Today, Explained - Rural America meets Black Lives Matter

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

In Bethel, Ohio, a Black Lives Matter rally became a standoff between armed bikers and peaceful protesters. BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen explains. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We've talked about how governments are reforming police in those cities. But one thing we haven't really touched on is how this works in small towns. Small towns where there maybe aren't that many Black people, but that are still grappling with systemic racism. Towns like Bethel, Ohio. Bethel is a town that's about a 45-minute drive from Cincinnati, Ohio. I think in some places people would think of it as like an excerpt, but from what everyone has told me, it does not feel like that. It feels like a rural place. This is Anne Helen Peterson.

She's a culture reporter for BuzzFeed where she wrote about one fateful protest in Bethel. So the town proper is 2,700-ish people, but then outside of the small village line, there are more people who consider themselves residents of Bethel. And there's the village proper, which is downtown area that has been there since the early 19th century. It has a bunch of churches. People say like there's about a church per person, but a lot of other things have been pretty hollowed out. Like there used to be a normal grocery store and now it's a discount grocery store that doesn't have good produce, that sort of thing.

And there's like a bunch of gun shops and pawn shops. In early June, this substitute high school teacher, Alicia Gee, was seeing that there were protests organized in small towns all around her. You know, one thing she said to me was like, if Hazard, Kentucky can ever protest, then we can ever protest. But she was very deliberate about thinking through what kind of gathering that they wanted to have. They wanted it to be a demonstration in solidarity of Black Lives Matter. They wanted to think of it as being a big tent to invite people who were all along the spectrum of, you know, defund the police to, you know, I just, I support working towards equality.

They wanted to go beyond just the handful of people that she already knew would be interested from her personal circle, so she decided to post it on the Facebook page that has kind of become a de facto community page since the local news has pretty much evaporated. And she was pretty scared about what would happen. She waited until later at night and then like posted some information about it and then went to bed and woke up in the morning. And there were just a ton of messages and comments

about like, we don't need that here. Like, how dare you bring that here? And a lot of it, I think it's less to do with what the message of the protest was going to be and more to do with what people had seen largely on Fox News about what these protests were, which were violent conflagrations. This is just one of hundreds of businesses that were looted, vandalized, or set ablaze over the past

week. The left psychotic so-called solution now to all the violence and all the anarchy and all the lawlessness and all the looting and all the arson and violence is, let's get rid of the police. And so people, perhaps logically, given the information that they had consumed, thought that to have a Black Lives Matter protest meant to destroy your small town. So they were saying, you know, do not bring this here. And they also, there's a lot of assumptions that like, if you do ever protest, you have to import protesters or pay them. All of this is happening on Facebook. So one of the people who gets really mad about the threat of a protest is a guy named Lonnie Mead, who has also grown up in Bethel, went to high school with some of the people that were showing up to protest. And he started doing Facebook Live broadcasts, asking people to show up to protect the town on Sunday.

Sunday at three o'clock, they're supposed to be bringing Black Lives Matter. I want to tell you right now, I hope everybody that feels like me, I hope we outnumber those people a thousand to one and not let that shit happen here in our little town of Bethel. On the actual day of the protest, June 14th, you have a couple dozen protesters who have shown up thinking that it's going to be just a really docile, maybe even boring event where they stand on the corner, hold up their signs for an hour, and maybe some people honk their horns at them or even throw a soda, but nothing really happens. And then what they actually encountered when people arrived

in the downtown area of the village were hundreds and hundreds of bikers. You're in the wrong town. Hey, get this on your phone. This ain't Seattle. This ain't Seattle. We're not in a Democratic state here. We don't put up with this shit. All lives matter here.

This is a motherfucking Republican state. This is a Republican state. So you have, you know, just standing with signs on one side, a couple dozen people, and then you have hundreds of bikers yelling racial slurs, yelling, like, you know, all sorts of nasty things, telling them to go home, ripping up signs on the other. Why are you shaking for? Nervous? Why you gotta be nervous? A lot of bikers had guns that they were carrying pretty openly, like AR-15s, large guns, hand guns. But other people just brought bats, right? Like someone brought a bag full of bats. There was anger that, you know, these protesters, they decided to stand their ground.

They were like, we are just standing here with our signs. We're not going to leave. You got to get your ass beat, dumbass! You got to get your head cracked! It's really, really difficult to watch. I think especially anyone who grew up in a small town, because it's just so easy to imagine that happening in your small town. It it's just so easy to imagine that happening in your small town. It's just a dark, dark energy. There's been a lot of criticism about how the police handled the situation because they

essentially did not diffuse it in any meaningful way. But I honestly think the police were incredibly overwhelmed. Because they were there expecting, again, you know, a couple dozen people standing on the corner holding signs. And what ended up happening was so much bigger. But they did not intervene or arrest people who were tearing up signs. Sir, I just got punched in the back of the head. You know, even the man who came and sucker punched this guy in the back of the skull, like, did not arrest this guy.

The police were standing right there and watched it, and you can see that on tape. And I think, too, though, that when that happened, that was kind of, of like the point when the protesters were like, we've been here an hour. It's time to go home. People realized, like, it could have gotten a lot darker at that moment. Can you paint a picture of what these protesters looked like? I mean, you hear a lot of racial slurs in the videos, but you don't really see any Black people. It's a whole lot of white people, right? That's one of the things that you have to understand. You know, in a lot of these small towns, they've worked hard to center people of color in the community and let them lead and say, like, what matters to them, what the protests

should look like, that sort of thing. But there's also a lot of places, and I think Bethel is one of them, where there just aren't a lot of people of color. There actually was a woman who is Black who was recording and she was not there to be part of the protest, I think because she knew she would get menaced. So she actually was on the other side with the counter protesters.

And so people started yelling the N-word at her. A lot of people said afterwards that like the few people of color in the community who maybe would have shown up didn't really feel safe. Like they knew that maybe it wouldn't be the best place to be. And, you know, it turns out they were right. I mean, considering small towns like Bethel are very white and only have a handful of people in their police force to begin with, why is it important to focus on what's happening in these small towns and what their protesters are saying? Well, I think one thing that a lot of people have told me

that makes this time feel different is that, you know, it's not just Black people who are saying Black Lives Matter in the streets, right? It is a whole lot of white people not a coastal thing, it's not a thing that is limited to Black people or a certain class of people, that is incredibly important to show just how widespread and popular, for lack of a better word, this movement is. How comparable is what happened in Bethel on Sunday, June 14th to what had happened in other small towns across the country as they've tried to organize around this movement? In some ways, incredibly unique in terms of like exactly how many counter-protesters showed up and the confrontation between them. But at the same time, I think that it could have happened in many, many, many different towns. It could have easily happened in my hometown in Lewiston, Idaho,

where 1,000 people showed up to protest. But the protest was in a park along the river, and all of the protectors were downtown. If they had been in the same space, it could have easily exploded. was in a park along the river and all of the protectors were downtown, if they had been in the same space, it could have easily exploded. After the break, I'll speak to someone who's been trying to bring people together to better understand Black Lives Matter in Bethel.

I'm Sean Ramos-Fur him. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained ramp.com slash explained definitely a background noise. Hold on. Is that your dog? Yeah, he's coughing. Hold on.

Why don't we just have you start by saying, you know, your name and where you are and who your canine friend is and all that stuff. Sure, absolutely. My name is Rachel Lamb. I am in Cincinnati, well, the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. And my dog of eight years, he just turned eight, is named Freedom. My daughter of 12 years is named Liberty, so I have a theme going there. Thanks for letting us know. Okay, so, I mean, how close are you to Bethel? Claremont County is kind of an inner working of a bunch

of small towns, and Bethel is actually right in between Batavia, where I live now, and New Richmond, where I grew up and went to high school. We intermingle a lot, but we all pretty much know each other and have events together. And Bethel is just kind of a part of my life and always has been. As someone whose whole life is sort of centered around this town, what is your impression of why the protest in Bethel and New Richmond and Batavia here in Claremont County, but from rural America all over the place, you see this attitude of, oh, you better not bring the protests or the looting and the rioting to our town. We'll be ready for you. And that kind of became the country bumpkin mantra. Because small town America is not familiar with the language of protests, just because they don't happen there as often as they do in the big cities, they're not used to them. The two words, riot and protest, got conflated in people's head.

So what did you do? I had planned a barbecue-style sit-down in the park. Like I said, the language of protests, they don't understand. But the language that they do understand is barbecues in the park, community events. You at least have to have coffee and donuts. And that is what we definitely have. Wait a second, at a barbecue, it's coffee and donuts? Yeah, yeah. Well, it was day two. It was morning. It wasn't really, it wasn't an evening time dinner. When we say the word

barbecue, that basically just means get together, eat some food. So we got a bunch of donuts from the donut place in Bethel. We had hot coffee, we had, we had snacks and we had water and we had invited anyone who wanted to come. Our idea was that we were just going to sit down and kind of hear why people felt the way they did. There's always some thought process to how this person got to saying all lives matter when people say Black Lives Matter. Why is that so important to you? And then we'll explain why Black Lives Matter is so important to us. The only problem was that Bethel was still in a very raw state because of everything that happened. And I think everyone looked very kind of skeptically on our luring them in with donuts. They thought that it was just going to be

another yelling with bullhorns across the street. So what it ended up turning into is a bunch of Black Lives Matter allies talking about how we can have conversations in our family units, in our friend units, at our jobs, if we hear or see racist things happening, to encourage people to start standing up, to start calling out that uncle or grandpa or friend that occasionally says racial slurs. So I think that particular protest on June 14th in Bethel,

as almost anyone who sees the video would agree, was sort of exceptional and perhaps got out of hand because of a lot of misinterpretation of what people were coming to Bethel to do that day. I wonder, as someone who sort of initiated the conversations thereafter, what do you think is key to helping people think about what's going on right now in the country in a new way and not having sort of

these hangups about what they think Black Lives Matter might be about from, you know, I don't know, watching Fox News and hearing a lot of talk about Antifa. Here's the thing about small towns. One of the things that I heard so many times over and over again is, you're not from our town. Get out. You're not part of our community. Get out. And when someone said to them, hey, I've lived here 20 years. I'm absolutely a part of this town.

The way the tension and the anger just melts away is probably surprising to people, but the small town talking to small town idea, that's what is going to work. It's a simple and obvious solution, but for some reason not used as often as it should be. We've been taught for so many years, if you want to keep your friends, if you want to keep your family, don't talk about, I think it's politics, religion, or money, right? We've been bred to avoid difficult conversations. Have you had personal experience fostering progress

by talking and listening to your own family, to your own neighbors in these small towns in Ohio? Absolutely. In my own family unit, did not believe in interracial dating. The one that really surprised me the most was my grandma. My grandma and grandpa, grandpa specifically, he was a racist, you know, and I shouldn't even try to sugarcoat it. And that's the thing is that we do that too often. We sugarcoat how bad it is because we love people. When my grandpa died, my grandma held on to a lot of those same opinions. And I remember her saying to me that my boyfriend would never be

welcome in her home. And I looked at her and I said, well, that's a real shame because I love him. And I would think that you loving me and me loving him, that you would be happy for me. And I walked out on the porch for a while and within 10 minutes, she came outside crying and said, I do love you and I am happy for you and I'm sorry, these old ways are hard to kick but I'll give it my best if you wanna bring them over. And I'm not saying that every conversation would go that easily, obviously,

but when you put it out there and you stand up and you tell them that they're wrong and you tell them in a way that involves, hey, I love you, but what you said was not the right thing to say. Or in friend groups, you know, like, hey, man, none of us say that kind of stuff. Why do you have to be like that? Just simple statements like that can hang in a person's brain, and it can really make a big difference in possibly changing their mind. Rachel, well, thank you for having this conversation with me. And I really appreciate your time and give our regards to freedom and liberty. I absolutely will. I appreciate you showing interest. you