By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly Substack newsletter

In the months after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, I joined counter-protesters at the “White Lives Matter” rally in front of the pier in Huntington Beach, a former sundown town in Southern California. One of the white men who mattered was toting a two-story pole with three flags: the stars-and-stripes, the 18th century “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake and a “Trump 2020: No More Bullshit” banner. He wore a shirt that said, “I stand for the flag and kneel for the cross.”

As I digested his message, I scrolled through all the memory verses stored away in the recesses of my post-evangelical mind. The only passage in the bible that even remotely resembles kneeling for the cross is in the second chapter of Philippians.

The verse from Paul’s letter to a little house church in the Roman colony says that in the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is lord. Context matters. The passage subverts the patriotic supremacy of its day. Back then, every knee bowed to Caesar and every tongue confessed that Caesar was lord.

The first Christians pledged allegiance to Something Else.

Jesus never told anyone to kneel for the cross. He beckoned his disciples to deny themselves and take up the cross. Jesus dared them to defy oppressive social and political norms for the sake of those who are excluded and exploited, even if it led to ostracism and death.

On the shores of Galilee, Jesus preached a short and simple message. If people who live in an imperial culture really want to experience the divine, they need to repent. In the ancient world, this Greek word – metanoia – was used in the context of war. The soldier who repented switched sides in the middle of a battle. He was a traitor.

When Jesus challenged people to repent, he was urging them to switch sides, to cross over, to break rank with the destructive rules, roles, expectations and obligations of their family, their nation, their ethnicity, their social network.

Sarah Nahar calls this kind of spiritual work “shedding colonial codes of conduct.”

Lynice Pinkard says it is like “learning to speak treason fluently.”

Those who repent reorient their lives not only on the basis of what we break rank from, but on the basis of who we breathe with: the poor, the pure in heart, the persecuted, those who mourn, those who are merciful and those who thirst for justice. Jesus called these people “blessed” – a word that literally means “the ones who become large.”

---

I came across that same bible verse from Philippians last weekend on my drive down South. It was about an hour after I passed Robert E. Lee Avenue. The passage was plastered on a billboard hovering over the intersection of Highway 92 and US 50 in the middle of West Virginia.

My route carried me past correctional facilities, factory farms, Civil War battlefields and a multitude of churches. The ratio of lawn signs – Trump to Harris – was easily one hundred to one. I saw a billboard for someone named Coop running for local office. It had his name in big block letters bookended by two images: a cross and an AR-15.

I drove through the red, orange and yellow painted Appalachian foothills to help facilitate a retreat for white men committed to personal healing and collective liberation. It was our fourth gathering in the flesh and, this time, we met up at a farm in Highland County, Virginia run by Wes, one of our members.

---

At our gatherings, we talk about what it means to be white boys who break rank from supremacy and breathe with Something Else. We examine what it might look like to unhinge our worth and identity from human hierarchies of value like whiteness and patriarchy. We lean into a life rooted in real relationships, in our ancestral lineage, in the deep, tender places within us, in the land and her living beings, and in the liberation struggles of those abandoned and abused by colonial codes of conduct.

On Saturday, just before midnight, the six of us hiked out into the moonlit woods. Wes wanted to show us something. We trudged up a hill, through a meadow, down into another holler and followed the creek up to a cabin built with the logs of a chestnut tree, a species that has been extinct for more than a century. The base of its crumbled chimney was still standing.

Wes told us what he’s heard from the locals. A white guy lived off the land way out here in the 19th century. He tapped maple trees and walked dozens of miles into the nearest town to sell it. Then he’d walk back to his cabin and settle in for long stints on the banks of the creek.

What in the hell was he doing, all alone, way out here in the woods?

We tapped into our collective imagination. Was this white boy breaking rank with the old confederacy? Perhaps, he was a scalawag, the word that Southern Democrats started calling white men who betrayed “traditional values” and the white supremacist order. A scalawag was a sell-out, a traitor, a friend to Black people and Northerners. A scalawag was one who repented and picked up the cross.

White Southerners lynched scalawags in the 19th century.

We might say that John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth were first-century scalawags. John got beheaded and Jesus got crucified. They would have lived longer if they knew when to head for the woods and build their cabins by the creek.

---

In his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America, WEB Dubois wrote that before the Civil War, poor white folks in the South knew that slavery hurt their own economic opportunities. As long as there was a workforce that was basically free, the wages of white workers would remain very low.

Despite this reality, poor white men embraced the opportunity to become members of the plantation police force. Because it provided work and gave them authority over Black people. But even more important, this kind of career “fed his vanity” because it associated the poor white man with plantation owners.

Dubois says that policemen were poorly paid, but they were compensated by a “public and psychological wage.” They were treated with courtesy and leniency – because they were white. They chose to police Black people instead of conspire with them for a better world. Most white Americans continue to make this same choice today – even as it imperils their own economic interests.

---

In the 21st century, wealthy elites – almost all of them white men – weaponize race to sow hatred and division by funding media outlets, social media campaigns and institutes with “research” that supports their racist, profit-driven agendas.

This is what drove the protests against government mandates during the pandemic.

This is what drove the ban on critical race theory in many states.

This is what’s been behind framing student protests as “anti-semitic,” even though they were just demanding that their universities divest from companies profiting off of genocide and other human rights violations in Palestine.

This is what we see every time universal healthcare or minimum wage increases are blocked by campaigns that stoke fears of socialism, job loss, or a recession.

This is what we see when proposed cuts to the military are countered by questioning people’s patriotism, and when demands to defund the police are met with language like “being tough on crime” and “fighting the drug war” and “protecting our children.”

Wealthy white elites use racism to distort and distract us from the real issues. They say that people of color, trans folk, the undocumented and “the far left” are threats to society and democracy.

The real threat is, and has always been, wealthy white elites who have a vested interest in racist outcomes in the systems they control with their vast resources.

Their racist myths maintain what Dr. Eddie Glaude calls the value gap, the culturally-scripted and often-unconscious belief, across the political spectrum, that white people are more deserving than Indigenous communities, Black people, dark-skinned Immigrants, Palestinians and the rest of the Global South.

In American society, the key question for white folks and middle-class people of conscience is this: are we willing to put our money, reputations and bodies on the line to conspire with the other America and the Global South – or will we continue to police (or second-guess) these blessed folks on behalf of wealthy white elites?

---

I love to imagine that the white boy who built his cabin way out in the woods was a scalawag. But ever since Saturday night, Something Else has been trying to get my attention. The white boy who built his cabin way out in the woods is, for me, also an emotional parable. Because when life gets hard, I tend to walk away and put up walls made of chestnut.

In the past six weeks, my codependency has been kicking. I’ve said “yes” to things when I should have said “no.” I have struggled to name my needs and limits. I have rarely asked for help. I’ve over-extended myself with travel, community organizing and facilitating spaces of healing and recovery. The more I go into production mode, the more I struggle to be present and feel with others. Lindsay says it is like I am somewhere else.

My distancing strategy goes way back, even before my great-great grandparents settled down on one-hundred-and-sixty acres in Dakota territory. The pioneer spirit passed down by my beloved ancestors is one big no drama policy, buried in work, pushing through pain and sadness, never putting up a boundary. These are also symptoms of the white self-sufficient masculinity heralded by wealthy plantation owners in the South for centuries.

It is easy to underestimate just how much I have been counterfeited by the ways my ancestors coped. It is also easy to underestimate the role that a Love supreme has played in my own healing and liberation. I made it to this messy moment in history through miracle and wonder.

---

Audre Lorde once wrote that our feelings are the fortresses and sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.

Our feelings. Not our research, our formulas, our programs, or our investments.

When our grief and trauma – and fear, shame and anger – are not named and metabolized in a mutual partnership, or a circle of tender, nurturing kindreds, then they will definitely come out sideways in the form of abuse, addiction, anxiety, depression, despair, codependency, conspiracy theories, confederate flags, Christo-Fascist theology, cynicism, nihilism, a stubborn self-righteousness and much more.

Lorde animated Something Else.

She called it “the erotic.”

The erotic is creative energy empowered. It is the deep feeling of fulfillment and passion when we are doing something that makes life richer for everyone around us – including ourselves.

The erotic is a source accessible to every one of us. It has the power to change our lives and the world. It lies on a deeply feminine and spiritual plane – and rises up out of nonrational knowledge.

Lorde says that men value this depth of feeling enough to keep women around so they will use it in the service of men. But men fear this depth of feeling too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.

I know this fear of feeling all too well. This fear has been scripted into me for generations – and this fear cements itself in me when I work to capacity, instead of slowing down and feeling my way forward.

Audre Lorde wrote that giving into the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury that only the unintentional can afford – and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

Let that soak in.

There is another way – and it is just as counter-cultural as becoming a scalawag.

Because what’s in here is connected what’s out there.

The more I break rank with the emotional scripts that counterfeit me, the more I will be able to break rank with the socio-political supremacy stories that counterfeit our culture. The more I do this, the more I will be able to breathe with Something Else.

Anything less is a luxury I simply cannot afford.