23  SIGNPOSTS

WHEN WE MOVED INTO OUR HOUSE around the corner from the apartment complex where we used to live, I put up a sign in the front yard that said, No Matter Where You’re From, We’re Glad You Are Our Neighbor, in three different languages: English, Spanish, and Arabic. My motives, as ever, were mixed. I wanted to love others in a way that is easy and still makes me feel good. I’m the type of person who loves to display my values on a sign in front of the house—a house I could afford to buy in part because of my privileged position in society.

Our neighborhood is a microcosm of the way our cities are going, the next wave of gentrification. Places like Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have attracted throngs of tech workers and wealthy businesses, inviting them to “revitalize” and reclaim the urban cores of cities. As more people move in, drawn to amenities like walkability and art and culture, the rents have raised accordingly. Lower-income folks, those who work the service jobs that prop up a city, are pushed farther and farther out. Since these workers can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in, they’re pushed into the surrounding suburbs—places that were never intended for them but are still more affordable than the city center And now, as the wealthy work to revitalize the urban core, the property values of just a few decades prior are turned upside down, the low-income folks finding themselves with no option but to live in what remains, a place that was never intended for them: the suburbs.

White flight, or the phenomenon of White people leaving the inner core of the cities to the suburbs, is a relatively well-known phenomenon. But now, as the city continues to be seen as more desirable—indeed, as Christians have started to declare God’s love for the city and God’s desire to “reclaim” the cities—the reverse trend is happening, what has been called “the great inversion.”1

For the first time in US history, the majority of poor people in metropolitan regions live in the suburbs. This has of course disproportionately affected people of color and people who have lived in generational poverty in the United States, but it has also affected another population: immigrants and to a lesser extent refugees, who used to be resettled in the urban core where rents were cheap. Now, they almost always move to the suburbs, the only places where rent is affordable.

This is where I live, now. The apartment buildings in my own neighborhood are filled to the brim with people of color displaced from North Portland, with immigrant and White families trying to squeak by. The houses, many of them built in the 1950s, still are mostly owned by White people; older folks who are trying to sell now that the market is good and the demographics have shifted. The homeowners, people who have been here for a long time, are not necessarily happy about the changes they’ve seen in the past few decades as low-income families have streamed into the neighborhood. There’s tension in the air, in the streets, in the school—palpable but still mostly underground.

When I first put my sign up in the yard, I felt a bit nervous. How would people react? I wasn’t surprised when a few months after we put the sign up in our yard it was purposely run over by a car. Bent and dirty, it was still usable, and I felt a grim satisfaction as I stuck it back in the yard, proud of my tolerance. A few weeks later and it was gone—it had been stolen. Who had done this? I tried to imagine what sort of person would steal a welcome sign. In my mind’s eye the thief was someone I didn’t like, someone I feared slightly. But this someone, I realized, was also my neighbor. How was I supposed to learn to love them when a simple welcome sign was perceived as a threat?

At a recent neighborhood association meeting I attended, an older White woman asked a police officer why they didn’t do more about the “bad” people who were committing crimes. The officer admitted that they were understaffed and overwhelmed. This woman declared that our neighborhood needed more police officers and that if it was up to her, she would “take care of” the bad guys. When she said this, this old woman, wearing a pastel-colored sweater, her head full of white hair, made her fingers into the shape of a gun and pantomimed shooting somebody. The police officer shook his head ruefully and laughed. I gasped and a few heads swiveled around to look at me. “That’s a pretty hard-core approach,” the police officer said, “but I see where you’re coming from.” Later, he told the room of neighborhood residents that if he had his dream wish, they would expand the jails and open up a thousand more beds to keep more people inside. I felt small and hysterical, longing for a world where we had more imagination to think beyond guns and jail cells for the troubles of our world. I looked around the room, waiting for someone to contradict these narratives. Nobody else spoke up, and my own voice felt silenced by fear and despair.

In that room, a room set up for us to talk about our community, one of my neighbors wanted to kill some of my other neighbors. What would Jesus have me do in this situation? How do you love your neighbors when some of them have had fear curdle their hearts, when violence appears to them to be the best solution? What do you do when some of that despair and anger starts to rub off on you?

My friend Zeynab called me one day and told me to come to her apartment. When I got there, it was warm, both from something bubbling on the stove and from the five of us in her small apartment—my friend, her three children, and me. Zeynab laughed nervously and twisted her headscarf in her fingers. She wanted to tell me something. Earlier that day, she said, when she was coming back from English class with two of her children, she had been spat on by a man in a car.

I was shocked and expressed my dismay and sorrow. She laughed again, waving her hands. I am fine, she told me. She was waiting to cross the busy intersection that separated the bus stop from her apartment building. She was yards away from safety, the rental apartment that she has turned into a haven for her family. She told me that the man had yelled at her, waving his arms, hitting his steering wheel, his face red. He told her to go back home, several times.

Neither of us said anything, but I wonder if Zeynab was thinking it: if only she could go home. If only her home was safe for her and her family. But it wasn’t, and she was here, which also wasn’t safe. Zeynab brushed off all of my questions and dismissed my desire to report the incident. Instead, she told me a story. Allah, she said, plants all sorts of vegetation in the jungle, both good plants and bad plants, and they are in every country in the world, both her first country and in this place, her new country. Both good plants and bad plants, together they grow everywhere, you cannot have a world with just one kind.

The man in the car must not understand the Christian religion, she told me, because Miriam (Mary), the mother of Jesus, wore a headscarf. And if Mary wore a headscarf, why would Zeynab’s headscarf be so upsetting to him? I listened to Zeynab laugh off her pain and fear. I listened to the stories she told to make sense of a world that was rarely safe for her. She was my teacher that day, a theologian explaining a faith that had been forged in the crucible of a world that was intent on crushing her, pushing her out, destroying her home, and then insisting she go back to it.

She told me she was not afraid, that she was fine, but I could tell otherwise. For weeks afterward she stayed inside her apartment instead of taking the bus to English class. But that man and his fear and hatred did not keep her down for long. Within a month I saw her again, crossing the street with her children clutching her hands, bound and determined to be a good seed no matter where God chose to plant her.

I now try to be more aware of power as I walk through my neighborhood and as I pray over the people. I try to be aware of who is afraid and where that fear is coming from: Are they afraid of their power being taken away, or do they fear for their safety? I try to address the thump of fear in my own heart as I hear stories of hatred. I try to pay attention to the anguish I feel instead of rushing to give into anger, despair, and cynicism. I try to lament, as best as I am able. I walk past Confederate flags and looming developments of high-priced condos, past needles on the ground and people screaming at each other. It’s a discipline to remember that God is present, that God is love, even in those moments.

When I’m with Zeynab, I listen to her share her stories. There’s no way to make the world a truly safe place for her, no way to flip the structures of the world on their head and put her at the top, with all the power. All I can do is listen, be present, let her be my host and my educator. I can begin to unlearn my desire to fix every problem quickly and efficiently. I can learn to be sad with someone as a manifestation of neighbor love.

Mark Charles once pointed out how a popular sign for progressives made him upset. This sign is in the style and colors of an American flag. It says, “In our America: All people are equal. Love wins. Black lives matter. Immigrants and refugees are welcome,” and on and on. Charles, a member of the Navajo nation who has done significant research on the doctrine of discovery as it relates to Christian theology and the treatment of indigenous people in the United States, says that the fundamental problem with the sign is that it isn’t true. The America where people are all equal, where love wins, where Black lives are treated as equally under the law as White lives, where policies and procedures exist to welcome immigrants and refugees into our country in ways they deserve—it’s all a fantasy. And simply declaring it to be true doesn’t change this.2

I know this because of my experiences in my own neighborhood and the stories carefully shared with me. What does it mean to put up a sign that speaks to a longing for another world? I think it is a place to start, but not the end goal. What we want is the imagination to believe in heaven coming down to earth, in God’s will being done to our neighbors, to shalom being experienced by those who have and are suffering the most. And this will not happen until we change the systems that actually created and uphold the way the United States works, the way America actually is, and until we own it as our own. Deeply flawed, full of promise—if it is to ever be any good, then we will have to listen to those people who have been forced to perfect the democracy, as Nikole Hannah Jones says: the Black and indigenous and immigrant and LGBTQ+ and poor voices that have struggled to fight for their rights, to fight for the America that is supposedly good for all.3

After Zeynab told me about the man who spat on her, I walked around the corner to my house wishing as usual that I could make the world a better place with my good intentions and my own two hands. A few days later my neighbor across the street called out to me. He has a gentle demeanor and a large mustache; on Christmas Eve his family hosts elaborate parties, complete with large white tents and mariachi bands. His family is part of the small but growing number of non-White homeowners in our neighborhood. They are the kind of neighbors who keep to themselves, always smiling and waving. But this day my neighbor called out to me, so I went over to talk to him.

“Did you take your sign down?” he asked me. “Because I really liked it.” Confused, I tilted my head. “The sign, in your front yard. Did you take it down?” I suddenly remembered. “No,” I told him, “somebody stole it.” He looked at me and squinted. “Oh,” he said. “Well, I liked it. As soon as you put it up I knew we could trust you.”

I remembered how nervous I felt about putting that sign up, the anger and cynicism that flared in me when it was vandalized and then taken for good. But I hadn’t considered that it might do what it actually purported to do: that it could be a sign of welcome, that it could make even one person or family feel just the tiniest bit safer. I immediately went online, ordered another sign, and put it back up in my yard, where it stands to this day. If and when it gets taken, I will buy another one and another one, until the good Lord calls us to another home, either in this world or the next.

When someone tells you that the little flare you sent out into the world, hoping to find connection and true peace, hoping to find places of God’s love and hospitality in the world, became a spark in the dark night sky for them, you take it seriously. It’s never enough, of course. But it is a part of cultivating a holy imagination. A sign as a means of connecting to others, of tendrils going out to cultivate a good garden, of looking for others to partner with in the business of contributing to a flourishing neighborhood. When someone tells you that these signs mean something, then you keep sending up those flares until all of God’s children one day are welcomed as neighbors with joy and gladness, until the sky is finally filled with that light.