Demographic shifts and changing times in a community with strong traditions
Updated July 4, 2025
The documentary “Lynden” — which examines a 2020 racial justice march in the city and responses to it — has caused a stir in Whatcom County since it began showing at Bellingham’s Pickford Film Center last month.
The film was also shown at Western Washington University and, on Aug. 3, in Lynden itself, at the city’s public middle school. Some viewers on both sides of the political spectrum have been bothered by what the documentary has shown them of the side they disagree with, while others have criticized the 72-minute film without actually seeing it.
But four years after the events the film chronicles, how do the people of Lynden perceive their own community? And over time, how is it actually changing demographically?
A demographic shift
Lynden, like many communities, is becoming more racially diverse.
In the 2000 U.S. Census, 93% of Lynden residents described themselves as white. By 2020, that percentage was down to 80% as the city’s population surged from 9,500 to 16,000. Among nonwhites, just 0.27% of Lynden residents were Black or African-American in 2000. In 2020, nearly 1% of residents — still fewer than 200 people — fit that category. Most of the growth in nonwhite residents was among those identifying as Hispanic or Latino.
Between 2010 and 2020, Lynden also saw modest increases in the percentage of residents identifying as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, as well as those who are Hispanic or Latino. There were slight decreases in the number of Asian and Native American populations, according to the data.
Lynden resident Jeremy Dorrough — who appears in interview segments of the documentary — has watched the demographic shift in the Lynden area over the last few decades.
Dorrough, executive director until 2022 of the North Cascades branch of Youth With a Mission, a worldwide Christian missionary organization, is the director of Racial Unity Now (RUN), a local Christian nonprofit that formed in the wake of the 2020 events depicted in “Lynden.” RUN’s mission is to bridge gaps of understanding among racially-diverse community members. [Ed.: Corrected date of Durrough’s tenure at YWAM]
Dorrough said that demographic changes tie into the racialized tensions, misunderstandings and prejudices that communities like Lynden can experience.
“The community’s changing,” he said. “And people react when they think that their sense of community and identity is threatened.”
Dorrough wasn’t surprised to see counter-protesters at the racial justice march in 2020. That response included numerous armed individuals who showed up to “protect” the city from antifa — a notion he described as “absurd.”
“Some of the groups that organized were kind of county militia-type people that weren’t really from Lynden,” he said. “In some ways, a lot of that didn’t represent the actual residents of this township.”
Wylin Tjoelker — a conservative videographer with a strong presence in the documentary (and who provided footage to the film’s creators) — is a Whatcom County resident who has never actually lived in Lynden, Dorrough said.
Despite these caveats, Dorrough said he still personally knew people standing among those militia types.
“What was surprising was seeing good, decent people standing there next to them,” he said. “Church ministers, community leaders and government leaders that were also kind of caught up in this idea that leftist agitators [were] going to burn down our town.”
Matters of perspective
The events in the documentary had a particularly negative effect on some residents’ perception of their city, including Gracie Lamb.
Lamb and her husband moved to the Lynden area from Auburn a decade ago for their retirement. In 2020, she attended the racial justice rally as well as other racial unity events shown in the documentary, and can be glimpsed with a sign in one moment of the film.
Seeing the documentary, she said, was an almost PTSD-inducing experience that brought back uneasy feelings.
“That day completely changed my attitude towards Lynden,” Lamb said. “The veneer was off, and you saw what people were really like. I was just stunned.”
Lamb described counter-protesters’ behavior towards rally-goers — many of whom were minors — as threatening and rude. Knowing that many of those protestors were associated with local churches soured her so much on Christianity that she no longer considers herself to be one.
Although Lamb said she had thought the move to Lynden might be their last, she and her husband are thinking of moving back to the South Sound in the coming years to be closer to their daughter. While there are still things to like about the town, she said, it no longer feels as safe to her as it once did.
“It’s all because of what happened in 2020,” Lamb said. “It’s not the warm, cozy place it was when we moved here.”
Not all Lynden residents feel this way, including those who are part of minority populations.
Tarnjot Brar, a real estate agent, moved to Lynden in 2011 from India’s Punjab region.
He said ethnic populations seem to be growing in northern Whatcom County cities like Ferndale, Blaine and Lynden, especially for Hispanic and Indian people. Many Punjabis move to these places, he said, because the area is an ideal location for farming and is close to Canada, where a substantial Punjabi population lives just across the border.
Brar said has not personally experienced much discrimination, and generally feels accepted in the community.
“I have really good neighbors,” he said.
Some minorities, though, have experienced blatant episodes of racism.
Bryan Tucker, co-director with Chris Baron of “Lynden,” said that during the film’s Aug. 3 screening in Lynden, the film’s primary subject — Lynden High School graduate Amsa Burke — shared an upsetting story during the question and answer portion of the evening.
Burke, who is Black, was adopted from Ethiopia at age 6 and raised by a white family in Lynden. While visiting her family last Thanksgiving, Burke received a prank phone call from old high school classmates, who proceeded to call her a racist slur.
The story came on the heels of comments made by Tjoelker, who Tucker said upset some audience members by saying Black people who faced racism should simply “stand up for themselves.”
“She was looking right at Wylin with tears in her eyes, saying that racism was not a ‘single act’ that she experienced in Lynden, but a societal, cultural and institutional issue she faced repeatedly throughout her years there,” Tucker said in an email. “It was a powerful moment.”
Aiming for change
Racial Unity Now, which is shown hosting their first rally in the documentary, is part of a long-term movement to nurture Lynden towards greater racial unity and understanding, Dorrough said.
During the last three years, RUN has held a number of events working towards underlying systemic issues that can feed prejudice in a community. Those events include an annual cultural program called “Flavors of Community,” which is held around the anniversary of the 2020 rally, Dorrough said.
The event provides different local racial and ethnic groups a chance to share cultural cuisine and performances, and usually draws several hundred people. RUN also holds church-based trainings called “Be the Bridge,” which are multiweek small-group studies to better racial understanding.
“It helps people who maybe have never considered racial issues, or the experiences of people of a different race, do so in a healthy context,” he said.
With many new Hispanic families in the area, RUN is also working to improve how the community receives them. That includes a welcome program for children of incoming immigrants, set up through a local church. A pantry there provides families with essential resources like toiletries, school supplies and bedding, Dorrough said.
RUN has also hosted a series of interorganizational immigration forums, which has brought out local community and civic leaders to try to improve the handling of immigration matters. Those leaders have included Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu and immigration attorney and Bellingham City Council Member Hannah Stone.
“As far as local racial issues, immigration is the force that is driving demographic change more than any other force,” Dorrough said. “And that’s [often also] where misunderstanding — and tribalism and protectionism — happens.”
Dorrough admits there are still limitations to the impact RUN can have if residents do not examine other aspects of where their views come from.
“There’s a lot of … bigger, national issues that are beyond our ability to really impact,” he said. “We can’t impact what news channel people watch, and how that affects their view of people from other races. But we can work on a community level.”
Divided we fall
Jon Van Hulzen is a Lynden Christian High School instructor who grew up in the community and teaches Biblical and religious studies courses. One of the required classes, for seniors, is called “Worldviews and World Religions.”
When it comes to tolerance, Van Hulzen said he tells students that understanding and accepting others who think and live differently is essential as both Christians and neighbors.
“Loving one’s neighbor begins with understanding one’s neighbor,” he said in an email. “This means being willing to critically evaluate our own prejudices, letting go of the fears that so easily turn to paranoid suspicion, and embracing our common humanity. It also demands that we be willing to take ourselves out of the center of these conversations (with all of our ego and tribalism), and assume a posture of listening to the stories of others.”
Van Hulzen also tries to get his students out into the world to foster this kind of ambition. Each semester, during a study on Sikhism, his world religion students take a field trip to a local Sikh temple, where they meet and eat with members of that community.
“By just taking the time to sit, eat, talk, and listen together, I believe more love and understanding is cultivated than if we had just read about Sikhism out of a textbook,” he said.
Dorrough agrees that, if people are to accept and understand one another despite their differences — in Lynden or elsewhere — spending time with those who are different may be an essential part of transforming both the community and themselves.
“That’s not what a lot of people necessarily want to hear, but you have to be willing to get to know somebody — and to tolerate somebody — that might have ideas that are offensive to you,” he said. “If you’re offended simply by the presence of a Lyndenite, how are you ever going to see transformation in community? That doesn’t mean you share their ideas or pretend to share their ideas, [but] you’ve got to be willing to get along with people.”
Next showings of “Lynden” at the Pickford Film Center are on Sunday and Monday (Aug. 25 and 26). Three subsequent showings are sold out.
— By Matt Benoit