We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steve Slocum. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steve below.
Alright, Steve thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
Right after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992, I took my family of five to the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan to serve as Christian missionaries. We lived for five years as guests in a Muslim culture. The people were wonderfully hospitable and kind to us – we fell in love with them. This experience would plant a seed of awareness about my colonizing culture.
Fast forward to the 2016 presidential campaign. Many of the Republican candidates had discovered the effectiveness of the fear of Muslims as a campaign platform. None more than Donald Trump. During that time, anti-Muslim sentiment in the US rose to higher levels than in the months just after 9/11. Several hate crimes targeting Muslims took place right here in San Diego.
I grew tired of the never ending narrative in the news, and in television dramas and movies, and I decided it was time to speak up on behalf of my Muslim friends and present an alternate narrative, the narrative I had lived while living as a guest in Kazakhstan. My book, Why Do They Hate Us? Making Peace with the Muslim World, was named a top book of 2019 by Kirkus and Booklist, and a silver medalist in the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.
In parallel, I founded my nonprofit, SalaamUSA with the mission of creating friendship and mutual understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims, and fired up an event series of awareness events, mosque visits, friendship dinners, and community circles.
Early in 2020, with Salaam’s in-person event schedule in full swing, the COVID lockdown forced a complete shutdown. I was holed up in my temporary living quarters trying to figure out what to do next. Should I wait this out? Should I utilize a video platform for our cross-cultural meeting series? At the same time wondering if I or one of my loved ones would get COVID and die. The only thing that seemed to make sense was to write. I began journaling and blogging as a mechanism for coping with my fears and with the unknown.
On May 25, 2020, my writing and social media posting were interrupted by disturbing imagery that seemed to be going viral. It seemed that another black man had been murdered by the police in the city of Minneapolis. At one point a chilling video emerged. One of the bystanders had pulled out their cell phone and captured a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd. Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, hands in pockets staring coldly and directly into the cameras that were filming him as he calmly choked the life out of George Floyd.
Along with much of white America, I would never be the same. In a moment, I suddenly realized that the decades of Black history I had barely paid attention to (because slavery had ended, after all), were critically important.With time on my hands, I read the books, attended the webinars, followed black voices on social media, and started to absorb a version of history that was as mind blowing for me as it was real.
It wasn’t long before my appetite for this alternate version of history dovetailed into Native American history. My mind was expanding, and it was snowballing. I realized that this issue non-Muslim Americans had with Muslims was only one facet of white American racism, something Dr Todd Green, author of The Fear of Islam, has been saying for a long time.”
As a result, Salaam pivoted. We expanded our mission to address the root cause of white American racism in our postcolonial white culture. At the same time we decided to focus our efforts on our local region – the Kumeyaay – Tijuana – San Diego borderland region.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Our program is geared towards helping people of privilege become aware of their privilege and then give them practical steps and real opportunities to do something about making our communities more equitable. It’s not enough to be aware. We want to motivate and activate effective allies for underserved and marginalized groups to work together for much-needed societal change.
I am most proud of the hundreds of people we have brought together in the San Diego area across various human boundaries who would likely never have come together. It’s very satisfying sitting back and watching all the lovely conversations taking place at our events. I’m excited about 2023 as we launch our critical awareness program, where we’ll give the floor to BIPOC educators to teach us about historical and present-day realities in the lived experiences of Indigenous, Latinx, and African-American residents of this region. We have some great teachers lined up and a lot of interest, so we think it’s going to be transformative.
Creating something like this has been very rewarding but at the same time very draining. It’s not like inviting people to a party. It’s taken a lot of energy on my part to get folks out to our events. A handful of people are adventurous socially but most of us would prefer to surround ourselves with our comfort group. We had some good momentum going and then of course the pandemic showed up and shut down our in-person events series. I had pushed myself about to the limit at this point and being in lockdown was difficult. I considered many times shutting down the nonprofit and just doing things that normal people do. But when the George Floyd murder took place and I watched a wave of awareness roll across America, I felt reenergized by the energy of this wave and how many people were reading books, taking workshops, beginning to understand white privilege, and wanting to get involved to concretely change things.
Lessons learned? I think first of all I’ve come to understand how many blind spots I have related to my privilege. This causes me to slow down, and to listen. We’ve made it a priority to have a diverse and fully inclusive board of directors and we brought on board a DEI consultant to help us with our language and our mission and values such that when people of color read them, they feel like it’s something they can get behind, and not just another white guilt/white savior organization. And we are working hard to create inclusivity not just in our language but in our organizational DNA. We want Salaam’s DNA coding for traits that are fully equitable and inclusive across the full spectrum of diversity.
What I want the world to know about us is that we are here to facilitate bringing our communities together. We know it can be hard to go somewhere where we know we’ll be in an uncomfortable social setting and where we don’t know anyone. We’ll make that easier. We have training, events, icebreakers and exercises to help groups of people who don’t know each other get to know each other in a fun way. We find that once the ice is broken, people have such a good time making new friends from other cultural backgrounds.
We also want folks to know that we want to go beyond awareness and even friendship to allyship and action. We want to serve alongside BIPOC leaders and help do the work that will result in fundamental structural change and make our San Diego communities equitable for all.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I’ve made a lot of major pivots over the years. I’m a big fan of neuroplasticiy. By far the biggest pivot, if you can call a 180° turn a pivot, was when I extracted myself from evangelical Christianity. I fell into the scene in my late adolescence during the Jesus movement. I was drawn to the sold-out commitment to what seemed at the time to be a good cause. It gave my life meaning. I went all in. I took a break from my engineering studies and went to Bible school for two years, then after starting my family, left my engineering career and took my family to live for five years in Kazakhstan as missionaries in the 90s..
This would be the beginning of a shift, a change in my brain. My exposure over a long period of time to a culture so very different from my own had a powerful effect. Even though I went there as a Christian colonizer, albeit unwittingly, little by little I began to see the beauty of the indigenous Kazakh people and their culture, and began to feel uneasy about imposing my Americanness on them. This uneasiness never went away. In fact it kept getting worse. I managed to get myself kicked off of two missionary teams, mostly because of wanting to spend my time with Kazakhs rather than Americans, and for working hard to preserve their cultural norms and practices.
It finally came apart not long after I returned to the states in the late 90s and saw the trajectory of evangelicals as more of a political movement than than what it was when I signed up. Extraction was difficult. I had built my entire life around this belief system and taken it to its limits – where I indeed found its limit. Nothing made any sense to me. How could I have been so wrong and how could I have bought into this perception of reality so deeply? I didn’t trust myself to know what was even real. Of course I had no friends I was in church people and I didn’t even know how to be in the everyday world when I wasn’t surrounded by Christians other than to try to convert anyone I met who wasn’t on my team.
I went from being a rockstar missionary to an outcast reprobate. It was a difficult transition. For about 10 years I didn’t read any books because I was afraid I would fall for some other new way of thinking. I wanted to go about reconstructing my concept of reality in a way that felt safe. I began sitting on the floor for hours and taught myself how to meditate. Along with meditation was a lot of observation and contemplation. Little by little, I began to rebuild my perception of what was real. I’ve landed on an approach that focuses more on what I can and do know, and less on what I never know. I’ve developed a love for science – microbiology, wildlife biology, neuroscience, systems theory, the science of collectives, and so many other things. Life is making a little more sense to me now.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
I would have to say the number one thing for me was authenticity. I have been authentic and vulnerable in telling my story about how I was so wrong and my process for beginning to become aware of my issues and changing. I continue to do this in my inclusion and antiracism work, and it seems to resonate with a lot of people. Another thing that helped was having an award-winning book. Writing my book was 10 times harder and more expensive than I thought. I put a lot of work into it to make it a credible contribution and that really paid off.
The third thing is focusing on action. When it comes to antiracism, there’s a lot of talk about it, but when we listen to people of color, they want action. Action that leads to societal change. So we focus on action. Embodied learning about privilege. Active connection with people outside of our own culture. And boots on the ground activism in support of BIPOC leaders and activists. For example, after the mosque shootings in New Zealand, I organized an event that brought San Diego Muslims together with a large group of non-Muslims at St. Paul’s Cathedral downtown. It was a wonderful show of solidarity with our Muslim community members in a difficult time. It was covered live by several local news stations.
Finally, I’m not gonna lie, unless you already have a big reputation and following as a celebrity of some kind, you’ve got to pay to play. PR and promotion is not cheap I’ve spent quite a bit of my own money getting the word out, and been lucky enough to have appeared on KTLA morning news and CBS News 8. The goodness of good things is amplified when more people hear about it. So I make sure to budget for this important element of nonprofit work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.salaamusa.org, www.steveslocum.com
- Instagram: @salaam_usa, @steveslocumauthor
- Facebook: @salaamusa.org
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/78454244
Image Credits
Gabriel Patterson