Church & Colonization: Solidarity against private property
This post is part of our Church & Colonization series. Using the themes of Advent (faith, hope, joy, and love), Re/Generation participants and CTA leaders reflect on aspects of how colonization in the United States has been intertwined with Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular.
Theme: love
I have made a career out of working for charities. All of them impose a way of life on the people they serve, from big organizations like Catholic Charities and Salvation Army, to independent church shelters of various denominations, and volunteer-run drop-in centers and food shelves. Even the government’s social service arm I worked for was built to only fill gaps left by the overburdened network of charity programs.
These charities, including the government, mostly claim to be non-political. But even the small ones are influenced most by ultra-wealthy corporations who privately control the majority of all land and money in the United States-- and the police who protect that property. These private property interests create a dominant narrative that poverty is caused by a combination of bad morals, bad health, or bad luck and is solved when sectors of the private market adjust to meet the need.
This narrative about poverty’s causes and solutions should be understood as a form of modern colonization over the people who rely on the services, the workers like me who offer them, and the entire culture that assumes the validity of this form of charity.
Poverty solutions are complicated and bureaucratic, but all of them rely on private-sector entities figuring out how to absorb public money by funneling it through pieces of a person’s life--but never unconditionally, and never in ways where poor people have direct access or control over the resources. These solutions are specialized, just like the rest of the commodity market, to address different categories of a person because they are produced by different competing interests.
For example, healthcare, housing, education and anything else a person needs are separated because the different entities (insurance companies, landlords, or nonprofits, etc.) are each seeking to collect money to provide the resources. The entities act as colonies to distribute the resources, but the solutions are all produced according to the colonizing power, which is private property.
A decolonized charity alternative would include unconditional free public health, free public housing, and free public education. I don’t mean public in the sense that these projects are necessarily managed by the government, though that’s certainly the most imaginable method. I mean public in the way Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, founders of the Catholic Worker, used the word “common” when they talked about the common good: communities collectivize their resources so that among them there is no need. I’ve seen and participated in this sort of solidarity based charity work before with my Catholic Worker communities, but never on a scale that allowed me to imagine an entirely de-colonized model of charity where private property was made to submit to the needs of people.
My first experience of large-scale solidarity charity was during the Minneapolis George Floyd uprising in May and June when I helped lead an occupation of the vacant Midtown Sheraton hotel and turned it into a temporary shelter. The project addressed the immediate material needs and danger of homelessness by targeting private property via occupation and centering values of cross-class solidarity. While COVID spread and the police and National Guard fought to regain control of the city during the uprising, homelessness steadily rose and almost 100,000 hotel rooms sat vacant across Minnesota, including the entire Midtown Sheraton.
The occupation began at the peak of the uprising. The hotel was near the center of violence and many surrounding buildings had already burned down. It began on the same day that one of the National Guard staging areas was set up across the street behind the hotel. Along with militarized local police the Nation Guard had begun shooting anyone caught outside after the 8pm curfew the night before. The back of the old Sheraton faces a paved-over railroad path called the Greenway where huge camps of homeless people set up every summer. Hundreds of people were camped within a mile of the hotel in the days before the occupation began. Hennepin County had begun busing some of the encampment residents out of the city, but most would be left behind.
Twenty people were supposed to stay at the Sheraton that first night--with the initial blessing of the hotel owner -- but by morning over 100 people had taken shelter in the hotel. Within a few days the old Sheraton was housing 400 people with 400 more on a waitlist, most of whom had moved in directly from the streets and who would not fit or be allowed in the existing shelter system. Three meals a day were offered to anyone who asked for them. The basement level was turned into a sprawling donation distribution center for everything from diapers and plungers to wheelchairs and bicycles. Most impressive of all, the hotel became the largest harm reduction space anyone had ever seen. People could safely discard used injection needles and get free clean new ones, along with packs of narcan, an overdose treatment, and other safe injection supplies. There was even a “chill out room” with cots and volunteer medics standing by.
The entire operation ran on donations and was staffed by hundreds of volunteers a day working around the clock. Roles were created for everything, including routine maintenance, garbage pick-up, hotel laundry, donation logistics, emergency medical aid, resident council organizing where hotel rules were made, daily wellness checks on every resident in every room, and security against white supremacists who stalked the streets outside.
The project was a glimpse of one version of decolonized charity based on solidarity. But colonization is not thrown off so easily. Colonized charity’s roots are generations-old and have long since choked out the experience or memory of non-dominant forms of charity. No one involved with the Sheraton had ever experienced anything like it, so no one knew how to plan for the future.
The project was so overwhelming and unexpected that nonprofit agencies would not even allow their staff to enter the building on work time, and government agencies disparaged the effort even as they quietly made referrals into the shelter. A few progressive foundations even tried to support the project, but without a standard charity set-up they couldn’t figure out how. They ended up sucking away valuable resources to try to make the effort legible and safe for their legal and financial teams.
The project ran for two weeks before it collapsed under the overwhelming need and lack of institutional support. It became dangerous. The last morning I was there I put out two fires started by a disgruntled resident. While I stamped out the second fire in a garbage can, a family screamed for me to come help a man who had overdosed in their bathroom. While I gave him CPR and injected him with doses of narcan, I tried to get the other residents to call 911. They would not for fear of the police. Another volunteer eventually came looking for me and called the paramedics. The man died while I was pumping his chest.
Later that morning I went door to door with two other volunteers to explain that the volunteer support for the occupation was ending and advised everyone to leave. Residents were sad but not surprised. Many said they’d just stay until the police came to evict them. It was what would happen anyway, they figured, if they returned to camps on the Greenway. The first wave of residents left the hotel that afternoon, but it was more than a month and half before police cleared out the last people. When it was finally empty, the hotel was completely wrecked.
Most of the residents moved to a public park two blocks away. Within a week there were almost a thousand people in the park, and hundreds more were setting up in parks across the city. In early July, homeless encampments in public parks were legalized for the first time ever in Minneapolis. This put the scale of the homelessness crisis into clear view of the city's richest residents who lived on the streets surrounding the parks. Overnight, thousands of property owners were radicalized into fierce advocates for homeless people.
But colonized concepts of charity are bigger, stronger and more powerful than the Sheraton hotel witness or the public park encampment victory. In other words, colonization is still dominant. It will take many tries, bursts of commitment, and greater capacity to decolonize our charity.
With thousands of people back on the streets waiting for the market to offer solutions, the victories of this summer feel like they were consumed by the interests of private property. But I think the Sheraton and the parks will serve as breakpoint away from that model. This summer gave the leaders of the next occupation more experience, and gave the community a greater capacity. We will remember what solidarity charity felt like.
*****
In the modern telling of the nativity story the inns are all empty, but the rooms are closed tighter than ever to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The streets and shelters are the mangers. These are dangerous and overflowing with holy families, wise travelers, and out-of-work shepherds. Instead of a holy night in the manger, these people take holy action to occupy the vacant inn. Meanwhile, the innkeeper calls the police to evict them.
Will we bring gifts of charity for the holy people when they are evicted back to the mangers, and celebrate the humbleness of their settings? Or will we join their holy work to open the inn and make it a home?
