By Tommy Airey, a re-posted and slightly abridged version of his weekly newsletter

Bernadette Atuahene is a Black woman who grew up fifty miles north of me in Southern California. She is my age and has multiple degrees from places like UCLA, Harvard and Yale. A couple years after Lindsay and I moved to Southwest Detroit, she moved to the Eastside to study the city’s housing crisis. Her research unveiled something truly apocalyptic.

In the decade spanning Barack Obama’s inauguration to George Floyd’s murder, one-third of the entire city of Detroit lost their homes to illegal tax foreclosures. The city overcharged its poorest residents, almost all of them Black. Residents were evicted. Homes were seized and auctioned off. At the same time, the city spent more than a half billion dollars to demolish many of these homes and wealthy white investors were given hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to redevelop the land in their own image.

The only reason that we know about this epidemic of illegal tax foreclosures in Detroit is because Bernadette Atuahene devoted three years of her life to doing the research. The only reason that we know about the poisoning of faucets in Flint is because Black women testified and tested the city’s water on a mass scale. The only reason that we know about the police murder of George Floyd is because a Black woman filmed it on her phone and posted it to her socials. The more I see this trend, the more I wonder what else is happening, hidden behind the curtain called American exceptionalism.

The apocalypse that Bernadette uncovered is a classic example of what Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment.

Low-income communities are abandoned – by design – to create an opportunity for the rich and powerful to extract resources, generate profit, and turn poor people into a pool of cheap prison labor. Stock market portfolios are built on the backs of the abandoned. If you’ve ever gone to the ghetto, the Gaza strip, the Global South, a Native American reservation, or a rural landscape that has been logged, mined or ripped apart for some valuable resource, you’ve seen it for yourself.

This is not some sort of conspiracy theory. It is a particular brand of capitalism, beta-tested in Black cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Flint, Philly and Ferguson, Missouri. It has become conventional wisdom in middle-class America. In my book, I call it “the colonial script.” The rich and powerful run campaigns saying that these cities are “making a comeback.” But the whole operation works, behind the scenes, by abandoning long-time, low-income residents. Wealthy white men are made to look like saviors. Meanwhile, the abandoned are not only neglected. They are ostracized. Conservatives and liberals call them

criminals,
savages,
terrorists,
illegals,
lowlifes,
deadbeats,
druggies,
hillbillies and
much worse.

Name-calling is part of the strategy. Justify the massive levels of injustice, oppression, exclusion and exploitation by pinning all the blame on the abandoned.

***

Howard Zinn once wrote that the United States is the most ingenious system of control in world history. Because it is so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power, it can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. America is designed to keep the middle-class content with benefits subsidized through the organized abandonment of the ghetto, the Gaza Strip, the Global South, the reservation and rural sites of resource extraction.

However, the rich and powerful are losing control. Because abandonment is spreading. And so is the discontent. More and more middle-class folks are overwhelmed and exhausted with the demands of child-rearing, elder care, careers and social obligations. Very few of us ever hit rock bottom, let alone a breaking point. We are resilient, treading the rip current of capitalism, just to keep everything together.

However, some of us middle-class folks are connecting the dots. We see that the root of much of our confusion, despair, insecurity and resentment is in the reality that powerful institutions have become indifferent and unresponsive to most of our needs too. We are waking up to the fact, for the first time, that conventional wisdom itself runs on profit, power and control – not love, justice, compassion, truth and humility.

Many of us are also coming to the realization that we are in a crisis of credibility. We know, deep down, that most people, most of the time, have no idea who they can trust with the truth, where they can go to get an honest rendering of reality. This crisis is a major opportunity. Because for too long, the middle-class has turned to the wrong people for answers to the wrong questions.

When you hear us ask, “What’s happening to our country?”

What we really mean is, “Why are the rich and powerful abandoning us too?”

What we ought to be asking is, “Who decided it was a good idea to build the success of middle-class America by abandoning other people?”

The short answer is that rich and powerful people designed this. America is an abusive system of control and the middle-class is caught in the middle between the rich and powerful – and the abandoned.

Conventional wisdom teaches middle-class people to cater to the rich and powerful. The abusers. It is a classic case of trauma-bonding. We live in an extremely abusive system. But just enough of us have been given access to just enough wealth and power. So discontent is limited to a troublesome minority – a troublesome minority which is called many things, by conservatives and liberals.

The far left. The woke.
The social justice warriors.
The idealists. The extremists.
The unrealistic. The naive.
The ungrateful. The unpatriotic.

Conventional wisdom blames the abandoned – and anyone willing to organize, rally, boycott, march, make public comments and protest in solidarity with them. Most middle-class folks will not associate with this motley crew. Middle-class people are trained – through positive and negative reinforcement – to press the mute button instead. Their silence signs off on the supremacy stories of the rich and powerful that counterfeit what it means to be human. Conventional wisdom has conned the middle-class to care about our nuclear family, our financial security and our social respectability more than anything else in the entire world.

By prioritizing these pursuits, the middle-class becomes complicit in organized abandonment. We have allowed certain human beings to become disposable, based on what they look like, who they know, where they live, or how much they make. We limit discontent to a troublesome minority. Which is a major problem for us. Because when we allow other human beings to be abandoned, it is not only materially devastating to them. It is also spiritually devastating to us.

Conventional wisdom is counterfeiting us. It says that we are supposed to care about our nuclear family, our financial security and our social respectability. However, what the deepest parts of us truly want and what the planet desperately needs are spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage. What we are supposed to care about is in tension with what the deepest parts of us want and what the planet desperately needs. Everything turns on this tension.

***

What is the way forward? How do we break this tension? For starters, we can flip the script and look at everything through the lens of the abandoned. We can stop giving the benefit of the doubt to powerful institutions like corporate media. We can start taking our cues from impacted communities who live and/or work inside the ghetto, the Gaza Strip, the Global South, reservations and rural sites of resource extraction.

We need to figure out how to get realigned with reality. Because we have been trained to be well-adjusted to injustice – and it is making us unwell.

The middle-class is caught in the middle. But in the middle, we have options and agency.

We can break rank with conventional wisdom.

We can stop bonding with abusers.

We can stop allowing our lives to be dictated by what rich and powerful people say we are supposed to care about.

We can live for Something Else.

We can undergo a radical revolution of values.

We can re-orient our lives around love, justice, compassion, truth and humility.

We can join the troublesome minority.

We can apprentice ourselves to the abandoned. So we can heal – and change the world.

Tommy Airey is a post-Evangelical pastor and the author of Descending Like a Dove: Adventures in Decolonizing Evangelical Christianity (2018). He lives in Detroit, Michigan with spouse Lindsay. He just launched his weekly newsletter called Something Else. You can subscribe to it for free here.