A Rough Time To Be an Arkansan

But also, an American

It’s been a rough year to be an Arkansan. This year’s state legislative session started off with several proposed bills that drew national attention, and embarrassment. One of them was a proposal that would have banned teaching The New York Times’s 1619 project, about the role slavery played in shaping the nation’s founding, in schools, although it ultimately didn’t pass. The state did pass its version of a Stand Your Ground law, and made it harder for Arkansans without IDs to vote. “Today in the legislature, we made it easier to kill someone and harder to cast a vote,” the independent State Senator Jim Hendren said at the time. He opposed both pieces of legislation, and had been a Republican but left the party in the wake of the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

But the worst has been legislation attacking transgender youth across the state. Last month, Arkansas became the second state in the nation to ban transgender girls and women from playing in school and collegiate sports. (The first was Mississippi, our frequent competitor in being the worst. Sorry, Mississippi.) The second, passed later in March, actually banned doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth. Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT & HIV Project called it “the single most extreme anti-trans law to ever pass through a state legislature.” It was so extreme that our governor, Republican Asa Hutchinson, vetoed it. “I vetoed this bill because it creates new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths,” he wrote in The Washington Post. (You might think it’s weird, as I do, that he doesn’t see the same overreach in laws against reproductive health care, but that’s a different story.) The legislature overrode his veto, although this bill and many others are likely to be challenged in court. Many children could be harmed if this goes into effect, and more are harmed simply because they know this hostility is directed toward them.

In the context of all of this legislation, what does it mean to stay here? Obviously, some people can’t leave, and need to stay and fight this legislation to prevent it from going into effect. What does it mean to be an ally? That’s what I’ve been wondering. Whenever I complain about the political drift of my county or my state, I always hear the same thing, “Why don’t you just leave?” This is what Trump fans said to progressives during his his presidency, and is apparently what people say to political fish out of water everywhere. The writer and Iowan Lyz Lenz highlights the inherent white supremacy in that argument in the piece linked above, as well a the realities it ignores. But she also said something on Twitter, when she published the piece, that echoes many of my own thoughts: Why should I leave? I’m not the one making it terrible. I think about that often. My families have been here more than 100 years at this point. I have as much right to call this place home—which may in fact be no right at all, since this land is stolen—as anyone else who finds themselves here. I can stay and scream as long as I want.

A Lutheran pastor I admire and became connected with through Facebook, Clint Schnekloth, has been speaking against these bills and encouraging political activism throughout the legislative session. He lives in Fayetteville, home to the main campus of the University of Arkansas, center of the booming metropolitan region of the state’s northwest corner. His ministry has helped with refugee resettlement in the state, worked with the (very large) Marshallese community there, and supported the LGBTQ+ community, but he also posts on Facebook frequently and more generally about anti-racism and national and state politics. He is a Midwesterner who has lived and traveled around the world, and relocated to Fayetteville about 10 years ago. He likes it for a lot of reasons. The city has good schools. He’s drawn to places with a strong sense of identity, which the Ozarks definitely have. Northwest Arkansas is not a monolith, and the mountains are home to a number of weird subcultures living jumbled next to each other: near Fayetteville, a lesbian commune persists near a Quiverfull community. It’s the kind of region that draws a lot of original people who glory in a unique sense of self. But it’s also the kind of state that punishes people who are different, and that’s the unreconciled duality of life in the Ozarks. After the state passed its anti-transgender laws this spring, Schnekloth said:

I know it’s tempting to fantasize moving out of a state passing misogynist and anti-trans and generally hateful and corrupt legislation. This is just my own perspective, but as a white clergy person I kind of feel like my real calling is to stay so I can a) love on everybody our hateful legislature is targeting and b) tell that brood of vipers to their face what hypocrites they are.

Also, and important, this is actually a national strategy happening in states all across the country. The phobia and nihilism runs so deep they’re actually sharing templates. Moving doesn’t get you away from it. It only delays things.

If you can you’re much better off fighting this trash and standing shoulder to shoulder with those being harmed and maligned.

I spoke to him this week and asked him about this idea. It is his calling, of course, to be a force for good in the world. But how do you do that in Arkansas? Here, it’s difficult to even register your displeasure with state politics in a tangible way. In last November’s elections, there were several races, both local and statewide, in which I could not vote for a Democrat because one wasn’t running, which meant I had no real hope of ousting people I so vehemently disagreed with. Tom Cotton, who my fellow Arkansans have sent to represent us in the United States Senate, faced only a libertarian, Ricky Dale Harrington, Jr., who had slim hope of winning. In my local races, there were no candidates opposing Republicans, and I couldn’t vote for nobody. The Republicans representing my region in the state legislature went unchallenged.

“I don’t even know exactly how to analyze it, sometimes I think it’s as simple as we don’t have an Atlanta. What would Georgia be if it didn’t have an Atlanta?” Schnekloth said. That’s indeed an issue: Arkansas doesn’t have a major city with the localized kind of demographic change that is turning the rest of the country forward. It is overwhelmingly rural; 79 percent white; 15 percent Black, which is low compared to our Southern neighbors; only 23 percent holds a bachelor’s degree or higher; and our largest city has fewer than 200,000 people, which is not much bigger than the suburb I used to live in. Isolated and spread out, it’s hard for any of the disparate groups that have banded together in other states, forming the progressive base, to gather here and be a countervailing force.

So, Schnekloth has decided to be a force for good. In response to the hateful legislation, his church began organizing a Queer Camp for young people in the summer. They announced the camp almost before they had any real planning done, because they wanted to put something on the calendar for young queer kids who might be feeling desperate despair to look forward to. In the days after the announcement, they received a flood of offers for help with classes and programming, and about 70 youths have registered within the past few weeks, mostly from the area. “I do get frustrated on behalf of Arkansas when the media and the rest of the world, say look at how bad Arkansas is, just because their legislatures are doing this, when we all know there’s great diversity in the state.”

Still, he knows it’s different for others, especially those who feel physically unsafe. Fayetteville, other college towns to greater or lesser degrees, the city of Pine Bluff, the beautiful, bizarre little oasis that is Eureka Springs, and Little Rock itself have worked to be safe spaces, blue islands amid the red seas, but there are only so many things small communities can do in the face of hostility around them.

I spoke to someone I know, who asked that I don’t use her name, who recently moved out of state. Not quite two decades ago, she and her family had settled on a patch of rural land in the mountains not too far from my home county. She and her husband both had careers that allowed them to work from anywhere, and they wanted land and woods and animals and freedom. Free spirits who like wild spaces have always been called to the hills. They are not Christian, and had no intention of being so. She knew that they would be cultural misfits here in the Bible Belt, but said, “we wanted to become endearing by doing good things for the community.” They set up and helped run a number of nonprofits. They raised their children here. “It was our intent from day one that we would challenge the status quo by being good citizens and not being Christian. That would be our gift to the world.”

Then, one child died in a tragic accident, and another came out as non-binary, and the needs of their family shifted. Since 2016, the people who had once played nice about political differences had stopped doing so, and the area became more hostile. This had refocused their memories about every trauma and micro-aggression they’d encountered in their time here. I asked when she realized she had to leave, and she said November 7, 2020. That was the day after the police chief for a town near mine, a man named Lang Holland from Marshall, Arkansas, was caught making violent posts online about killing Democrats. He was asked to resign and did so, but my friend realized that there were many more like him throughout the region. “He’s personally aware of a couple hundred people who will say that same kind of trash,” she thought. “All at once, I realized we can’t stay here.” They picked a spot on the map, almost out of the blue, they thought would be more welcoming for their child, and they began leaving a month later. “My husband and father built our house,” she said. “That was our dream home. We never imagined we would leave.”

For them, leaving was a matter of personal safety and well-being. The anti-transgender legislation in the state could be devastating for her non-binary child, who was also not being supported in school. But is any place really fully safe? Neither Daunte Wright nor Adam Toledo were killed in the rural woods of Arkansas. Thirty-three states have introduced anti-trans legislation. The relaxation of pandemic restrictions has meant a return to mass shootings, and hate crimes remain on the rise. None of this is new. Trump and the media he wielded so well did not create the racism, misogyny, and nativism that rose to the surface during his presidency; it likewise did not go away with him. There’s nothing to do but face it, wherever we find ourselves, and demand it ends. It is also ok to decide, for awhile, just to scream.

What I’m Recommending:

A friend gifted me these starters by a company called Omsom, spicy sauce packets that serve as building blocks for Southeast and East Asian dishes. The company is also really cool, started by two sisters. The dishes are quick, easy, and delicious.

Cute Animal Picture of the Week:

If you know or are connected to a good German Shepherd rescue, email me! This sweet girl needs one. (Unfortunately, her name right now is Brooke, which is not a good dog name.) Or, if you’re interested in adopting her, drive here and get her. Like all GSDs, she needs an active home with experienced dog owners.