Around New Year’s 2017, a community organizer named Chris Lambert leased a soon-to-be-empty school building for $1 in one of Detroit’s poorer African-American neighborhoods. The plan was to pour $5 million into remodeling the building, take on the $1-million-a-year operating expenses and turn the place into a vibrant hub for the surrounding community, with nonprofits, culinary training programs, after-school programs and artists.

Lambert did not communicate this well to the people who actually lived in the community.

When neighbors learned Lambert had acquired the building for a dollar, many wondered why a white outsider, not somebody from within the community, had gotten such a deal. They assumed that he was the cutting edge of gentrification, that he was going to pour money in and push the current folks out. This kind of outsider exploitation is the lived history for many Detroiters.

That month, Lambert hosted some community meetings to mollify fears. They did not go well. People called him a colonizer. They called his black colleagues Oreos. “This white guy is going to subject us to more slavery,” somebody declared.

Lambert wanted to argue back. But his black partner, Dwan Dandridge, advised him to just listen. It’s a hazing process, Dandridge told Lambert. You feel voiceless tonight. These people have felt voiceless their whole lives. Just listen.