Recently, my hometown of Bloomington’s farmers market has been covered Fox News and The New York Times. Not because the vegetables sold here are particularly deserving of national attention. The market was deemed newsworthy because one of the farm stands is run by outspoken white supremacists.
Although Bloomington is a fairly liberal college town, this region has a sordid history of hate. The national Klan headquarters is less than 30 minutes away – when I was in college, the campus diversity coordinators warned students not to stop in that town, not even to buy gas. Even right here in Bloomington, there was a fracas at the local high school recently because some students decided to honor a friend who’d died by using cremation ashes to print bumper stickers – but they printed stickers of the Confederate flag.
Teaching poetry in the local jail has made me much better at recognizing supremacist imagery. Most people know that the Confederate flag is bad news, but I’ve gotten to see a wider range of hateful symbols tattooed onto people’s flesh.
COs bring twelve people to each week’s class – often two to four will be Black (in a town where the total population is approximately 4% Black or African-American), and the rest are usually white guys. It’s pretty common for one or two of the white guys to have visible supremacist tattoos. Which doesn’t even include questionable stuff like the dude who got an poke and stick of the words “White Trash” in elaborate two-in-tall cursive letters during his time there. Tattooing runs afoul of the jail’s “no self mutilation” policy, but most COs studiously overlook the guys’ rashy red skin and burgeoning designs.
When I’m there, we often read poetry that directly addresses racial injustice. I’ve brought stuff by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Adrian Matejka, and Tracy Smith. Sometimes these lead to good discussions. Sometimes our class gets totally derailed.
In one of the poems titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes pulls off a stunning trick. The same line is included twice, but the word “haunted” changes from a verb into an adjective after the language slides into a less formal diction. It’s a beautiful moment. The first time I brought this poem, we talked about the clinginess of the past, the way not only our own histories but also the histories of our forebears can stalk us through time.
The next time I brought this poem, several guys reacted by saying that Black people don’t talk right. Then they went off about sagging pants. All this from southern-accented white guys whose missing-toothed, meth-mouthed mumbles and guffaws I could barely comprehend.
We had to quickly move on.
Or there was the time when we read Betts’ “Elegy with a City in It,” a fantastic poem that uses a spare, stark set of words and sounds to simultaneously evoke both the deprivations of the inner city and the epic grandeur of The Iliad, which uses a similarly constrained lexicon.
Many gone to the grave: men awed
by blood, lost in the black
of all that is awful:
think crack and aluminum. Odd
what time steals,
or steals time: black robes, awful
nights when men offed in the streets awed
us.
If you read the poem aloud, you’re chanting the same phonemes over and over, but their meanings twist and turn as they spill from your tongue. That’s what I wanted to discuss.
Instead, a few guys latched onto lines like
Black,
Mario, Charles, they all blackened
the inside of a coffin …
and this offended them because “white people have it bad, too!” As though Betts could not describe Black pain without trivializing their own. Soon somebody was saying “All lives matter” and that he’d voted for our current president. This guy was in jail because he’d been caught selling heroin to support his own habit. The president he’d voted for had recently recommended executing drug dealers.
Somebody else shook his head and muttered, “y’all are fucking [stupid].”
We moved on.
In my classes, I work with a wide range of ages – sometimes guys as young as seventeen, sometimes men in their sixties. My spouse, as a high school teacher, works with younger people – anywhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But ideology can set in early. My spouse has had students whose families were prominent in the Klan.
At the beginning of the year, she asks each student to fill in the paper silhouette of a head with words and pictures of what inspires them to succeed. She then posts these along the ceiling of her classroom. Several times, she’s had to ask kids to erase supremacist imagery.
So it isn’t terribly surprising that some farmers at our local market have hateful beliefs. Right-wing supremacist movements are major terrorist organizations in this country, and they do a lot of recruiting. As our nation has become slightly less horrible, though, many of these people learned to be circumspect. They maintain a divide between their private and public language.
People who rely upon public, liberal venues like our farmers market can’t be too outspoken with their hate.
Indeed, the white supremacist farmers who were recently outed tried to be circumspect. But they must have felt lonely, and they grew too careless. Under a pseudonym, they posted on the Identity Evropa message board. This is a website devoted to the ideologies that have inspired the vast majority of terrorism in the United States. Theoretically, this is a venue where people get to cultivate their hatred anonymously. But one of their compatriots was caught painting swastikas on a synagogue (see image below) and blew their cover. Sort of. The vandal was interrogated by the FBI, and his remark unveiling the farmers’ pseudonym was buried deep in a 200-page sentencing document.
Through assiduous work, a team of activists was able to prove that these farmers were white supremacists.
The activists who had worked so hard to gather evidence were obviously against hate. They wanted to take action. But the plan they favored wasn’t very flashy. They would organize a boycott of that farm stand. They also proposed that the city use the sellers’ farmers market fees to fund grants for people of color, with the understanding that our nation’s long history of racism has inequitably skewed the demographics of agricultural land holdings.
To stay at the farmers market, the supremacists would have had to support a cause they loathed … and they were making less and less money here. I was told that, during the boycott, the farmers had begun padding their bins, bringing fewer vegetables each week so that they could still appear to be selling out their stock.
Unfortunately, the tropes of social media have changed public discourse in our country. I assume it’s relatively uncontroversial to claim that social media prizes style over substance. Quiet, careful plans are at a disadvantage in the attention economy.
As word spread that these farmers were white supremacists, patrons demanded that they be banned from our market. People of color now felt unsafe in that space, for obvious reasons. There’s a difference between the perceived threat level felt by a pale-skinned activist and by somebody who is recognizably a member of a racial minority.
The mayor, whose spouse is a constitutional law professor, rightly argued that the farmers would be able to sue the city on a First Amendment case.
Still, people felt that we had to do something more visible. Passively allowing outspoken white supremacists to hawk their tomatoes at our market would seem to be tacitly endorsing their political stance.
Everybody has a right to believe whatever garbage they want. Do you sincerely believe that people of northern European descent have a genetic inclination toward greater intelligence? You’re wrong, and you’re a jerk, but you’re allowed to believe that.
The problem is that white supremacist organizations like Identity Evropa use terrorism to back their asinine beliefs. Implicit threats of violence, delivered by people known to stockpile military-grade weaponry, are different from “mere” hate.
If these farmers couldn’t be banned, then we’d hold signs in front of their booth. Eventually, a protester was arrested – the police had asked her to stand in a designated “announcements” area instead of in the middle of the market – and, as always happens following an arrest, her home address was published online.
She was soon inundated with death threats.
As coverage of the dispute increased, right-wing militia types were also drawn to our town. Three percenters, unaffiliated gun nuts, other supremacists – they began to support that farm, undermining the boycott. And these radical Protestant faux-constitutional terrorists made sufficiently credible threats of mass violence that our mayor had to shut down the entire market for two weeks at the height of the growing season. Other farmers were suffering.
Calm, careful behavior from the original activists – assiduously combing through those lengthy, dull documents, not to mention their efforts to infiltrate local supremacists’ in-person social circles – had undoubtably helped. Hateful ideologies were exposed, and efforts were made to impose consequences.
But then our visible protests made matters worse. We’ve helped the proponents of hate to make more money.
And, now that we’ve drawn attention to them, we’ve inadvertently connected these white supremacists with their allies. They will no longer need to post on public forums, which was the only reason that activists were able to prove that they supported these ideologies in the first place. Now these supremacist farmers are invited speakers at right-wing events.
As this whole struggle was unfolding, my spouse and I participated in a poetry reading. We shared poems written by people in our local jail. We were joined by one of the authors, a man who had just been released after five months inside. He described what it was like to write while he was there – breathing fresh air in the outdoor rec courtyard only nine times in five months, having access to a pencil sharpener only once each week, and feeling forced to confess to a crime that he swears he hadn’t committed because they promised to release him for time served.
Our audience clapped for the poems and stared aghast during our banter, which is probably as it should be.
We closed our set with a piece from M.G. This poem was written in February, before the public turmoil regarding our farmers market began. At a moment when so many of us were warily watching that space, it seemed important to remind people that there have always been watchful eyes gazing at the market.
The farmers market is just down the street from our five-story county jail.
MARKET
– M.G.
As I look out this window of bars
There’s a farmer’s market.
People coming and going.
I wonder if I have any friends over there.
The sun is warm and bright.
One day soon I will be at
That farmer’s market.
I hope to see my friends again.
Frank Brown Cloud 