This is a post about the lawsuit filed December 7, 2020, against Mireya Reith and the nonprofit she leads, Arkansas United.
Although I greatly respect many of the people who have represented AU since I’ve been paying attention, I believe this lawsuit is not just necessary — it’s overdue. Arkansas United and Mireya Reith are corrupted by the Walton money they accept, and the games they have to play to get that money.
The last time I wrote about how Walton money buys the silence of Latinx community leaders in northwest Arkansas, I had to file a police report because one of the women who worked for RootED swore she would light my tires on fire for writing what I did. She later resigned (and took the RootED board president along with her) and we repaired our relationship, but I’m hoping this time goes easier.
Bear with me while I rewind a little.
In 2017, Mireya Reith shared one of her early memories of political activism with Facing South. According to Reith, a US Senator (presumably Blanche Lincoln, another Walmart/Stephens Group-funded politician) once attempted to excuse her anti-immigration vote against the Dream Act by saying, “I can’t do anything if I’m not in office.”
Reith’s self-reported rebuke came quick and punchy: “With all due respect, Senator, you’re not doing anything for us in office.”
One year after the Facing South article, I met with Reith in her office at the Springdale headquarters of her nonprofit, Arkansas United. I didn’t know anything about Reith or AU. I was just there to ask Reith a specific question about her time as president of the State Board of Education (SBoE).
Reith answered my question on the record, told me she knew my blog, and said she was glad I was writing it. She said Jay Barth (another non-critic of the Waltons who took over as SBoE president when Reith left) had asked her about my work. Reith said she told Barth everything I wrote about northwest Arkansas was credible, since it matched what she heard from her own sources. However, Reith told me she couldn’t afford to be publicly associated with my work, since Arkansas United had recently gotten a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and my work is rooted in criticism of the Walton-funded education agenda.
Mireya Reith told me it took a while for her to start voting like a brown person on the State Board of Education, but she eventually grew into her voice as an advocate for the Latinx community in Arkansas. She also told me it was crucial that someone from her community should have a “seat at the table,” and that’s why she couldn’t take the risk of publicly supporting the work of someone like me. The Waltons would surely kick her out of the halls of power if they thought she was allied with someone who criticized their agenda.
Basically, Mireya Reith gave me the same excuse the Senator gave her: “I can’t do anything if I’m not in power.” Sadly, I did not come up with a pithy comeback. I trusted her to know–and do–what was necessary to be effective in advocating for underserved communities.
Arkansas is home to many enthusiastic activists who passionately commit themselves to building equitable, inclusive communities. However, the state’s major corporate employers tend to fire individuals who use their “free speech” to advocate for any position other than the company line. It is very taboo to criticize the pro-business, pro-assimilative/exploitative immigration, “profits before people” ideologies of the Walton, Stephens, Dillard, Tyson, Rockefeller, Hunt, and Hussman families. Therefore, in order to avoid career and character assassinations, most folks stay quiet and rarely support the few martyrs who speak out.
(Ask my ex-husband why we got divorced this week.)
In the vacuum created by corporate pressure not to tolerate individual activists, nonprofits spring up to fill the available space. Without much in the way of individual donations, nonprofits apply for grants funded by the very people who build and enforce the oppressive, racist, deadly systems that caused the “political” problems in the first place. That money comes with strings attached. Nonprofit workers promise certain “deliverables,” strategic silences (looking at you, Hunger Relief Alliance), and strategic alliances (*cough* Canopy NWA, RootED *cough*) in exchange for the right to earn a living, which is more than most activists can expect in Arkansas.
That’s where Mireya Reith and Arkansas United fit in. Yes, they advocated for the rights of DACA recipients to qualify for in-state tuition, and to become licensed as nurses. That was a meatball pitch even in Arkansas. But do they ever raise their voices against the abuse of H-1B visas by large employers in northwest Arkansas? Do they fight for the rights of immigrants to maintain their own cultural traditions freely, without any pressure to convert to the church of “God and Walmart“? Do they help immigrant workers organize unions in order to increase their labor protections while at work?
If Arkansas nonprofits actually did these things, they would surely lose their donor base.
Arkansas United, like all the rest of the corporate-funded nonprofits in Arkansas, dances the tune that the Waltons call. These exploitative business owners expect total assimilation to their version of Christianity and “corporate culture,” and require human beings to work without dignity or rest, for low wages, assigned more work than anyone can reasonably be expected to perform in a day. Their profit-oriented expectations attach themselves to the donations nonprofits receive, with demonstrably harmful results.
Now, a former employee of Arkansas United, is suing Arkansas United and Mireya Reith for harmful labor practices, including racism and retaliatory termination of an employee who raised concerns about the way Arkansas United applies for (and spends) its grant money.
The complaint holds space for additional co-plaintiffs, since other ex-employees have also filed grievances and have been speaking publicly about their harmful experiences working for Arkansas United.
Arkansas United, of course, denies the validity of these claims. Its board of directors says the lawsuit has “no merit.” AU’s public statement also says the board members “are not allowed to comment on the case.”
Makes you wonder: Who tells the board of Arkansas United and Mireya Reith what they may or may not do?
The board treasurer for Arkansas United is Alan Leveritt, who publishes Arkansas Times, a “centrist newspaper in a conservative state,” and El Latino, a Spanish-language news source in central Arkansas. Leveritt’s newspapers mislead the public by representing centrists (like Leveritt, who came to power within the Democratic Party of Arkansas from Libertarian roots) as progressives, thus destroying the integrity of the fundamental concept of an oppositional, competitive, two-party system supposedly at the heart of American politics.
Reading this lawsuit within the context of Leveritt’s power in Arkansas politics gives a chilling perspective to the ways in which Arkansas United uses backpack giveaways as a ruse to collect personal data from parents of school-aged children, and requires its workers to use contact lists from Crossroads Campaigns when attempting to fulfill the phone banking requirements of various grants. Arkansas United apparently operates as an extension of the corporate Democratic Party — not as a charitable service oranization, not as a community organization, and NOT as a membership organization (no matter what its paperwork says).
Wealthy philanthrocapitalists donate money to Arkansas United and other, similar nonprofits not just because they want to control nonprofits’ actions, proselytize for a particular ideology, or whitewash their own reputations. They also want access to the personal data that nonprofits collect so that they can manipulate the outcomes of bipartisan elections by playing both sides.
What the Waltons don’t want is for any of us to organize a system they can’t exploit. They use charitable donations to establish political, social, and narrative control, and to cover up their family’s moral and ethical bankruptcy going back generations.
If we believe corporate-funded nonprofits are working on our behalf, we become complacent. Our complacency leads to blind loyalty, which props up false idols like Mireya Reith and Arkansas United. Just as Reith is accused of manipulating, misleading, and taking advantage of her employees, Arkansas United manipulates, misleads, and takes advantage of the BIPOC communities it serves. Nevertheless, many of us (who would never wish this sort of harm on anyone we consider to be an ally) rely on AU to “do the work” so we don’t have to take the career/reputational risk of advocating on our own behalf.
By willfully ignoring the harm caused by these Walton-funded organizations, we allow them to insidiously assimilate BIPOC communities into the Waltons’ “capitalist” pyramid scheme, rather than challenging the predatory, destructive system itself.
Once again, we — as a nation — are expecting the “least among us” to sacrifice themselves in order to build the world we want to live in. And once again, it is only the wealthiest among us who really benefit.
Excellent. Thank you for your work.
My, my, my. If only we has independent thought. We have been blinded so long by the greed and dreams of having a piece of democracy that we have lost our way.
Thank you.