Episode 022: Scary to Imagine (2/2)

Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, Spotify, Stitcher or TuneIn.

Transcript

Content Warning

JULIA: Hey everyone, this is Julia, Self Evident’s senior producer.

JULIA: Just so you know, this episode has swearing, and discussions about white nationalist hate groups.

JULIA: Also, this is the second part of a two-part story. So if you haven’t heard part one, you should go check it out wherever you get podcasts. Or on our website, self evident show dot com.

JULIA: Thanks for listening!

Open

THEME MUSIC begins

CATHY: This is Self Evident, where we tell Asian America's stories to go beyond being seen.

CATHY: I'm your host, Cathy Erway. And I'm here with our producer James, who visited Bloomington, Indiana to report this two-part story about activists, academics, and farmers confronting white supremacy in their town.

THEME MUSIC ends

Segment 1

CATHY: So James, let me try to refresh here… in spring of 2019, journalists and activists published a huge pile of chat leaks from Identity Evropa , which was classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a White nationalist hate group.

“Unite the Right” demonstrators: You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

MUSIC: A tense, uneasy beat begins

CATHY: And they linked a White farmer in the Bloomington area, Sarah Dye, to that group, through her online name, “Volkmom.”

JAMES: Yeah, and this matched up with warning signs that Black and brown folks in Bloomington, especially in the farming community, had been seeing for a couple of years.

JAMES: Identity Evropa helped to organize the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where a white supremacist murdered anti-racist protestor Heather Heyer with his car. So after that, they were trying to rebrand, and after the chat leaks, they changed their name to the American Identity Movement .

JAMES: This was all a way of trying to present their White nationalist ideology as more mainstream.

CATHY: Meaning, act less like stereotypical, goose stepping Nazis and more like respectable neighbors.

JAMES: Exactly, and Sarah Dye has repeatedly denied that she’s a White nationalist, denied that she’s a White supremacist, and instead claimed the label “Identitarian.”

CATHY: Okay. So then, as this information became public, an Indiana University grad student named Abby Ang started gathering all of those details, and calling more attention to them .

JAMES: Right, and through the group No Space for Hate, Abby was tabling outside the farmers market entrance, encouraging people to boycott Sarah Dye’s business .

CATHY: So then, a professor, Cara Cadoo, went right into the market and staged a protest that led to her arrest .

JAMES: Right.

CATHY: And the Mayor of Bloomington —

JAMES: Mayor John Hamilton .

CATHY: — right, so he supported that arrest.

JAMES: Yeah.

CATHY: But then what happened with everyone else who was protesting?

JAMES: Well, let's start with Abby Ang, from No Space for Hate.

JAMES: She was still outside the market, handing out flyers while she watched the situation escalate from a distance.

Abby Ang: It was very hectic because I was like, "What is happening? Why are they arresting this woman? And also who is this woman?" Because I had never met her before.

AA: And people thought that she was me at first, and people were saying like, “Oh, did you hear that Abby got arrested?”

AA: And I quickly found out that people can't really tell Asian women apart.

AA: I remember kind of having an emotional breakdown after she got arrested because everyone was just coming after me and being like, "What did you do?"

AA: "Did you arrange for this to happen?"

AA: "Do you understand what this means for the optics?" and...

AA: "We didn't sign up to do this if people were going to get arrested”

JAMES: So Abby wasn’t the only person in Bloomington speaking up about all this, and a range of folks had converged on the issue.

JAMES: There were local antifascists, or antifa, who we talked about in the previous episode .

JAMES: They had already been monitoring and opposing right-wing activity in Bloomington .

JAMES: There was a smaller group that emerged called the Purple Shirt Brigade , multiple members of which would also be arrested for protesting in the market.

JAMES: There were concerned farmers who hadn’t really been listened to, and faced a lot of pushback, when they tried to express their concerns about Sarah Dye in the past.

JAMES: And one group we haven't talked about yet, which had also been demanding action from the city, was Black Lives Matter .

MUSIC: Tense, uneasy beat ends

JAMES: I spoke to one of the core council members of Black Lives Matter Bloomington, JadaBee .

Segment 2

JadaBee: I, uh... hopped in my car drove. It's not that far away from me. I drove really fast —

JAMES: After Cara Caddoo was arrested, Jada found out Mayor Hamilton was heading to the farmer's market . So she drove down there too.

JAMES: Here’s how she recalls what happened next.

JB: I sort of (chuckles slightly) pulled up, parked illegally in a slant as close to him as possible.

MUSIC: An intriguing, sparse acoustic bass and guitar trio

JB: I got out of the car, and I started going…

JB: "What the hell are you doing? You have just escalated the situation to the extreme. You're arresting protestors now? Are you a Nazi yourself, John?"

JB: And I, I like, really let him have it.

JB: He's like, "well, I had nothing to do with it...”

JB: And I'm like, "John, you can stop all of this.

JB: You're the mayor of Bloomington in a state that's a pro-Mayor state, meaning you have almost total control over this whole situation .

JB: You say one word and they're gone from the market. You say one word and Dr. Caddoo doesn't get arrested.

JB: By mayoral decree, you can completely disband this market today and rehire everybody else except her. You can do that today. You can end it today."

JB: And he's like, "well, the lawyers say..." and it's just this like... the same thinking over and over again.

JB: And it's white supremacy that just encircles everybody in this, like, horrible binary thinking, and traps the brain.

JB: And... you know, it's as much as it's a problem for black and brown people, it's also a problem for white people because it stifles their ability to think critically. And you could just watch that happening to him.

MUSIC: Acoustic bass and guitar trio stops playing

CATHY: So Jada was not beating around the bush.

CATHY: And that couldn’t have been the first time she was a part of this, right?

JAMES: Yeah, actually, one of the reasons I spoke to Jada for this story — is that she's lived in Monroe County her entire life, and in Bloomington for over 20 years .

JB: There’s a lot of people who believe that Indiana university made Bloomington. And that's just not true.

JB: And there's a rural community, not only of white people, but of Black people and brown people and indigenous people that are there — and still a part of what's happening.

JB: A lot of my activism focuses on my upbringing in the countryside of Bloomington.

JAMES: So, while Abby Ang had been diving into community organizing and political work for a few years, Jada had grown into her activism over the course of her life.

JB: Well, I'm Black and I'm queer. And I grew up black and queer in the eighties, in Bloomington Indiana, in a rural community .

JB: And... so (sighs) there was like all of this turmoil of being like, "Well, I'm literally the only black lesbian anybody knows. Crap." (laughs)

JAMES: Another of Jada’s recurring experiences as she was coming up was something more familiar for Black Americans.

JB: Before I was 20, I was pulled over 25 different times. Not for speeding, not for breaking a law… and everybody I know that lives in the county have, have had to deal with the police multiple times, multiple times for no reasons at all, for no reasons.

JB: Not for actual crimes being committed, but because they're being profiled by BPD… and, you know, the Sheriff's Department .

JB: It wasn't like somebody took me to a rally and said, "Hey, you're going to be political now." It was the nature of who I am that caused that to happen.

JAMES: Over the decades, as Jada was becoming a well-known musician and activist in the Bloomington area, she developed what might be her calling card:

JB: I tend to be the stick. So you didn't, you didn't take the, you didn't take the carrot. So here's the stick.

JB: And I don't cut myself slack. I don't cut the people closest to me slack. 

JB: I don't believe in changing things to be more palatable, because when I was younger, I used to just try to fit into a little box and it was hurting me, killing me, and I just couldn't do it anymore. And so I don't do it, and I don't do it in my activism.

MUSIC: A wistful hip-hop beat begins

JAMES: Abby and Jada were friends. They met when Abby started joining groups that Jada was also a part of — like Democracy for Monroe County , and Black Lives Matter.

JB: I drove her home, we hung out, we'd go get food, you know, after meetings and stuff.

JB: I started a group of, like, ladies who would try to like, go and do things to pamper themselves because we were also stressed out. And so she came with us a couple of times to the salt cave, which is a cool little place here in town.

JAMES: In the summer of 2019, as Abby was forming the group No Space for Hate, Black Lives Matter wrote their own letter to the city, demanding that Sarah Dye’s business be removed from the Market .

JB: No Space for Hate was, you know, definitely forming. And it was primarily a white organization, other than having...an Asian American leader. I mean, it was mostly White people who made up that group.

JB: And so we were like, “Oh, okay. So white people are going to deal with this. Cool! Awesome.”

JAMES: But Jada also started to think twice about how much they were focusing on this one person.

JB: I, in particular, started to talk to other Black people and go, “Do you go to the farmer's market? Do you go to the farmer's market? ”

JB: And I started getting a sense of how many black people were not going to the Bloomington farmer's market. And it was every Black person I knew.

JB: We started getting a sense that, like, it wasn't just Sarah Dye, but that the market as a whole, as an institution, had a race problem.

JAMES: Early on in this conflict, Black Lives Matter suggested that the best course of action would be to remove the market from City control .

JB: We thought the best solution to all of this would be...that the market should be turned over to the vendors, so that the vendors themselves could remove her.

JB: As opposed to the city, who kept saying, “Our hands were tied, our hands are tied.”

JAMES: This is actually why it was possible for Sarah to be removed from the farmers market board in a neighboring county .

JAMES: But the city wouldn’t go for this .

JAMES: And as Jada watched No Space for Hate set up outside the farmer's market every Saturday, she felt conflicted .

JB: Protest, by definition, has to sort of push some boundaries.

JB: So if the officials set up a boundary for you and you stay within your boundary, what are you accomplishing?

JB: Abby and the people in No Space for Hate were much maligned.

JB: There were so many white liberals who just started hating her or anybody who was protesting the market, because they just wanted their nice White market back .

MUSIC: Wistful hip-hop beat ends

JB: I don't want to say that what they were doing was not effective, because it was, cause it shook those White liberals to their core.

JB: And you’re making people aware that there's a white supremacist in the farmer's market. That has merit.

JB: But activism is that action between here's the set parameter of what you can do... and here's what you need to do in order to dismantle the system that is in place that is oppressing you.

JB: And at some point in time, you have to move from, you know, making people aware... to shutting it all down.

Protestors: Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!

JAMES: After Cara Caddoo was arrested for holding up a sign, the city itself did shut the market down, for two weeks .

JAMES: And when the Mayor announced the market’s re-opening, here are the changes he promoted:

Mayor John Hamilton: We are enhancing safety at the market with video monitoring, more police officers, new volunteer ambassadors, altered traffic patterns in the vicinity, and other steps.

Mayor John Hamilton: We'll welcome thousands of visitors with special programming and activities. And free parking.  

CATHY: Ooh, free parking!

JAMES: Yes. Lemme tell you something, Cathy. If there’s... If there's one thing that can (laughs) bring the American people together…

JAMES: Anyway, one of the changes that was in the press release but not on the mayor's video was that, quote, "new signage will clearly indicate areas designated for flyering and expression and publicize market rules" .

JAMES: And even as the Mayor stood by the arrest of Cara Caddoo, he made a point of calling out No Space For Hate, as, like, his example of good protestors who could follow the rules .

CATHY: OK, so after all of that… we’re back to… talking about signs.

JAMES: Well, the city did start setting up multiple meetings with activists.

JAMES: They hired a third-party mediator …

JAMES: ...started something called the Broadening Inclusion Group , all of this in an attempt to address everyone’s concerns…

JAMES: ...but at the market itself? Yeah. Rules about signs... Sarah Dye’s farm was still vending there...

JAMES: So Abby was still showing up every Saturday with No Space for Hate .

CATHY: Mmmm.

JAMES: And Jada and Black Lives Matter Bloomington wrote another letter to the City, again supporting a proposal to put vendors in charge of the market .

JAMES: Right wing groups and the American Identity Movement kept escalating their media campaigns.

JAMES: A white nationalist news network invited Sarah Dye for an interview and plastered Abby’s face on their YouTube Channel.

JAMES: Meanwhile, Jada and multiple antifa activists reported receiving sudden visits from FBI agents, which was just really scary for them.

JAMES: So protestors were facing more and more hostility over the farmers market. And tensions were still high.

Segment 3

MUSIC: A tense, sparse backdrop of keys, bass, and ambient tones weaves in and out

JAMES: A few weeks after the market reopened, No Space For Hate led a protest march from the Bloomington Courthouse to the market .

JAMES: They were marching for a little more than two city blocks, about a third of a mile . Some of them dressed in regular clothes, holding protest signs.

JAMES: Antifa folks dressed in black, with masks covering their face .

SOUND: Tires screech

JAMES: And after the march got moving towards the Market, an oncoming SUV nearly drove into the group. A man named Brad Clapper got out of the car .

(A fight breaks out)

Activist: You got kids in the car!

Brad Clapper: Yeah! So get on the fucking sidewalk!

JAMES: This video was recorded by a local reporter for the Indiana Daily Student.

JAMES: The footage shows Brad Clapper trying to pull the mask off an antifa activist’s face, and pushing down protest signs with his hands.

Activist: Come on.

Brad Clapper: Get on the sidewalk!

JAMES: At one point in the video, one of the activists wearing black is in kind of a standoff with Brad Clapper next to his car. The other antifa folks pull him away, and they all just move on.

Female Activist: He wanted to feel tough, he did, let’s go.

Male Activist: Right. You have accomplished nothing but looking like an asshole to your kid.

Female Activist: (laughs) They’re gonna remember that!

JAMES: I tried reaching out directly to Bloomington’s antifa through Facebook and email. I never managed to connect with anyone there.

JAMES: But according to Jada, antifa in Bloomington was always aware of these kinds of potentially dangerous situations.

JAMES: So they had a working agreement with the Black Lives Matter core council, describing precisely how they would support each other during protests like these, while avoiding escalation.

JAMES: Abby didn't have this kind of working relationship with antifa.

JAMES: And she said she hadn’t made an explicit plan with them around this march.

JAMES: Here’s how she remembers it.

AA: They said, "It's going to be very calm. It's going to be very peaceful. We're going to just walk from here. We're going to walk to here. And then we're going to go home."

AA: And what happened was like, they became super confrontational.

AA: They almost got into a fight with a guy in a car…

AA: This is the problem with working with White allies a lot of the time, is that a lot of them don't get, like how, if they act up in public, the people who are going to get blowback are going to be people of color.

JAMES: Jada wasn't at the march. But she told me she went to see how the antifa folks were holding up.

JAMES: She said they were shell shocked by what happened, and upset by how some No Space For Hate members were reacting to the whole thing.

JAMES: Abby said that some members of No Space for Hate were upset with her for leading them into a kind of protest that they weren’t ready to be a part of.

JAMES: And this became a bigger conflict when Abby wrote about the incident on social media.

JB: There was a Facebook post denouncing local antifa...Denouncing their tactics, and denouncing them as people.

AA: I denounced, like basically what they did. They shouldn't have been cursing at people on the sidewalk...

AA: ...There was just so much damage to my credibility at this point that I felt that I had to say something about it publicly.

JB: It's become a public conflict, happening at the time where the president of the United States is calling antifa a terrorist organization —

JB: And everybody starts freaking out. All of the people that were like, "See, I told you they're horrible!" started having a field day...

AA: They felt like they were being thrown under the bus, and I get that… And I took it down like 24 hours later, after the message got through —

JAMES: I’m stopping the tape here because no one I spoke to had saved Abby’s post, and a lot of the talk between activists had happened in person or in disappearing messages. So I couldn't verify most of the conversations that happened.

JAMES: But it’s pretty clear that any trust between Abby and antifa was gone.

JAMES: And the same was starting to happen to Abby and Jada.

JB: I’m like… If this is how you treat a dominantly white organization when you're in conflict with them, how will you treat a predominantly black organization when you're in conflict with them?

JB: What if I do something that you don't like? How are you going to treat me?

AA: Like... I trusted her! I trusted her to take my side and to explain to these white activists why what they did was out of line. She didn't.

AA: That was the moment in which I felt truly abandoned by Jada, because at that point she had been, like, really trying to support me and trying to say like, "These people are here for your protection."

AA: They weren't … and I said I want nothing to do with them.

MUSIC: Tense musical backdrop fades out

AA: ...And we kind of mended things a little bit, but then after that point, I don’t think anything could truly be salvaged.

JB: It doesn’t matter that it’s me, and it doesn’t matter that it’s Abby.

JB: What matters is, that is how white supremacy works. It works by pitting each other against each other, for various reasons.

JB: Where we can't just suck it up and, you know, fight through, and, you know...

JB: ...How are we ever going to reach these White liberals, let alone the Klan?

MUSIC: A somewhat dramatic, “Old West”-style, guitar-driven score begins

JAMES: The City Farmers Market kept going, until the season ended in late 2019. There were more arrests, more meetings, more protests of all kinds .

JAMES: Abby and Jada were just two people among many in that bigger fight. But in all the community spaces and activist groups where they used to show up together, it eventually became impossible for them to be in the same room.

JAMES: They both didn't want this story, about the fight against white supremacy, to come off as a story about a personal conflict between the two of them.

JAMES: I don't want that either. I don’t think the point of this particular story is to decide who was in the right, or to expose all the details.

JAMES: But I do think Abby and Jada came into this fight for different reasons, with different personal experiences guiding their choices in how to speak up. How to protest. How to confront public officials and White power. How to confront each other.

JAMES: I think politics is always personal. And one thing that kept coming up in my conversations with people in Bloomington was the importance of personal relationships... because they shape what's politically possible.

JAMES: And all of that is felt differently, not just by Black women and by Asian women... but also by lifelong locals and people who’ve joined them from elsewhere.

JAMES: By folks getting their start in activism and people who are much more established in that world.

JAMES: By everyone who exists between, or at the crossings of these identities, and has to decide how they’re going to navigate them when they challenge people in power.

JAMES: When they disrupt business as usual.

BEAT

JAMES: All that said, one thing does linger with me.

JAMES: When the next white nationalist gets outed in Bloomington, the rifts that opened up during this fight will still be there. They’ll continue to affect local activists and local relationships.

JAMES: Jada’s a Bloomingtonian for life. So she’ll be there too.

JAMES: Abby won’t. She may always have a close connection to that community, but she’s finished her PhD and moved to another town.

MUSIC: “Old West”-style score comes to a close

Midroll Promo

PROMO MUSIC begins

REKHA: Hey, this is Rekha, Self Evident’s Audience Manager.

REKHA: Our team treats storytelling is an act of participation.

REKHA: And as we kick off this new season of stories, we also want to hear from you.

REKHA: So please, join our community panel — where you can share perspectives, give us feedback, suggest potential voices for the show, and even be interviewed for an episode yourself.

REKHA: Sign up at self evident show dot com slash participate.

PROMO MUSIC ends

Segment 4

CATHY: I’m Cathy Erway. This is Self Evident.

CATHY: Our producer James just got done telling me about the fallout between Abby and Jada, two of the activists in this fight over the Bloomington City farmers’ market.

CATHY: Which gives me a lot to think about...

CATHY: But James, can you tell me where everyone’s ended up?

JAMES: OK, well, Abby is still connected with No Space for Hate. 

JAMES: But when the covid pandemic started, she used those connections to start a new mutual aid group in Bloomington .

JAMES: Thousands of people signed up, and so that project became a much bigger focus for her .

JAMES: And she did that from outside Bloomington , because she spent most of the pandemic lockdown with her family.

JAMES: Then in the summer of 2021, a little over two years after Abby joined the fight at the farmer's market, she went back to Bloomington to finish her PhD .

JAMES: And pack up her things.

AA: As I'm leaving Bloomington, it's definitely been weird, because I'm thinking about, like, all these people that... I've been in conflict with, as well as, like, strong friendships that I do have, and trying to work through a lot of those feelings, as I prepare to kind of leave the space that I've given like... eight years of my life to .

AA: But especially with the mutual aid group, I just felt, well, I just feel really burnt out by a lot of, like…

AA: ...just the sense of helplessness that I'm — as one person, I'm not going to be enough to fix all of these problems.

AA: There needs to be more change from, whatever, like a policy level of government intervention or something like that. And I just feel really tired, I think.

BEAT

CATHY: And what happened to everyone else?

CATHY: What about Cara Caddoo?

MUSIC: A fresh, easygoing hip-hop beat begins

JAMES: So Cara had the option of suing the City of Bloomington for damages over how they arrested her, but in the end, she decided not to.

JAMES: Sarah Dye, on the other hand, is suing the City of Bloomington, along with the Mayor and two former Farmers’ Market officials personally — claiming that the City had violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments .

JAMES: That lawsuit is still moving through court.

CATHY: But while that’s going on, she’s still at the market?

JAMES: Her farm still has a contract with the Bloomington City Farmer's Market , and they’re fully within their rights to show up on Saturdays and sell, but...

JAMES: ...as far as I can tell, she’s been doing business through her own CSA , selling produce through pop up farm stands , and according to the city, her farm hasn’t really shown up to the City Farmers’ Market much at all .

CATHY: And what about her ties to the American Identity Movement?

JAMES: I mean, I don’t see a reason she’d change her beliefs. And even though the American Identity Movement has declared itself disbanded, in his farewell message, the leader of that group called it “a strategic reorientation” — 

CATHY: Oh, dear.

JAMES: — so I don’t think their ex-members are going anywhere, anytime soon.

JAMES: Meanwhile, Bloomington’s local antifa don’t seem to be organized the way that they were during the farmers’ market protests. So in a practical sense, it’s like they don’t exist.

CATHY: So then back to the City farmers market, that leaves me wondering… 

CATHY: I mean, I can’t imagine that the city would give up control of the market, like some of the activists were proposing —

JAMES: No, definitely not.

JAMES: When the season ended in late 2019, protests died down.

JAMES: Then, in early 2020, the Board of Park Commissioners unanimously voted against giving up control of the market , with support from a majority of the market’s established vendors.

JAMES: The City’s added a new anti-discrimination section to the farmers' market rules. But they also updated the rules and vendor expectations to ban vendors from doing any religious or political activities at the Market, except for in specific areas .

MUSIC: Fresh, easygoing hip-hop beat ends

CATHY: Okay...

JAMES: And there’s another new rule — direct quote here — "Behavior outside of the Market that relates to the Market must not reflect poorly on the Market or the reputation of the City ."

CATHY: So it sounds like except for that lawsuit from Sarah, basically, the City got everything it wanted. No controversy, no more protests, no more antifa, no signs where they’re not allowed… (chuckles meekly)

CATHY: Has anything about this situation changed?

JAMES: I definitely think about that. So remember, I first found out about all this during the summer of 2020.

JAMES: And that same mentality from the City of Bloomington, the way they responded to protests at the farmers market, showed up when local activists were pouring into the streets to demand justice for Black lives .

County Attorney Jeff Cockerill: We want to make sure our courthouse lawn is a safe place, a clean place, and a healthy place to be.

JAMES: On June 10, 2020, the Monroe County Board of Commissioners voted to enforce restrictions on what time protestors could gather at the courthouse .

County Attorney Jeff Cockerill: And so it's the intent of the commissioners to allow people to use the grounds during the appropriate hours, 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, to voice, whatever… they want to voice...

County Attorney Jeff Cockerill: ...When other people want to come in and do speeches, we want to have the same rules for everybody.

JAMES: Then the commissioners — who were three White women — pointed out that they were all wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts.

County Commissioner A: ...for our apparel today...

County Commissioner B: (laughs)

County Commissioner A: (laughs) Awesome. Uh, with that, we are ajourned…

County Commissioner B: I wanna say, I wanna say too, that this is from a black owned business.

County Commissioner A: Yes. Absolutely. Beautiful.

CATHY: Okay, wow!

JAMES: I...  (sighs) I yield my time.

MUSIC: A buoyant funk tune begins

CATHY: OK (laughs) — So now I’m remembering the meeting you played for me when we started this whole story... that was happening at the same time as these protests for Black Lives, right?

JAMES: Right, and two things about that meeting, where the public comments spanned all of these issues…

JAMES: First, it ended with the Broadening Inclusion Group — which the city had formed to try and improve on the market’s lack of diversity — voting to disband itself, by popular demand .

JAMES: And second, people in that meeting kept pointing out that there was another place that they could go on Saturday mornings.

Bloomington Resident A: Support the people's market.

Bloomington Resident B: Go to the people's market.

Bloomington Resident C: The people's market...

Bloomington Resident D: The people's market...

JB: All of you should resign, disband the city market and encourage everybody to join the people's market. We have been actively doing food justice and racial justice since our inception.

JAMES: That last voice was JadaBee, talking about the People's Market, which she had been helping to build ever since Bloomington police arrested Cara Caddoo, and the city shut down its market for two weeks .

JAMES: It's a democratic cooperative, run entirely by volunteers .

JAMES: Abby was one of those volunteers as the market was getting started, but she’s no longer with them.

JAMES: And one of the most involved farmers and activists at the People’s Market is Lauren McAllister, who we heard from in the previous episode. By the way, Lauren’s also on the core council of Black Lives Matter with Jada.

Lauren McAllister: I’m so glad to see you!

People’s Market Customer: It's so good to see you, too, it’s actually really funny.

LM: It feels really good.

JAMES: Every Saturday, they show up to the parking lot of an elementary school , with a little over a dozen vendors , to sell fresh food on a sliding scale.

JAMES: And they put together boxes of local meat, eggs, bread, and produce that are paid for by sponsoring community members, then picked up by folks who need it .

Brandi Williams: You can take the cucumbers I brought.

LM: And the peppers.

BW: And the peppers. Yes, you could take — so peppers, cucumbers, there's a couple of rogue tomatoes in there... 

JAMES: There's also an open pantry where anyone can show up and just grab whatever dry goods or household items they might need.

JAMES: Here's Lauren — with Brandi, another key activist behind the creation and growth of the market — digging through some stuff that was just donated for the pantry by a local organization.

MUSIC: Buoyant funk tune ends

LM: Come on!

BW: Okay!

LM: Come on! Vitamin E? Hold on.

LM: Argon butter?

Brandi Williams: Organic.

LM: You did that. Putting that list up, and they answered the call. They brought all this stuff...

JAMES: The process for all this is pretty simple. There's no rules or means-testing that people need to figure out .

LM: And there's not long waiting lists or phone calls or financial verification necessary, you don't have to believe in Jesus…

LM: None of these things are asked.

LM: Because if you're able to get online, Monday through Wednesday, and request a box, you're already in a position to receive it.

JAMES: Dina Okamoto, the professor we heard from in the previous episode, makes a point of coming to the People's Market every Saturday .

Dina Okamoto: Do you have eggs today?

LM: So many eggs.

JAMES: She's also helped the Market with fundraising.

JAMES: I asked her what she's made of all this, as someone who teaches people about race and protest movements.

DO: I mean, there's a... there's a disconnect.

DO: I myself have not been involved as much on the ground.

DO: And a lot of the research that I do is not really talking to activists and to protesters.

DO: So I think for me, that's... that's gonna be a question that I need to think about for myself. 

DO: What does the world need to know about? You know, what kinds of answers? How important these experiences are, of people on the ground, how they do their work, how they think about their work, and what are the outcomes of that work?

BEAT

DO: I want to support the market because it's truly amazing what they've done, especially during the pandemic.

DO: And it's something that I, I can't live without now.

DO: I need my CSA box each week. Um, I need to go to the market and see those folks, and to support the people that are doing the hard work.

DO: It just, it makes Bloomington feel like home.

JAMES: Some folks in Bloomington told me that because of the protests in 2019, there are now more small, private markets where you can buy local food , and that’s better for the community.

JAMES: But the power structure hasn’t changed.

JAMES: The Bloomington City Farmers’ Market is still by far the biggest, while the People’s Market and any other new markets have to be built from the ground up .

JAMES: And whether we’re talking about customers, vendors, public funding, or grants, the independent markets are now competing with each other— all while being regulated by the City, which runs their biggest competitor.

JAMES: But even with all that... for Lauren, there's no going back.

SOUND: Setting shifts from the friendly chatter of the People’s Market to sheep baa-ing and traipsing around Lauren’s farm

LM: When we would get emails of families that were like astonished that they got food for free, without us asking who they are, what they are justifying, their existence, that was fuel.

LM: And the anger. I mean, the rage was really great fuel, but then the exhaustion kind of hit. So you had to find something deeper to maintain you..

LM: Maybe being a farmer is part of it too. I'm so close to life. I'm seeing it so regularly by sprouting seeds and cultivating plants.

LM: Seeing the animals grows and birth happen…

LM: I'm leaning into that.

James, sitting with Lauren: Since 2019, a lot of the conflict that has played out, especially publicly, seems to have been around, like, what's permissible…

LM: Mmmm.

James: ...versus, like, a radical degree of change, colored negatively, right?

LM: Yeah, I mean, "slow and steady" is like an adorable thing that privileged people get to talk about. You know, they get to sit around and be like, "Yeah, let's consider and get some research back and talk about it."

LM: Or you can just do some work.

James: Are any of these things radical, from your perspective? 

LM: No, I'm quite often bored speaking about, like, these basic things that, uh, would encourage our community to be better, but…

LM: Getting to the root of things, which is what radical means...

LM: I think, especially as of late, that when people are saying "radical," I think they're really meaning "scary."

LM: And I do agree that it would be scary to imagine less convenience and more relationships...

James: You said "scary to imagine." Why is it scary to have an imagination?

LM: Oh, because then you're not normal.

MUSIC: Soulful, funky beat begins

LM: Then you're not middle of the road. Then, then what you do after that imagination you're accountable for.

LM: But convenience tells us we can come and go as we please, and we don't have to be accountable.

Credits

CATHY: This episode was produced by James Boo.

JAMES: We were edited by Julia Shu and fact checked by Harsha Nahata. Sound mix by Timothy Lou Ly.

CATHY: Music by Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Our theme music is by Dorian Love.

JAMES: Big thanks to everyone from Bloomington who spoke with us for this episode: Abby Ang, AB Scherschel, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Angela Babb, Brandi Williams, Cara Caddoo, Dina Okamoto, Ellen Wu, JadaBee, Jessie Wang, Lauren McAllister, Leslie Brinson, and Susan Welsand.

CATHY: Self Evident is a Studiotobe production. Our Executive producer is Ken Ikeda.

JAMES: This episode was made with support from PRX and the Google Podcasts Creator Program.

CATHY: And of course, our listener community.

JAMES: Full show notes, more resources and reading, and a transcript of this episode are available at selfevidentshow.com. You can follow us on the socials at self evident show.

CATHY: I'm Cathy Erway. Let's talk soon.

CATHY: Until then, keep sharing Asian America's stories.

MUSIC: Soulful, funky beat ends