Voices

BACKTALK Last week, Nick Williams visited Deli Edison in Chapel Hill, where owner Sam Suchoff boasted of eating a half-million bagels in his lifetime.

Whitewashing Raleigh’s Future

Black voices and perspectives are being shut out, and the community knows it

BY COURTNEY NAPIER backtalk@indyweek.com

ADRIAN HALPE questions the math: “I’m no journalist, but I did take two classes from UNC’s legendary Professor Shumaker and have always had an interest in the journalistic craft. It was my understanding that articles about people are supposed to contain their age, a detail the Deli Edison piece fails to include about Sam Suchoff. But let’s imagine he’s 60. Counting the extra day of leap years, this means Sam has lived 21,915 days, give or take a few. Five hundred thousand divided by 21,915 equals 22.81; that’s 22.81 bagels Sam would have had to have eaten every single day of his life since the day he was born!

“Clearly, Sam’s comment is pure hyperbole, and your article should have noted that. Moreover, it’s such hyperbole that it makes me question whether Sam is on the up-and-up, and whether he really knows bagels or not. My guess is he does not. To be an expert on this subject, one must have been raised in New York City, preferably Brooklyn, and there’s no indication in your article that Sam has that qualification.”

Williams replies: “Suchoff was, in fact, raised in Brooklyn.”

SUSIE PAGE, a social worker, has questions about the ongoing McDougald Terrace debacle: “I met with a client recently who reported multiple health concerns in her McDougald Terrace townhouse. Kitchen cabinets were leaning heavily from the wall. Floors were repeatedly flooding, and the fix via the property management office was to avoid using the bathtub upstairs to bathe her children. My client is pregnant and worried about having a newborn in a home with possible mold exposure. As there was no foreseeable plan to address these deficiencies, I could only recommend she reach out to Legal Aid. “Now we know that HUD inspections failed McDougald’s in 2019 and 2017, citing life-threatening safety violations including misaligned ventilation systems to furnaces and gas-fed hot-water heaters. We also now know that the DHA board knew about these issues and assumed they would be addressed immediately. I want to know how crisis-management works at DHA and why the CEO’s performance review expressed regret that day-to-day management requirements were preventing him from focusing on ‘higher-level concerns.’”

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On New Year’s Day, I had the pleasure of meeting with the legendary professor Linda Dallas, an accomplished painter and illustrator who teaches in the art department at St. Augustine’s University. We sat at the Starbucks on Peace Street and discussed how our city has grown and changed over the years—and at an ever-dizzying pace. As we talked about the transplants to Raleigh, she said something profound: “Many of the 60-plus people moving to the area are moving away from the very cities that Raleigh is trying to emulate. And many of those who are moving are people of color.”

Immediately, I knew this needed to be written about, this whitewashing of the future of Raleigh by our politicians and our media. Nearly 30 percent of Raleigh’s population is Black, and, along with every other minority group, it has grown since 2000. Experts estimate that people of color will be the majority of Raleigh’s population by as early as 2025.

But reading articles like those in the INDY’s 2040 Vision series would have you believe that Black and Latinx leaders will not exist 20 years from now, at least not any worthy of their own column. Out of the 13 contributors tackling topics like the future of housing, politics, art, and the robot apocalypse—not counting the sections on the future of the Triangle’s municipalities, which had multiple authors—there was only one person of color represented (shout-out to the realest, Zainab Baloch). Black culture was mentioned in the piece about hip-hop being a future subject of arts education, but it was written by a white man. Similarly, The News & Observer recognized former DHIC executive director, Greg Warren, as its 2019 Tar Heel of the Year, but left out the fact that DHIC was founded by Raleigh’s first and only Black mayor, Clarence Lightner, in 1974. It seems we didn’t exist as leaders in the past, either.

When you look at City Hall, the future is just as pale. Conversations about affordable housing are mostly referring to blue-collar workforce housing, meaning Raleigh’s teachers, first responders, and government workers—professions where there is a gross underrepresentation of

Black and Brown people. And what about minimum-wage workers, single parents, and those on a fixed income? The city council and its staff have said multiple times that they are not focused on providing housing for residents who make 30 percent of the area median income or less. Raleigh developers are looking to build homes for the young singles, couples, and families moving to the area for tech industry jobs, a sector of the market that is predominantly white. But this group comprises a dwindling percentage of Raleigh’s actual projected population.

Why is this happening—the whitewashing and “rich-washing” of Raleigh’s future? Why are our government and media ignoring the proverbial writing on the wall?

I can’t speak to the intent of these entities, but the effect is that Raleigh’s Black community is being ignored, and they know it. Their needs are being swept under the rug, and they know it. Their knowledge and voices and perspectives are being shut out, and they know it.

Our city and county are full of Black people with fascinating and insightful perspectives on every topic covered in the Vision 2040 series.

Aaliyah Blaylock, creator of the Black Raleigh Facebook page, would have incredible insight regarding the future of media. There are two HBCUs in downtown Raleigh with professors and students who could share important perspectives on the future of education. Wanda Coker has been on the frontlines of the fight for fair and affordable housing and deserves a column all her own. Mike Williams, the creator of the Black on Black Project, is an authority on the Triangle’s arts scene and has a clear vision of its future that ought to be heard far and wide.

There were some brilliant minds represented in the 2040 Vision series, as there are in City Hall, but they do not accurately represent the diversity of Raleigh or Wake County. The great science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler said, “Whites represent themselves, and that’s plenty. Share the burden.”

Black people exist in Raleigh’s future, and the future is now. œ

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