ACROSS THE RIVER: BRIDGING CONVERSATIONS | KIM JORGENSEN GANE | Candidate for Michigan State Senate

KIM JORGENSEN GANE is a midwestern mom, a speaker, author and activist community leader; a democrat, running for State Senate in Michigan’s District 20. For this candidacy, she leads with an approach of ‘care’, informed by her deep connection and understanding of the place she has lived most of her life and its complex politics. She brings her ‘every mom’ passion to issues of class, gender and race in her still deeply segregated state, helping the public connect to their values, stories and lived experiences with how they vote.

Transcript

ACROSS THE RIVER | BRIDGING CONVERSATIONS

Kim Jorgensen Gane | Candidate for Michigan State Senate

S2 EPISODE 5: TRANSCRIPT  May 22, 2022

[00:00:00] Kim: 

"I love this place and I love the people in it. I have made friends across the river and had to make great effort to do that. I was raised to, I think, unsee the differences, to unsee that there were people right across the river who were having a very different experience because of where they grew up versus where I grew up. And, my gosh, that's just chance. If we could only sit down together and have conversations. I know that there are people who are voting in ways that are going to cause them to struggle more. I wish that we could experience radical collaboration to make it better for all of us." 

[00:00:50] Nina: I'm Nina Freedman. And this is WHEREING. WHEREING explores where we are. It is dedicated to those who believe in the inherent right of belonging and all the ways we feel we belong, and connect to ourselves, to each other, and the spaces that hold the stories where all of this comes alive. Where each experience of belonging is a work of art created by chance or by design. Dare I ask, is belonging where you are not what matters most? WHEREING is the spatial story. Welcome.

Kim Jorgensen Gane is a Midwestern mom, a speaker, author, and community leader; a Democrat, running for State Senate in Michigan's District 20. For this candidacy, she leads with an approach of care, informed by her deep connection and understanding of the place she has lived most of her life, and it's very complex politics. She brings her 'every mom' passion to issues of class, gender, and race in her still deeply segregated state, helping the public connect their values, stories, and lived experiences with how they vote.

Kim. I'm really excited to speak with you today. 

[00:02:12] Kim: Thank you so much for having me, Nina. It's wonderful to be here. 

[00:02:16] Nina: It's really my pleasure. So, Kim, your story and your current run for Senate in Michigan is embedded in your experience of living in an area of two coastal communities which are separated by a river. Can we begin with you describing these two places?

[00:02:36] Kim: Of course. I was born and raised in St. Joseph, and Benton Harbor is our twin city. People who have been here forever still remember, that we are the twin cities. St. Joseph, Michigan is in the Southwest corner of the lower peninsula, Berrien county. We are right across the lake from Chicago. The region in general is a bedroom community of Chicago. We get a lot of visitors from Chicago, and there are a lot of second home owners. Their work is centered in Chicago. They spend their weekends, chunks of the summer holidays here, and not just St. Joseph, but in all the surrounding communities. It is a beautiful place on the lake. Lake Michigan feels like an ocean. You can't see the other side. My community is largely white and affluent. Across the river, Benton Harbor, is predominantly black and suffers from disinvestment, disparity and inequity.

[00:03:39] Nina: Was it always that way? 

[00:03:40] Kim: No, no. Benton Harbor used to be the bustling, city center. There are beautiful mansions that are still standing, along Pipestone and Benton Harbor and other parts of the city. Some of them have suffered over the years from disrepair and neglect, and some of them have been fixed up and preserved and made magnificent again. It was the manufacturing center of our area. Michigan is a big auto manufacturing state. And so, the auto industry heavily influences so much of what has happened here. So goes the auto industry, eventually, so is going to go much of the state of Michigan, Chicago, Gary, Indiana. Besides just being impacted by the auto industry, our economy here is also very heavily influenced by the seasons, a lot of tourism and service industry. As manufacturing dried up, the service industry and tourism really grew. The lake is such an influential part of life here. 

[00:04:48] Nina: Your seasonal economy, is in the summer mainly, right? 

[00:04:52] Kim: Yes. Summertime, is the high season when most of the people visit, and our population grows exponentially. 

[00:05:00] Nina: So, you were saying that the economy at one time was very strong in Benton Harbor. Right. And, then the auto industry started to dry up, and this changed the nature of the city and the economy. Looking back at that time, you're saying now St. Joseph's is very white and Benton Harbor is predominantly black, when it was a manufacturing community, when it was economically strong. There's been changes back and forth. What was that history?

[00:05:30] Kim: So, I remember when I was a little girl, downtown Benton Harbor was still a bustling city center. There were two theaters on Main Street. JC Penny, Sears, and Roebuck was downtown Benton Harbor. That's where we went to get our school clothes. But it was shifting, things were changing. The rust belt, before it moved to places like China and other parts of the world, it moved down south first, for cheaper labor. So, things were shifting at that time and things were shifting racially very much at that time, too. My aunt, who was in her eighties, she graduated from Benton Harbor High School. At that time, Benton Harbor High School was very mixed. By the time my dad, who is 75 went to high school, he was able to choose whether he wanted to go to Benton Harbor or he wanted to go to St. Jo, and he chose to go to St. Joseph High School. So, that's where my parents met, was at St. Joseph High School, high school sweethearts. Both of my parents, my brother and I graduated from St. Joseph High School. And all four of my children ended up graduating from St. Joseph High School. It's a little sappy and sweet. This is a very small town. But back in the day, St. Jo was the smaller town, more rural. Benton Harbor was very much the thriving city center. Now, I would call St. Joseph more suburban. We do have a city center. It is the county seat, Berrien county. But it's a small town. The downtown area, really the main part of it, comprises three blocks. But, we have these spectacular beaches. That's the attraction. It's both a blessing and a struggle to make it through the whole year. The businesses who survive have to start over every spring. It's hard to be a small business that relies on tourism, that also relies on the weather, and our weather is becoming less and less predictable. So, it's challenging besides how racialized everything is here, because there are such distinct differences in our communities. When you are raised in this place, everything is racialized. 

[00:07:51] Nina: Tell me a little more, how that experience is perceived, because you say one is a white community. One is now a black community, and then you have the river, in between. So, there's my side of the river. There's your side of the river. And the river is this rupturing fracture, between the two. How has that actually perceived? You just know about it, or do you have to interact between the two?

[00:08:17] Kim: That's such a fair question, how do the communities relate to one another? Yeah. It is different, I would say for everyone. There are people who wish to maintain the segregation. Michigan still is a very segregated state in many ways. And in fact, the Midwest in general. You know, Wisconsin is a state that has very segregated areas still. But, I would say from my experience being someone who's born and raised in St. Joseph, we lived for a couple of years when I was a child in a Southwest Chicago suburb. So, I did see, when I was a child, that there were places that were different than where I grew up. I had a very idyllic childhood. Of course, it depends on how old you are as to what your experience growing up would be. People who are older, like my aunt, their experience growing up in Benton Harbor was I'm sure in many ways, just as idyllic as my experience growing up in St. Joseph. Benton Harbor is a very proud city. They are every bit as passionate about their city and their community as I am about mine. And, I get a little emotional. The children, in some cases are hungry. You know, COVID, as hard as it was on affluent families, families who are doing fine, families who are going to good public schools. I can't even imagine how much harder it was on communities that are not well-funded that have been subjected to decades of strategic disinvestment, because we are so different, and because it could be disinvested in. So, it just depends on when you grew up there and when you grew up here, and something that I have come to understand, as I have made friends across the river and had to make great effort to do that, to get to know and to come to love the Benton Harbor community, is to understand that they don't all exist in a monolith, right. Everyone has their own personal experiences, their own personal family dynamics, their own personal experience of living and growing up there. For me, being raised in St. Joseph, I was raised to, I think, unsee the differences, to unsee that there were people right across the river who were having a very different experience because of where they grew up versus where I grew up. And, my gosh, that's just chance. For everything that has harmed people who live and grow up in the city of Benton Harbor, my community benefited, because when those funds are not put into their community, they are being put into my community. But, you're not raised to see that when you're right next to it, you know, you're raised to think things like people choose their conditions. 

[00:11:25] Nina: People don't think about it. 

[00:11:26] Kim: Or, people just don't think about it. Absolutely. 

[00:11:30] Nina: And, they don't think that it actually affects them. It really does. 

[00:11:34] Kim: Yeah. You know, I had my daughter when I was 20. I raised her alone for the first six years of her life. I had white skin. I had an excellent public school education. I had parents who were connected, and because my parents were connected, a job opportunity. And still, I was suicidal as a young single mom, because it was just that hard. Had my communities talked to each other, I might've found a community in Benton Harbor of other single moms whose experiences were very similar to my experience, except that they didn't have so many of those automatic benefits that I had. I might've found community with them and I might have felt less alone. That's just one way that I can understand that our separateness impacts and hurts me too. I feel like it certainly did then. That seems to be what I'm called to do, is to bring my communities together.

[00:12:33] Nina: Before, when you were starting to get emotional Kim, I know that comes from a very deep place, and it's probably the fuel for the work that you're embarking on right now. Why did you get so emotional?

[00:12:48] Kim: Yeah. I had two boys graduate in 2021. It was so hard, the remote learning thing. And mind you, we are very well set up in our household. We have great broadband. They have every opportunity mechanically, to have succeeded in school. The emotion comes from feeling like my boys were robbed of so much because of COVID, but knowing that they never went hungry. It's that I have been hungry before. I have been in a place where I was worried about keeping a roof over my daughter's head and keeping food on our table and worried about daycare. Essential workers during COVID, how did they find daycare? The daycares were closing just like the schools were closing, and people still had to go to work. So, I do get emotional. It's that things were hard enough for me with every advantage, and knowing that they were so much harder for so many other people.

[00:13:56] Nina: You got emotional when you were talking about the racialism. Yeah. And I feel like what you're saying is that with all of the privileges and benefits that you had access to, the experience of past deprivation, when you were a single mom, and the deprivation that so many people had during COVID reignited that understanding that the people right across the river live this way all the time. 

[00:14:26] Kim: Oh yeah. Yes. Many of them do.

[00:14:29] Nina: This is Nina Friedman. We are listening to Kim Jorgensen Gane who is running for Michigan State Senate. 

That racialism that you're talking about, that deprivation, that disinvestment, and during the pandemic, how much harder it must have been for them. I understand. Because I know you come to this work through your experience as a mother, right? 

[00:14:54] Kim: Most definitely. 

[00:14:55] Nina: Can you expand on this approach to your campaign, to run for Senate coming from that place of motherhood? 

[00:15:05] Kim: Yeah. Well, for me it has felt like the work of caring. And, that's whether you're talking about being a caregiver at home of your own kids, being a caregiver of a disabled or an elderly family member, being a caregiver as a teacher in public schools, being a caregiver as someone who provides childcare. All of those sectors are undervalued in our community, in our country. There are parents who only get six weeks after giving birth. Well, if you have a c-section, you're not even supposed to drive yet. The work of caring doesn't have an economic place in Michigan's balance sheet or in America's balance sheet. It is just erased. It's not just the moms that suffer for that. It's our husbands and our sons. If you have four children and you're taking four unpaid leaves, unless you are fortunate enough to be salaried employee working for a big corporation that can afford to provide such benefits, every time you're sliding back. You're always trying to make up for what you've lost. It's terribly challenging for lower middle-class families and low income working families. For people who are single, who don't have any family, it's just them. Running for office it's all of those things. Michigan actually has a huge budget surplus right now. We have this one time opportunity to decide how to spend this budget surplus. We have Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and she is progressive. She has made national news. I sat in on the budget call yesterday for Southwest Michigan and the things that she wants to do with that budget surplus. It is all about supporting low income families and middle-class families, and investing in public schools. You know, Michigan is the home of Betsy Devos. Betsy Devos was our Education Secretary. I use air quotes. We knew Betsy Devos here. We knew Mike Pence here, because he was the Governor of Indiana. St. Joseph is not far from the Northwest Indiana border. In fact, my community gets Northwest Indiana news. We don't even get Michigan news. So, you put it together with Michigan being such a key state when the electoral maps come out. When you then put that together with how so much of the experience of growing up, where I have grown up is racialized, and so much of Trump's administration was racialized, and in my view, and in many people's view, was very much backlash for having had President Obama, the first black president of the United States. There are a whole lot of dots connecting about what the battle is that we are involved in right now. That battle is against equity. And, it's not just against racial equity, it's against gender equity too. Being someone who spent time as a stay at home mom, but who has also been a working mom. Also, we owned a restaurant in downtown Benton Harbor in fact. At that time, I was dealing with the seasonal business, parenting early teen girls, and my husband was traveling. He took a job in his field and it involved weekly travel. There were huge challenges around that. Each one of those experiences informs my desire to run for this office for State Senate in Michigan, District 20. It's because I've seen the best that we can be. And, I've also seen the worst that we can be. I know that because of caregivers not really existing in our economy, and therefore not existing politically, there has been sacrifice. I don't see that any of us are really thriving the way that we should be, because there is this huge hole in how we count. It's profound to me to understand that I was not raised to understand that my existence is political, but when you're raised in an African-American community, in a Latin X community, when you're raised facing bullying not feeling safe at school because you're LGBTQ plus, you understand that your existence is political, because it's been politicized your whole life. I think that I was raised to unsee all of that in so many ways. You know, my parents are products of their environment. It's not like they did it intentionally. It's just, that was the way it was. It was, don't make any waves, keep your benefits. We've earned them. We deserve them. Just go along to get along, don't rock the boat. I'm not good at that. I'm not good at not rocking the boat.

[00:20:17] Nina: You're very courageous.

[00:20:18] Kim: Well, it is really scary in this climate, but I believe so passionately. I love this place and I love all the people in it. There's a phrase that I've been using radical collaboration. If we could only sit down together and have these conversations, because I know that there are people who are voting in ways that are going to cause them to struggle more. I just wish that we could have those conversations. I wish that we could experience radical collaboration to make it better for all of us. 

[00:20:56] Nina: You want to take these two communities of St. Joe's and Benton Harbor and make it whole.

[00:21:04] Kim: Yeah. You know, even when we had our restaurant, it was always about bringing our community together. Our restaurant was a place where one could come in and feel welcomed.

[00:21:13] Nina: You bring that sense of caring into this run for Senate. In a few bullet points, what is your hope? How you might think about change? 

[00:21:24] Kim: My three main pillars of running are voting rights, reproductive rights and paid leave. My experience of the world tells me that without voting rights, we don't have any other rights. Without reproductive rights, we are not in control of our own lives and our family's lives. If we don't get to choose for our selves and our own experiences when, whether and with whom to grow our families, or to have families at all, we are not in control of our lives. And how powerful it is to be able to plan when you have your children. That is where our power actually lives. That is why those are the things that are under attack. 

[00:22:12] Nina: I've heard you talk about another big project that you'd like to start. Do you want to tell us about it? 

[00:22:19] Kim: I participated in a training focused on gender violence and racial violence. We were studying the wheel of barriers that people of color face that we were trying to understand, systemic barriers, and how frequently they run up against these barriers. I spoke out and I said, I have experienced many of those same barriers. And the facilitator said, well, of course you have. He said, we cannot hope to achieve gender equity without also healing racism. From that moment, gender equity and racial equity, those two things in radical collaborations, that has become my north star. So I can't unlearn that. I can't un-know that. I can't stop being aware of the ways that gender equity and racial equity bump up against each other and go hand in hand. So, my wish is to create a Civic Center for Gender and Racial Equity. I think this is a pretty magical place to do something like that. It's the continuation of work that I've been doing for a long time in a lot of different ways, but I feel like it would be a culmination in many ways of putting it all together because I feel like I've been trying to find my place. I know that geographically, it is this place. I really feel like it is my spiritual home. But, I just feel like to give a home to people who care about these things, a home to learn how these things impact our political and economic power as individuals, as families, as working people and as caregiving people, I feel like it would help bring so many things together.

[00:24:10] Nina: That's beautiful, Kim ,I can see it happening. 

[00:24:14] Kim: I can too!

[00:24:15] Nina: If people want to help you in your campaign, how would they go about it? How do people contact you? What do you need? 

[00:24:23] Kim: Oh my goodness. I can be emailed at Kim at friends of K J G kim@friendsofkjg.com. That's probably the best way to reach me, but you can find me on Twitter @kimgane. G A N E spelled like my last name, Kim Gane, G A N E possible. My weakest link is asking for money and it's a hard thing for everyone, but I bet you, I'm going to get a heck of a lot better at it . We can't do any of this work without campaign funds. You have to buy literature, signs. You need people power. So money is an unavoidable part of running for office. 

[00:25:14] Nina: On the WHEREING website we're going to provide the link www.friendsofkjg.com where you can also donate. So, if you're interested, please look there, everything will be there. It's an easy access link that you can just push, and you'll find it. 

[00:25:30] Kim: Awesome. 

[00:25:31] Nina: Before we close, is there anything else that you wanted to say? 

[00:25:33] Kim: Just to thank you so much for having me and being willing to have this conversation. They're very necessary conversations. But, they're not easy conversations, by any stretch. We can't make anything better unless we face the truth and be honest. That's not villainizing anyone. So much of us, just have no awareness. It's just not anything we ever had to think about. What my least favorite thing my husband says, if I've made a meal, it was fine. I hate fine. Fine is not the same as good. And how to be good, how to make Michigan work better for all of us. That's my goal.

[00:26:12] Nina: Thank you Kim so much for your time today, and I really wish you so much success in your upcoming Senate campaign, and then, in building the Civic Center for Gender and Racial Equity.

[00:26:24] Kim: Thank you so much. 

[00:26:26] Nina: You're welcome.

Dear listeners. Thank you for being here. I invite you to reflect on what you've heard today and send your thoughts or stories. We would love to hear from you. Stay in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website, thewhereing.com . Subscribe free to WHEREING wherever you get your podcasts so that you are alerted when the next episode airs. WHEREING is a pro bono initiative of Dreamland Creative Projects, which provides architectural and interior design services for the places where we live, heal, age and inspire. If you wish to have a design consultation, visit dreamlandcreativeprojects.com or email me nina@dreamlandcreativeprojects.com. Until we meet again, goodbye from WHEREING.