Charlie vs. the Immigrants

How we redraw the lines of society to keep some of us out.

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the fog.

I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table

I remember an encounter I had twenty-odd years ago, walking home to my apartment in San Francisco. I’d recently left my pastorate in Marin and was settling into a much quieter life in that beautiful city. I’d needed time and space to disentangle the deeply personal spirituality of my early years from the adversarial stance my denomination was increasingly taking; one focused on the hereafter instead of the here and now, on saving souls rather than lives.

So, there I was, living on my own, working at a small nonprofit that helped set young disadvantaged kids on the path to college while continuing my longstanding chaplaincy and case management work with AIDS patients; work that, despite admonitions and threats, I’d refused to give up and that was part of why I could go no further with my former denomination.

I’d visit the farmers’ market and go for runs in the fog, listen to music and read in front of my tiny fireplace. I remember poring through a not-yet-published draft of Brian McLaren’s A New Kind Of Christian, a semi-fictional story about an earnest pastor disillusioned with conventional faith, and who, like me, found himself wondering if there was still a place for him.

I had coffee conversations with my friends Linda, Mark and Dieter, fellow ministers who also yearned for a more authentic, truly benevolent form of faith, and I’d ride the N-Judah to the ocean, where I’d sit and attempt to reconcile the distance between who I – an emotionally sensitive, ethnic minority, LGBTQ+ identifying man of faith – was vs. who our dominant paradigms had, for so long, told me I needed to be. In short, I was trying to find myself.

One Saturday, on my way back from my neighborhood store, the Safeway on Church and Market, I passed my middle-aged mail carrier walking his beat and said hello. We’d never actually chatted before, but whenever I see people out working hard like this, I make it a point to acknowledge them, as I hope people likewise acknowledged my grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles. He was a portly, slightly sunburned Euro mix with a sunny disposition, and for some reason, that day, he wanted to talk. “You live near here, don’t you?” he said, and I replied, yes, that he delivered my mail. He introduced himself and started walking toward the corner with me. “I’m Charlie,” he volunteered, as we exchanged names.

Then, out of the blue, he asked, “Doesn’t it seem like there’s a lot more immigrants moving into this neighborhood?” I was stunned; less by the question itself than by the fact that never, in all my life, did I imagine myself on the inside of a conversation like this. I’m not sure what I said, perhaps, no, I hadn’t really noticed that (and I hadn’t, though I’d specifically moved into the city for its greater diversity, so in my mind, more immigrants were wonderful). Charlie pressed on, saying, “I mean, the white man and the black man, we built this country up together, and now here they come trying to take it away from us.”

There had been instances when I’d been inadvertently treated like an insider, like the time I called to speak with a friend from California who was back in Texas visiting his grandmother, a long-retired Southern Baptist pastor’s wife. Finding out I’d gone to University of Oklahoma, she asked me about Anita Hill, who was testifying against Clarence Thomas. “What do you think about that nigger girl?” she asked. “You think she’s lying?” That’s when it dawned on me; she had no idea I, like Anita, was of African ancestry. I opted not to tell her, but I’d think back and wonder how that bit of withheld information would’ve changed the openness with which she was communicating with me.

But here, with Charlie, this was something different. This conversation was actually because of how he’d identified me. It almost felt like I was perhaps being pranked; that there was a secret camera hidden somewhere. I think I subtly changed the subject by thanking him for having left my package beneath the mailboxes in the hall so that I didn’t have to traipse all the way down to the post office to get it. He smiled broadly and said I was welcome, before slapping me on the back and moving on with his route. I walked home both wondering what had just happened and thinking about the man I’d just met.

Despite his terrible approach (not to mention throwing immigrants under the bus), I could recognize the genuine effort he’d made to make a connection. There’s almost no good way to introduce the topic of race, but it was clear that he was trying to communicate something about this longstanding relationship between black-identifying and white-identifying Americans. Charlie never brought up the thing about immigrants again, but always, when I saw him, he’d give me a hearty hello, a handshake, and a smile.

Our chats in front of the mailboxes became sort of a regular thing. I learned all about his family (he had five sisters and a brother) and he, mine. We also talked about deep things, like why I felt conflicted about my ministerial calling and how he, as the oldest, had become a mailman at 18 after his dad died, in order to help his family. That first Christmas, I left Charlie a card taped to my mailbox, then he followed suit by leaving me one inside. That became our tradition. It didn’t take me long to realize that he and I had become real friends.

But our burgeoning friendship notwithstanding, something beneath the surface of that first conversation with Charlie struck me as significant. It would take me years to put it into words; but what I’d seen was an example of a powerful mechanism at work – the redrawing of society’s lines.

This, of course, has happened many times before, including every time racial whiteness as a franchise has been extended to previously excluded immigrant groups from Italians to Russians to Irish. But this time, the framework itself was being restructured. Instead of whites vs. coloreds, it was old-timers vs. newbies. But even this isn’t new. The process hearkens back to the old Bedouin proverb: “I against my brothers, I and my brothers against my cousins, I, my brothers and my cousins against strangers.”

Likewise, in This Land Is Your Land, I describe how “social regrouping” can be used to enable a faction to maintain prevailing power. The process involves breaking the collective down into subsets (segmentation), then putting it back together (reconfiguration) based on different dividing lines; leading us to form different conclusions. When applied in democracies, the resulting new majority is grounded in concrete tallies that anyone can do; which, in turn, makes the process appear fair and credible.

For instance, let’s say we were grouping four items; a fire engine, a bunch of cherries, a bowl of green beans and salsa. If you’re the fire truck, you’ll want to group by color (red), which, along with the cherries and salsa, gives you the majority. But if you’re the green beans, you’ll want to group by substance (food), which, along with the cherries and the salsa, gives you the majority. In both cases, the elements are the same. The power rests with whoever selects the sorting criteria.

But in the end, this always backfires. It creates a situation where we’re not only constantly reframing the narrative and re-forging alliances to maintain power; we also get that our alliances themselves are fleeting. Since they’re all just one good offer away from evaporating, society has no stability, which makes it hard for anyone to build anything real.

Thing is, any society, irrespective of form of government, can be hacked. Emperors can be assassinated, titles can be bought, decisions believed to be made by God can be faked, and within democracy, the vote, in any number of ways, can be manipulated. But because everything, and everybody’s changing, these grouping categories need to be amended and new lines drawn. This is exactly why it’s not enough to renounce just one manifestation of social supremacy, but all its forms. In the end, it’s exploitation, the why behind the what, that must be dismantled. Otherwise, we’ll simply repackage the same tricks in a new format. Or, we can change.

Which leads me back to Charlie. I ran into him about a year after I’d moved away from the neighborhood where he had his route. We walked along that same street chatting like the old friends we were. It was shortly after 9/11 and I told him I was days away from moving to New York City, that I was going back to graduate school and that I’d chosen NY to help as a trauma chaplain. “So, you’ve finally found yourself again, huh?” he said, looking at me approvingly and with a bit of a smirk. “I guess so,” I replied, smiling back.

“Oh! I’ve got news, too,” he announced, “I’m engaged!” “Wow, Charlie, that’s fantastic!” I exclaimed, genuinely happy for him, “Congrats, man!” Charlie was such a great guy, and if anyone deserved to be happy, it was him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, then handed me a photo. “Wow, she’s, she’s…”

“An immigrant,” he finished for me, with a look that was half smile and half apology, clearly remembering our very first conversation, and in his own way, acknowledging that I most likely remembered it as well. “I was going to say, ‘She’s amazing… incredible… stunning…’”, I said. “Yeah, she’s all that,” he replied, beaming.

And it was as if something in the atmosphere had cleared. We stood there grinning like idiots, then, I finally said, “It’s so great to see you, Charlie.” You, too,” he responded, then, he pulled me into a quick hug before giving me his patented slap on the back as I turned to go.

I walked off, thinking about how while that was clearly work Charlie had done on his own, I could take a small amount of pleasure in knowing that it didn’t hurt that I neither encouraged the ideological direction he was going nor wrote him off as a bad guy because of it. And now, there he was, clearly leaving his past prejudices and fears behind.