Founding editor of ‘The Contributor’ explores the legacies of white supremacy, private property and police
When I served as editor of The Contributor (2008-2013), part of my work entailed meeting up with our vendors and other unhoused Nashvillians and listening to — and sometimes helping them narrate, write, and share — their stories of life on the streets. It didn’t take me long to learn that one of the most common experiences that people struggling to survive without permanent shelter endure is harassment from those who supposedly “serve and protect” us — police.
Again and again, year after year, our friends would tell me utterly baffling stories of trying to sleep, sit, stand, eat, use the bathroom, and otherwise mind their own business when police began to harass them, telling them to move along, or even citing or arresting them and taking them to jail — all for having no place to lay their head. The sheer injustice of it all ignited my moral indignation and commitment to building a world without such injustice, and I haven’t looked back since.
In 2013, my last year at the paper, I collaborated with our co-founder, former executive director, and excellent photographer Tasha A.F. Lemley for a special issue on the criminalization of homelessness in Nashville. I pulled arrest records and police affidavits for more than a dozen unhoused folks who were cited or arrested for existing in public — for “breathing air,” as one man I interviewed put it — and Tasha took stunning photographs of each person in the exact place and position they were in when police accosted them. The experience of inviting criminalized people to share their accounts of being confronted and captured by agents of the state because of their state of dispossession forever shaped how I see our city and our nation in this era of racial capitalism.
Indeed, the conversations and relationships that I was privileged to partake in as editor at The Contributor impacted me so deeply that they went on to shape the trajectory of my subsequent graduate studies in theology and religion, as well as my community organizing and teaching in pursuit of a world of safety and abundance beyond police and prisons.
All of these things also animated the long writing of my book, White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization, which finally comes out this August from NYU Press.
Listening to firsthand accounts of the criminalization of people without housing in our city led me on a quest to better understand why it is that states of precarity — poverty — also register to the state as states of criminality: why, in other words, is it a crime to be poor? My pursuit of an answer to that question led me to a decade-long exploration of the European Christian theological roots and ongoing legacies of white supremacy, private property, and police. I am proud of this book, and hope readers of The Contributor will check it out. It can technically be classified as a work of “academic” scholarship, but, committed as I am to accessible writing, I am hopeful a wider audience can learn something from it. You may even find a few stories from Contributor vendors past and present inside its pages.