In the Hidden Corners of My Hometown

This West Coast modernist design just sprouts in the middle of a post-WWII development.

Flailing my way through protracted unemployment, I recently started driving DoorDash to get cash moving in. My community is too small to produce enough business for me to live off my gig, but it brings in enough to keep groceries on the table. The gig has provided another important education I didn’t realize I needed: despite living in one small city for over twenty years, I’ve discovered how much of town I just don’t know.

My central Nebraska city has a population slightly above 30,000 people. By current American standards, that’s dinky, but on a historical basis, actually quite large. Legendary ancient cities like Chichen Itza or Babylon topped out around 20,000 people, the practical maximum for societies where the majority needed to farm, and urban infrastructure had to primarily support pedestrians and mule carts. Modernity can support much larger populations, though, mostly because of cars, electricity, and Portland cement.

Modernity has also produced something that ancient cities could’ve never supported: single use zoning. When cars put much larger distances within easy reach, citizens building a business in front of their house, a stable in back, and extra rooms for an inn on the side, makes less sense. American communities are now built in sprawling, monolithic ways that discourage visitors. There’s little reason to visit huge swaths of one’s own city without a prior invitation.

This results in acres upon acres, streets upon streets, where I’ve never visited—until now. DoorDash invites me into single-use residential neighborhoods I’ve never previously had purpose or permission to enter. Visiting these quarters for the first time, I witness eclectic architecture, some of it deliberately either minimalist or rococo, and differing ideas about how large the surrounding yard should be. I’ve also witnessed that, the newer the community, the less likely to contain sidewalks.

Very large lawns, without sidewalks or parks, encourage children to play close to home. Current urban design (which, often, means no design, just vibes) discourages children from one of childhood’s primal impulses, the desire to explore. Wandering away from home may be impractical in new developments and, depending on traffic patterns, unsafe. This means children only have opportunities to meet friends and make connections in officially approved spaces, mainly school and, for some, religious congregations.

Just one of a development of identical crackerbox duplexes with postage stamp lawns,
no sidewalks, and no curbside parking—completely hostile to visitors or teenagers.

The extreme opposite, I’ve observed, is small houses, mainly duplexes, on small lots. These are single-story houses with attached garages, requiring a large physical footprint. However, these developments also lack sidewalks, which means not only no pedestrians, but no curbside parking for guests. These houses seemingly go mainly to young families as starter homes, so maybe they don’t entertain much. But it dampens their ability to perform time-honored neighborhood rituals of group bonding through hospitality.

Small starter homes have no parking and no place to set up picnic tables. Larger homes for established families have space and parking, but are so far away that neighbors can scarcely see one another. Either way, these designs discourage traditional neighborhood activities, like block parties or tenants’ unions, and functionally prevent neighbors from getting to know one another. The McMansions, in particular, look awkward, flexing their design flourishes to impress neighbors they’ll never meet.

Traveling to shared spaces, like work or school, requires either an overland hike without sidewalks, or car rides that create traffic jams. My city is small enough that “jams” are fleeting annoyances. But larger unplanned cities like Houston, which is over forty percent paved, can be dangerous during the morning commute. Ambulances trapped in rush-hour traffic have become a notable part of the Houston experience. So was the city’s inability to drain after Hurricane Harvey.

Current urban design standards divide routine activities. This isn’t entirely awful, as most people wouldn’t want to live beside a lead smelter, kimchi cannery, or hog abattoir. But most people also can’t walk to restaurants, shops, or even their neighbors’ houses. All daily business happens enclosed in hermetically sealed, climate-controlled metal capsules. Ordinary people have diminished opportunities to make friends, discover quirky experimental businesses, or, as I’ve learned recently, see most of their own town.

Old cities like central London, Paris, or New York south of Houston Street are designed around human needs: useful sidewalks, homes designed to double as business sites, and multi-story structures that utilize vertical space as assertively as horizontal. We can’t just regress, because history goes proceeds, even when we wish it wouldn’t. But we can look to older spaces for inspiration for innovative ways to utilize newer, more current spaces that aren’t hostile to visitors.

The Deep, Dark Mines of the Uncanny Valley

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep

Shellshocked veteran Lt. Alex Easton’s sole qualification to investigate unexplained phenomena, is that they’ve seen it before without flinching. But where they previously fought ineffable monsters in their native Gallacia, a mysterious Eastern European land of dismal swamps and forests primeval, this time, they’ve been invited to America. But then, if there’s a place as old and as hostile to humankind as Gallacia, it must surely be Southern Appalachia.

T. Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” novellas, starring Alex Easton, whose unique gender identity doesn’t translate into English, each delve into different horror subgenres. The first retold a Poe classic, highlighting a theme Poe introduced, but didn’t explore. The second followed the conventions of folk horror. This third unpack a theme popular in recent movies: the legend of mysterious humanoids dwelling in the caverns and mines permeating America’s eastern mountains.

Dr. James Denton, a supporting character from Easton’s first story, has telegrammed Easton for their help. He admits Easton isn’t particularly qualified, except that they’ve faced similar conflicts before, and he needs a partner who won’t ask stupid questions. So Easton crosses the ocean, rides America’s rails, and walks into West Virginia’s dark, forested mountains, a terrain from which more intrepid explorers have frequently failed to return.

Many American folk myths speculate that something dark and mysterious dwells underground, a horrible monster which we’ll uncover by mining for hydrocarbons or even just spelunking. This monster is usually whispered to be older than humankind, and eager for small provocations to resurge and take America from us. Of course, this is coded language. We “Americans” know who we stole this land from, and why they deserve to reclaim it.

Kingfisher salts these themes with a Lovecraftian influence which she acknowledges in her afterword, but which she doesn’t hammer needlessly. Rather, she describes two war-torn old souls, walking wounded, who investigate a land older than human conception. There, they discover a cavern that cannot possibly exist, guarded by a force so close to human, that its very existence personifies the uncanny valley. But that force is holding something worse back.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Reading this novella, I’m reminded of Stanisław Lem’s signal classic, Solaris. Both stories feature humans encountering an intelligence so different from themselves that they cannot truly communicate. Though Easton and Denton have more success than Kelvin in making peace, they struggle with some of the same problems. What does it mean to “communicate” with an intelligence that isn’t human? Or to speak individually with a collective intelligence?

But our protagonists bring something to the story that neither Lovecraft nor Lem considered: capitalists’ willingness to burn everything that doesn’t turn a profit. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and Lem’s ocean planet encounter humans primarily through scientists and explorers. Kingfisher’s primordial intelligence comes to light because humans dynamited the mountains and uncorked Earth’s mantle in search of power and money. Therefore, “first contact” means not curiosity, but pain.

I’ve become a particular Kingfisher fan because she reverses widespread cultural expectations. In this case, besides Easton’s blunt defiance of the Anglophonic gender binary, Easton also sees America as exotic and foreign, reading America back to Kingfisher’s audience. Burned out on conflict, Easton sees American glorification of the Spanish-American war as bizarre and uncivilized. America’s much-bandied national youth seems ridiculous amid Appalachia’s uncountable antiquity.

One could continue unpacking Kingfisher’s themes. Cartesian dualism versus the Freudian psyche, perhaps, or the failures of technological triumphalism in the face of Earth’s unimaginable age. Kingfisher plays with these thematic contrasts and reversals like Lego bricks, creating a whole that readers recognize from previous books, but which is entirely her own. Her ability to use common strategies to tell an uncommon story is why I’ve become a Kingfisher fan.

Although this story remains short, it’s the longest yet of Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier novellas, over 170 pages plus back matter. This gives Easton space not only to investigate their themes, but also to confront the monster. But this story also has perhaps the largest company of characters yet, and Kingfisher doesn’t give everyone full development. Easton’s loyal batman Angus, in particular, gradually disappears from the story, which is disappointing.

That said, this story largely maintains the momentum of the previous “Sworn Soldier” novellas. Though I might wish the story was about fifty pages longer, to give every character the space they deserve, that would’ve changed the novella-reading experience. Kingfisher’s distinct voice and nonconformist attitude remain visible and keep the narrative popping. It reads like a slice of popular literature, just seen through a lens like you’ve never read before.

The White Privilege Party, Part 3

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party and The White Privilege Party, Part 2.

Woody Guthrie

If the fash hate one thing, it’s being called fash. Or even told they’ve done something fashy. Even when faced with their overwhelming fascism, or with subject experts like Timothy Snyder or Jason Stanley demonstrating their fashy tendencies, they become angry and defensive. President Taco’s claim to be “the least racist person there is” has become the tragicomic emblem fascists’ need to be seen as nevertheless good.

Returning this series to where it began, the question remains of whether protestors should use confrontational chants while challenging the current administration. Specifically, whether they should use Woody Guthrie-type songs to call fascists “fascist” to their faces. In conservative, semi-rural, and racially homogenous places, such boldness will precipitate conflicts, which discourages White protestors from getting involved.

“Fascism” is a notoriously slippery concept, since it adapts itself to local conditions. Snyder and Stanley have useful, but often inconsistent, definitions. For our purposes, let’s define fascism as the hardened and intolerant extreme of the hierarchy I described last time. Fascism not only requires some people to remain powerless for others to have powerful, and divides power racially, but enforces this mandatory division through arbitrary violence.

The history of hierarchical violence reveals something remarkable. As theologian James Cone writes, Jim Crow racial violence didn’t happen to kill the targets. It happened to remind survivors that the perpetrators would face no consequences, because they owned the system. Likewise, the Roman church didn’t burn witches and heretics to force conversions in early Christendom. It only burned nonconformists in the Renaissance, once its political power was unquestionable.

Put briefly, hierarchical violence happens when perpetrators know they’ll face no meaningful punishment. In my lifetime, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Bernard Goetz knew or suspected that the racially slanted justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable for shooting Black people or their White sympathizers. So they strapped on guns and went hunting on American streets.

We’ve watched “red states” legalize driving cars into protestors. We’ve watched them refuse to prosecute bullies attacking children. We’ve watched the current administration target harmless dissidents on camera, knowing they won’t be prosecuted, or even meaningfully reprimanded. The deferral of each consequence basically ensures that the next street-level fash will feel authorized to attack, maybe even to kill.

Equally importantly, perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains in this arrangement. Fashy narratives reinforce the belief that hierarchies are necessary, and therefore equality is oppressive. Any attempt to fix unfairness is innately unfair to those who benefit, or think they do. Therefore those protected by the status quo, even the poor and forgotten, are too likely to violently defend what dwindling privilege they have.

The term “extinction burst” has become modish recently. Once you remove reinforcement from previously rewarded behavior, the behavior becomes more extreme and calcified before it disappears. Recent discussions spotlight violence specifically, as America’s overall culture no longer rewards racism, homophobia, and other bigotry as openly as before. But that exact change puts protestors in conservative areas at greater risk.

Please don’t misunderstand, I know these forces are contradictory. People are violent because they know nobody will hold them accountable, but they know nobody will hold them accountable in the exact places where their dying ideology still matters. Florida, which legalized driving cars into protests, has one of America’s oldest median resident ages. Nebraska, where prosecutors won’t charge men who attack kids, remains substantially isolated from the larger economy.

This paradox underlies Critical Race Theory. CRT founder Derrick Bell claimed, with evidence, that racism has proven infinitely elastic as its successive justifications become obsolete. Violent economic necessity justified slavery, but morphed into organized bigotry under Jim Crow. Once the state withdrew support, bigotry became disorganized, like background noise. With each morph, the system excommunicates its former defenders.

The three vigilantes I named—Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Goetz—all retreated into anonymity after their acquittals, and became parodies of their prior selves, because their persons didn’t matter. They claimed “self-defense,” but their selves were an afterthought. Their supporters abandoned them because once they bolstered the narrative that White (or White-adjacent) people owned the system, that system no longer needed them.

White progressives fear angering the fash by calling them fashy to their faces, not only because fashies are violent, but because they’re as much displaced by the cultural shifts happening around them as the conservatives are. They’ll hang onto their illusions that they can persuade the fash, because the alternative is plunging headlong into uncertainty. The old system is dying, and to those accustomed to winning, that’s terrifying.

The White Privilege Party, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party.

Striking teachers in the West Virginia statehouse, 2018 (CNN photo)

Political commentators conventionally date the decline of American labor unions to President Reagan mass-firing the PATCO strikers in 1981. But I think the process started much sooner. After peaking in the 1950s, union membership has declined steadily. Though reliable statistics go back to only 1983 (everything prior is estimates and probabilities), union membership rates have halved in that time. This decline has correlated with another powerful social force.

Desegregation.

Ian Haney Lopèz dates union desegregation to 1973, and claims that the battles surrounded seniority. White laborers, Lopèz claims, would rather relinquish all union protections, than surrender the senior standing they achieved under racially biased rules. Tacit within this refusal, though, is the corollary that White workers refused to negotiate alongside Black workers. Too many White workers would rather suffer than see Black people share their protections.

I cannot verify this 1973 date; FDR desegregated defense contractors by executive order during World War II, while Truman desegregated the military in 1948. The American Federation of Labor recognized its first majority-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Union desegregation seems more gradual than abrupt. The point remains, however, that the more inclusive unions became, the more White workers abandoned them.

I’ve begun this essay with labor unions because they’re quantifiable. And of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation; White workers might’ve decided they didn’t need union protection and also that they didn’t want to work alongside Black co-workers coincidentally. But the third prong of the trident, the election of softball racist Ronald Reagan, of “strapping young buck” fame, suggests that racism directed White workers’ economic choices, not vice versa.

This pattern recurs throughout American history. Critics have condemned Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project for suggesting the Founding Fathers created America specifically to protect their racial hierarchy. But the fact remains that, after the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original states, including New York and New Jersey, still practiced slavery. White Americans who talked up liberty and autonomy needed ninety years to fully stop enslaving Black Americans.

And then Jim Crow began.

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison wrote that American values have long valorized individualism and autonomy; but such values have weight only to the extent that they’re denied to some Americans. Me being unfettered only means something while someone else remains restrained. Morrison, a novelist, meant this specifically in literary terms, because in fiction, we can abstract such values to broad moral precepts. But the same principle applies to society writ large.

In today’s America, “peace” doesn’t mean the stability necessary to pursue our physical and spiritual well-being, it means the absence of war. “Wealth” doesn’t mean physical comfort and a full belly, it means the power necessary to employ other people to look after your stuff. “Law” doesn’t mean reliable systems of social order, it means violent crackdowns on nonconformists and the poor. We define our shared values oppositionally.

And, as Morrison writes, we often use race as mental shorthand for this opposition. Sure, sometimes we signify “the other” with other external signs, like hair or piercings. But if White punk rockers want acceptance from the squares, they can shave their Mohawks and remove their tongue studs. Black and Hispanic people can’t stop being Black and Hispanic, and therefore can’t stop being shorthanded as “less than.”

It’s easy, considering American public mythology, to forget that when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1969, he wasn’t there to mobilize for racial justice. He was there to help unionize the city’s sanitation workers. Sure, those sanitation workers were overwhelmingly Black, but Dr. King had recognized the inextricable bond between American racism and economic injustice. Poverty and Blackness occupy the same headspace in the American imagination.

Concisely put, America organizes itself into in-groups and out-groups, then racializes the groups to simplify remembering who belongs where. The same redlining practices that preserve segregated neighborhoods, have also segregated labor forces. The minute Black people wanted union protections, White workers began embracing myths of radical individualism, even as such individualism left them broke and powerless against billionaire business owners.

Better broke than Black, amirite?

We’re somewhat seeing this rolled back. Black deaths caught on camera have ignited a sense of justice in some White Americans, though not yet enough. But it’s carried its own pushback. Capitalists like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have sought political power that would’ve made Cornelius Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie blush. But it all for the same goal: maintaining the hierarchy of haves and have-nots. Which is, usually, racial.

Concluded in The White Privilege Party, Part 3

Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

What moral obligations do White people have, especially White men, to risk death when protecting the powerless in American society? This question confronted me this week when I answered a social media question. Somebody described her White friend in semi-rural Pennsylvania trying to organize a No Kings protest. She wanted to incorporate conventional anti-fascist songs and chants, but her White co-organizers feared becoming “too confrontational” and alienating their neighbors.

I admit I fumbled my answer. I said something mealy-mouthed about regions where somebody arriving with a Gadsden flag and a gun was entirely likely. Progressives living in broadly conservative areas know that those threatening our organized activities face few consequences. Just last month, in my state, an adult man attacked a line of protesting high school students—literal children—and local prosecutors declined to file charges.

Somebody answered my response by saying I failed to understand the Black American experience. Which, as a White cishet man, I probably do. This respondent pointed out that Black Americans face violent pushback for even the most anodyne protest. In fairness, I’ve shared enough protest space with Black and Hispanic people to have witnessed this firsthand, but like anything merely witnessed, that’s not the same as experience.

In all things, I strive to remain fair and broad-minded, and if I’m wrong, I want to amend my ways. So I’ve thought about this response. I could, if I wanted, mumble something about the limits of social media. Especially on platforms which cap character counts, like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, it’s impossible to make nuanced arguments. Conditional experiences, including the Black, queer, disabled, or womanist experience, will get elided.

But that’s merely an excuse. Several deeper issues conspired to reach this moment. First, humans naturally desire to stay alive. My sense of moral outrage at persistent American racism arose because racialized violence contravenes the human desire to survive, and places a sliding scale on human life. If some people deserve to remain alive more than others, autocrats could eventually use that relative deserving against me. Or you.

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

This isn’t new or unique. The “Women and children first” ethic made famous on the RMS Titanic was written after literally no women or children survived the SS Arctic disaster. Men on board wanted to survive so badly that they literally elbowed smaller, weaker women aside. Human-made moral codes like chivalry, law of the sea, and bushido generally arise to restrain powerful people’s tendency to value their lives over others.

Honestly, I don’t have to die for justice. As a White man, I could passively acquiesce, and pay little price. This, then, is the obverse of my respondent’s claim that Black people live with constant threats of violence. If White people can walk away from threats and survive, they will walk away. They won’t persevere if their lives are jeopardized, unless the threat of leaving is worse.

Forgive me bringing up old stuff, but here’s where Kyle Rittenhouse enters the discussion. Even I misunderstood the meaning when it happened, focusing on the red-herring language of “self-defense.” But Kyle Rittenhouse’s real lesson was that, if White people stand up for Black lives, human law won’t protect them. White lives don’t matter if they don’t prostrate themselves before a White political apparatus.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13 KJV) But Jesus never says anything unless its opposite flits through the common ethos. If we think morality should result in material reward, then dying for others is a failure. Only when justice is communal, not individual, does dying for the cause become an accomplishment.

And right now, in America’s White spaces, communitarian justice just doesn’t exist. That’s why private-sector labor unions are dying, protests are special occasions, and, as Charles M. Blow writes, White people can abandon racial justice actions when the weather becomes harsh. Community justice, once a shared value in America’s factories and farms, has dwindled as those spaces have become racialized, and White people live in atomized suburbs and single-family homes.

Under such conditions, asking White people to risk death simply because it’s right, is a non-starter. Not until our political, religious, and social leaders reclaim a vision of shared consequence, will that change. Unfortunately, that won’t happen while voters, congregants, and citizens don’t reward it—the ultimate circular reasoning. The feedback loop won’t break until, as the fash inevitably do, they turn against the people who first gave them power.

Continued in The White Privilege Party, Part 2 and The White Privilege Party, Part 3