] So, um, I see all of this stuff happening around me. I’m not sure who the trusted messengers are who could appeal to this base. Um, but I do know that their interests are being threatened by the, um, you know, possibility of authoritarian government taking over because they are reliant on those kinds of public benefits programs.

[00:16:08] And, um, and, you know, old people become disabled as they age. And many of the programs that exist for people with disabilities are there because of civil rights advocacy. So, you know, What do we do? How do we win the trust of these mostly white voters? 

[00:16:28] Erin Heaney: It’s a good question, Scott. And I think, uh, it’s, it’s, unfortunately, there’s not a, there’s lots that works, but none of it’s particularly quick.

[00:16:35] I would say, you know, I think, I think, uh, I think there’s a couple of things I would lift up. 1 is that, you know, I think that the, our opposition has been very clear with a story about who is to blame for our suffering for the suffering of working class white people, right? They’re like, they have a very clear message, right?

[00:16:53] The left hates you. The system is right against you and the tapers. Right. Code for people of color are to blame or it’s queer people in this moment, in particular, trans people, right? They’re very clear. That is who’s causing your suffering. They’re wrong. They’re lying, but they’re disciplined and they have a much larger, larger echo chamber than we do.

[00:17:09] So I think that we need to be very, we need to tell a very clear and compelling story about who is to blame. And you know, most of the infrastructure that our side has is democratic party and they’re not too eager to do that, right? Because of their base of financial support. So I think this is why we need independent, um, Organizing infrastructure that can be unapologetic and clear about who is to blame for people suffering.

[00:17:31] Because I think we’ve got to be really, really clear about that. The other thing that the right does very, very, the authoritarians do very well is they give people a sense of belonging and purpose. You know, again, I’ll tell a quick story, but, you know, like, a couple of years ago, I went to a family reunion and my aunt really wanted to teach me to shoot.

[00:17:51] Shoot guns, and I’m not a guns person, but she really wanted me to do it. And so I was like, okay, I’ll do it. And she, she pushed me to try. So we’re at the family reunion, you know, we’re eating some food. I go in the back and there’s a bunch of guys shooting. And I look around and I realized pretty quickly that these guys, a lot of them have 3 percent patches on their jackets.

[00:18:12] And I hadn’t seen those since, you know, 2017 when I was in Charlottesville. You know, of course, the 3% ers are a militia that were founded after Obama was elected, right? And. You know, I think the context here is that, you know, my mom was a working class person, first one in her family to go to college, and that was the exception in her family, though not the rule, right?

[00:18:32] And so I think in the absence of good jobs and a strong union to help, uh, you know, a different political home, a lot of my second cousins have been recruited into the far right. Right, because people are recruiting them everywhere. They are online and shooting clubs at church. And to be clear, like, their lives had not their material lives had not been improved, but they had found a sense of camaraderie belonging in a way to make meaning of the world.

[00:18:55] And so I think this is something that we’ve got to really contend with. How do we create political homes that are meaningful, meaningfully meaningful? How do we create political homes that are culturally relevant? Right? That really speak to people where they’re at and give people a sense of belonging and purpose.

[00:19:09] So I think. Um, this is, I think this is something that our side’s got to figure out how to do with a lot more, uh, skill and at a much bigger scale. Um, we can do it at small scale. We have small examples of this, but we’ve got to get a lot bigger, a lot quicker. 

[00:19:25] Scot Nakagawa: You referenced makers versus takers as a kind of strategy of.

[00:19:29] Authoritarians, and, um, it most certainly appears to be the case that it is, um, you know, that they’ve characterized an entire group of people in society as takers, as basically burdens on society, and takers as basically white men, right? Um, it makes me, um, you know, Think back to a time in the 80s when, um, we, um, were triggered to action when, um, neo Nazi skinheads were distributing, um, bumper stickers that said, white men are this nation, white men built this nation.

[00:19:58] Um, that’s the basic ethos. Um, so, you know, I just wanted to clarify that for the audience. And, um, I know you know this, Aaron, but among those takers are women. And particularly since the pandemic and, you know, um, the kind of dominance of women in the workforce, um, at the lower levels, um, especially since then.

[00:20:16] Um, but I also just wanted to, um, note that, you know, here in my trailer park, I’m experiencing approximately what you’re describing. Um, people around here are very angry. They talk about oligarchs. They talk about consolidated power and government in the way that many of us would who have been on the outside knocking on the door trying to get in.

[00:20:37] And they, um, talk about the economy as if it’s rigged against them. Um, so, you know, really what they’re looking at and, and of course, fearful of all of the changes that are happening. Everything seems to be happening far too fast. And I sometimes wonder, are you projecting the kind of technological changes around us and the anxieties you’re producing on queer people, for instance?

[00:20:58] I’m not sure. But, you know, there is this, like, Deep sense of angst. It reminds me that it appears we’re all reacting to the same things in the world because those things are the things that are concerning me too as a nearly 63 year old man. You know, I’m worried about all that stuff as well. Um, but we are reacting very differently based on who the trusted messengers are that are helping to, um, you know, kind of translate the moment for us and help us to understand it.

[00:21:24] And what the media seems to have done is focus so much on the differences of our reactions. That we have lost track of the fact that we’re reacting to the same thing. And so, um, you know, what you’re describing feels to me like that effort, right? To get people to wake up and see, you know, we’re all reacting to the same thing.

[00:21:42] You might think really differently about it, but the same thing that is affecting me is affecting you and we’re both not happy about it. That just seems to me like a really great strategy for reframing some of the, uh, really toxic conversations that we’re in, debates that we’re in right now. Um, particularly when some of them seem to be leading us toward violence.

[00:22:00] So what do you think about that? 

[00:22:02] Erin Heaney: I mean, I think I’m on the right 

[00:22:03] Scot Nakagawa: track. 

[00:22:04] Erin Heaney: I think you absolutely are on the right track. I think this is part of the challenges that like, we, we, the largest, the largest megaphones, I think, do need to speak truthfully about the changes that people are experiencing and the suffering that people are experiencing, because I think that’s trustworthy.

[00:22:20] You know, right now, the Republican Party is saying, you know, You know, things, things couldn’t be worse. And I think there’s not enough of us on our side saying things are really bad, but offering a different pathway forward. Um, I think if we don’t speak to people suffering and the very real anxieties that people have, we’re not going to be trusted to lead people out of them.

[00:22:37] So that feels really true to me, Scott. 

[00:22:40] Sue Hyde: Aaron, um, I grew up in a, a small town in West central Illinois that is largely agricultural, the economy there is largely agricultural based. And in, in my town, There has been a very significant in incoming population of folks from, uh, Central America, Mexico, some of the nations of West Africa, primarily brought there by the, uh, local, uh, pig slaughtering house.

[00:23:20] It used to be Oscar Meyer and now it’s some other, you know, gigantic Multinational corporation thing, uh, JBS is the name of the company that owns the slaughterhouse now, but I, I have read about and I have noticed a certain kind of tension between the white folks whose families have lived in Beardstown, Illinois for generations.

[00:23:50] The new incoming immigrants who are primarily there to work at the Slaughterhouse So as as your folks have, you know, kind of grappled with different Sociopolitical dynamics. What are what are some lessons that you’ve learned from? this kind of situation a small town relatively isolated prior to this influx of people from other places and spaces You And the tensions that arise from that.

[00:24:24] Erin Heaney: Well, I think we’ve learned a couple things. I mean, I think one is the importance of us investing in leaders who are oven from those places that have been there for a really long time. So that’s, you know, Scott Scott was beginning to speak to us. Like, who are some of the trusted messengers? And 1 of the things we, you know, we try to do it surges, um, start with the people who are kind of with us and have a shared vision for where we want to go and invest deeply in them.

[00:24:47] So, for example, in Tennessee, we invested in a leader to begin to build out something locally in her community. I think. What we’ve found is that it’s important to kind of go slow and be extremely curious. You know, that first phase of the story that I told probably took a year and a half. We were knocking on people’s doors and having deep, long, long, open ended conversations.

[00:25:08] These are, this is not the kind of canvassing, like traditional political canvassing where we’re there to get an answer. We’re there to get a yes or no. We actually want to get into the messy conversations with people who are maybe not with us 100 percent yet. You know, that’s, that’s actually where the power of.

[00:25:22] For transformation is the most profound, um, and so we’re not looking for everyone who just agrees with us. So it is important to find those folks, but to orient those folks in a way to understand that their role is not to be, um, like the smartest or the right or the most outspoken even, but to actually bring more people along with them to orient themselves.

[00:25:41] Like, our, our goal is actually to bring as many people along with us as possible. But those conversations, so they’re, they’re long, they’re messy. They’re not linear often, and often it takes, you know, 456 times going back to people to get them in the door to begin to take action with us. And so I think we found to that.

[00:26:00] It’s important to bring people together across lines of difference. Some of the most powerful and transformative work that’s happened is when we have been able to bring people together and people’s attitude shift over time. So I think, um, Yeah, that’s those are some of the things that we’ve learned.

[00:26:15] Sue Hyde: Thank you. Um, I’d like to connect you with some people, uh, from Beardstown, Illinois, if you’re interested. I’d love that. 

[00:26:22] Erin Heaney: Let’s make it happen.

[00:26:30] Scot Nakagawa: This podcast is presented by the 22nd Century Initiative, a hub for strategy and action for frontline activists, national leaders, and people like you. 

[00:26:40] Sue Hyde: At 22ci. org, you can sign up for our newsletter, You can learn from our anti authoritarian playbook, which includes resources on how to block rising authoritarianism, bridge across the multiracial majority, and build an inclusive pro democracy movement in your community.

[00:27:04] Here, here’s just a slightly different issue, but very important. So, uh, How did Drag Queen Story Hour eclipse issues like wage theft and union busting? And how did that focus further shatter the working class solidarity? And what should we be doing? 

[00:27:27] Erin Heaney: Totally. Well, I think, I mean, I think it’s important to situate this moment and some of the dynamics that we’re describing.

[00:27:33] I think within the context of You know, a 40 year attack on labor unions in this country, you know, and certainly, you know, some unions, you know, I’m, I’m a proud child of a union organizer. I’m, we’re a CWA family. Um, and so, you know, I, I say that with a lot of pride towards unions. I also know some unions are not anti racist.

[00:27:53] Some, you know, unions are explicitly racist. And, um, there is a lot of research that shows that, um, you know, labor unions are and have been historically an institution that did help mediate white racism. And it was a play, it was a political home for white workers to, to make meaning and have to actually struggle in many cases across lines of difference.

[00:28:13] And I think that the authoritarians and our, you know, our opponents know that, and that’s part of why that they’ve attacked, um, labor unions for the last 40 years. And so we’re in a much weaker position as a movement because we don’t have strong. political homes. And by political homes, I just mean places for people to come together.

[00:28:30] make meaning of the world and then hopefully take action together. So I think that’s part of what we’re up against. Um, as the attacks on the labor movement have, you know, been quite successful, I think what we need to do is create more of these political homes. So that’s part of what we’re up to at surge.

[00:28:44] You know, we’ve launched projects like Southern Crossroads and the Appalachian People’s Union. These are, you know, projects that are doing the work in Tennessee and Kentucky and Um, places where people can come together and take action to make their lives better, um, and hopefully do that in solidarity with other communities as well.

[00:29:02] So, yeah, I mean, I think if we don’t have strong political homes for people to understand who their, you know, true enemies are, it’s very easy for opposition to come in and point the figure at, you know, drag queens, trans kids, um, and we’ve seen that play out, you know, across the country over and over again, and especially escalated in this moment.

[00:29:20] Sue Hyde: And what, what is, what is, what’s your take on the So to speak, attraction to drag queen story hour as a look over here, look over here, look at this, what, what, what’s, what’s going on on the ground. 

[00:29:34] Erin Heaney: I mean, I think it’s this point that it’s not just race, right? It’s gender, that gender can also become the boogeyman, um, of the unknown.

[00:29:41] And it’s very easy for people to, to point their fingers at it and to, um, project things onto people, even that’s outside their lived experience. One of the things that we found in Kentucky, for example, is that a lot of people would claim that they were, you know, against trans kids, but when we would knock on their doors, Um and talk to them it became pretty clear that they had lots of queer and trans people in their lives Right, and so when we were able to actually break through and have direct conversations with people people’s positions on that issue shifted pretty quickly Um, so I think uh, I think we need to be just as vigilant and thoughtful about gender as we are about race in our organizing 

[00:30:18] Sue Hyde: Thank you.

[00:30:18] And uh just for our listeners. I want to remind folks that what is Aaron is talking about, it’s called deep canvassing, uh, which is a different kind of interaction with neighbors and friends and family members. Um, you might want to check it out at the surge website. 

[00:30:38] Scot Nakagawa: I do want to say something about drag queens, and I’ll say it, 

[00:30:40] Erin Heaney: I knew it, Scott.

[00:30:42] Scot Nakagawa: You know, I can’t help myself. You know, my sense of it is that drag queens basically challenge traditional gender roles. And in particular, uh, this idea, gender essentialism, that the right relies on really heavily. The idea that we are essentially by gender what we are by sex. So, you know, that’s related to, uh, kind of wanting to maintain a rigid gender hierarchy with men on the top, basically.

[00:31:09] Um, but drag queens basically come into the world as they are, challenging those basic ideas about gender in a way that are particularly triggering to their base, and also evoke a kind of rage reaction around sexual anxiety and gender anxieties that they can weaponize. To, for example, attack our public schools.

[00:31:31] And so, always important, I think, to deal with those issues of gender and sexuality, however controversial they may seem to be, because they’re always afoot. No matter what they’re saying, on their minds, one of the things is gender. So, um, you know, I don’t want to, um, just Ask a quick gender related question about Amendment 2 in Kentucky, um, which for folks in our audience, um, was a ballot measure back in 2022 that would have banned abortion in the state.

[00:32:03] But Serge then, um, joined other groups in, um, a campaign that resulted in the rejection of that ballot measure. So, what lessons did you draw from this experience, and what can we learn from? 

[00:32:15] Erin Heaney: Yeah, we were part of this, kind of, broader coalition, like, Protect Kentucky, uh, Access Coalition, and we won. Everyone was like, Kentucky’s on the ballot, or, abortion’s on the ballot in Kentucky, there’s no way you all are gonna win.

[00:32:27] And what we did is, we saw that we won overwhelmingly. You know, we ran the largest field, uh, program in the state. We had like over 20, 000 conversations with white, uh, majority working class voters, and most of our work was in rural parts of the state. And we did the thing I’ve said already four times on this podcast, but we had deep, long, open ended conversations with people on the doors that were extremely curious, um, and extremely vulnerable.

[00:32:54] Our canvassers were also very, very curious. You know, trained to tell their own stories about why they were making calls, um, and why this issue and why Kentucky matter to them. And we saw that one in four people we talked to went from disagreeing with us about the campaign, uh, to supporting and committing to vote to protect abortion.

[00:33:14] Pretty unbelievable. Those 25 percent persuasion rate is pretty high. And what we saw is that talking to people and helping make the connection and help kind of surface the, what I would say is cognitive dissonance between the political belief that they held, kind of the abstract party line they held and the reality of their own lived experience was incredibly powerful.

[00:33:37] Um, and it helped create a dissonance that then led to people changing their minds. So people told us all kinds of incredibly vulnerable stories. Some of them were about abortion and, uh, abortions they had had in their lives or people that they love and had to, had to make a very difficult choice. Um, but people told us all kinds of other stories that were related to really intimate moments in their lives.

[00:33:59] And over and over again, it was often about The economics of having a child and the reality of what people understood that, meaning, you know, what that meant to people’s lives. You know, the counties we were in, we closed margins by close to 20%. So I think part of what we need to continue to do is be.

[00:34:18] Train our people and train our movement to show up curious, vulnerable and nonjudgmental. We can be clear as organizers about where we’re trying to go, but also show up with humility and curiosity and the presence that it requires to sit with someone and change their mind. Because I think that’s, that’s what we’ve got to do if we’re going to get ourselves out of this.

[00:34:38] Yeah, that’s some of what we learned. 

[00:34:40] Scot Nakagawa: And that is deep canvassing. 

[00:34:42] Erin Heaney: Yeah, 

[00:34:43] Scot Nakagawa: it is. So, you know, I just wonder, you know, because you’re a campaigner and you have a lot of experience, um, you know, in leading campaigns, the right seems to have figured out a formula, right? They design campaigns that divide us and that unify their base.

[00:35:02] How do we flip the switch or flip the switch, flip the script here? And um You know, identify issues that divide them, but unite us, and that might actually serve as wedges to peel back a few percent from the base for authoritarian and reactionary ideas. 

[00:35:21] Erin Heaney: I think that’s totally right. Scott. I think there’s a whole range of economic issues that we can and should be running campaigns around.

[00:35:27] And I do think this question of ballot initiatives are really powerful. I mean, we’ve seen in many other places, a lot of ballot initiatives around abortion right now, but we’ve seen like in Florida, for example, there was a ballot initiative around kind of restoring, um, formerly incarcerated people’s right to vote, which was overwhelmingly popular and built an incredibly broad base of people from Republicans to the, you know, the far left.

[00:35:49] Um, and it was incredibly successful in that moment. So I think we do need to be doing more of this of actually letting people vote and having campaigns where we can go out and have excuses to talk to, you know, not just our little clique of friends, but really hundreds of thousands of voters. Um, yeah.

[00:36:06] Over and over again, uh, to, to begin to, you know, reweave the thread that we need, um, to build the coalitions that are actually big enough for us to win and beat back the authoritarians. 

[00:36:17] Scot Nakagawa: Awesome. 

[00:36:18] Sue Hyde: Thank you. So, Aaron, another, uh, kind of unique project of surge was to organize something called rednecks for black lives to support.

[00:36:28] The 2020 racial justice uprising. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that work is informing what Surge is doing now? 

[00:36:38] Erin Heaney: Yeah. Yeah. One of my dear colleagues, Beth Howard, um, who, uh, grew up in rural Kentucky, um, and is now running Surge’s Appalachian People’s Union was seeing some really incredible things as we all were in the summer of 2020.

[00:36:52] You know, we were seeing actually small towns, not just big cities, but people in small towns. taking action for racial justice and, you know, in defense of black lives, many people for the first time in their entire lives. Um, so that was powerful and encouraging. And then, you know, like many of us, Beth was also seeing lots of people in her family have negative reactions to that, you know, and feeling, you know, do feeling like they were being left out or, you know, the, the classic all lives matter made a resurgence in that moment, you know, and, So Beth decided to write this piece, um, really calling her folks back into, uh, solidarity in this moment.

[00:37:29] And, and so she wrote a piece called Rednecks for Black Lives, and she talked to, uh, she spoke to actually the quite radical lineage of the term redneck, which many of us have learned as a derogatory term, right? But in reality, we know that redneck, uh, Came from being in labor battle with the companies and the guys who wore the red bandana were the white workers who were demonstrating their solidarity with workers of color, and they wore that red bandana to show that they were in solidarity and that they weren’t with the company because they couldn’t tell because the white folks are both the company bosses, the sheriff’s.

[00:38:07] And the workers. And so the red bandana actually symbolized multiracial solidarity against the bosses. And so Beth wanted to remind white working class people of this powerful lineage that we can step into. And it was very well received. We had kind of no sophisticated comms department at that point. So Beth put it out and it went viral.

[00:38:25] And, um, you know, in less than a week, over 10, 000 people joined a Facebook group. So we know that there’s this longing out there and a desire for more working class white people to join our movements. And I think when we give people an in that speaks to their lived reality and their identity, we know that people come with us.

[00:38:42] So, you know, since then we’ve launched the Appalachian People’s Union and there’s projects all across rural Kentucky now that are organizing largely around housing issues right now as a way to bring people in. But very much in the spirit and the lineage of poor and working class people across Appalachia joining in multi racial solidarity, you know, against the authoritarians.

[00:39:02] And so since then, Beth has actually turned her article into a book, um, and she’s got a contract. And so it’s going to be coming out early next year. So if you go to our website, we’ll be sure to, uh, let you know when it comes out. And that’s going to be traveling the country, um, talking to people and inviting them into our movement.

[00:39:18] So everybody stay tuned. It’s going to be very exciting. 

[00:39:20] Sue Hyde: That is very exciting. Thank you. 

[00:39:23] Scot Nakagawa: Well, we’re all grateful for Beth, Beth Howard. Um, she is a shero. So, um, Aaron, so given all of the stuff that’s going down, and I don’t think I need to get into all of it, you know, all of the bad stuff that we know is happening in the world, what’s giving you hope?

[00:39:43] Erin Heaney: Well, Scott, I’m a hopeful person. I’m from Buffalo, New York, which means I’m a lifelong Bills fan. So, you know, you can’t, I’m extremely hopeful person. I’m lucky, Scott. You know, I get to see all across the country, the ways in which people are stepping up in this moment, you know, and despite incredible odds, you know, people are still showing up and doing really powerful and incredible things.

[00:40:04] I mean, already this year, we’ve had like six. 70 half of our chapters have been engaged, um, in, in really powerful work and against authoritarianism. Um, we’re seeing our groups grow day in and day out. And so I think people are hungry to belong to something and people are hungry and excited about fighting for a different role despite really, really hard odds.

[00:40:26] And so, you know, people, then that’s a sound corny, but people are continuing to show up, um, and, and make meaning and, and, and win together. So I, you know. There’s a lot that gives me hope and, you know, we got to keep going. 

[00:40:39] Sue Hyde: So, Erin, I’m really fired up listening to you, and I know some of our, uh, folks listening in also are interested.

[00:40:46] If we wanted to get involved, how would we do that? 

[00:40:50] Erin Heaney: Well, you should join us, Surj, S U R J dot org is our website, um, and if you go and sign up there, we will get you connected to all kinds of ways to take action. We have I think six ways to take action with us every single week and our organizers are great at making asks.

[00:41:07] So, uh, if you sign up, we will make sure to loop you into the work that we’re up to. We’ve got weekly phone banks, action hours, and then we have, you know, 150 chapters across the country. Um, and if you’re in, you know, the rural South or in Appalachia, um, the Appalachian people’s union and Southern crossroads is also engaging, um, as well.

[00:41:25] So if you sign up at surge. org, we will point you in the right direction, uh, and put you to work because we need you. Fantastic. Thank you so much. 

[00:41:33] Sue Hyde: Thank you, 

[00:41:34] Scot Nakagawa: Erin. 

[00:41:34] Erin Heaney: Thanks for having me.

[00:41:45] Sue Hyde: Hey, thanks again for listening. Find more episodes of the Anti Authoritarian Podcast on all of your favorite platforms, and also at 22ci. org and convergencemag. org. Direct links to these and other resources referenced in this episode are in the show notes. After the revolution, we’re out 

[00:42:09] Sound on Tape: of our lives.

[00:42:11] The authoritarian podcast is created by the 22nd Century Initiative and published by Conversions Magazine. Our theme music is After the Revolution by Carsey Blanton and is licensed under creative commons. The show is hosted by Scott Nawa and Sue Hyde. Executive producers are James, mom and Tony Esberg.

[00:42:29] Our producer is Josh Stro and Yong Chan Miller is our production assistant.