INDY Week 12.08.2021

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For more than a decade, The Durham Green Flea Market has been a taste of home for the Triangle’s Hispanic community. Amid closure rumors, vendors hope to see it carry on.

BY GABI MENDICK, P. 14

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Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill December 8, 2021

ALSO INSIDE: Event calendars are BACK!

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 38 NO. 47

CONTENTS NEWS 6

Ethiopian residents from across the Triangle gathered in protest of the Biden administation's use of sanctions against the African nation.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

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Food cart vendors say the Raleigh city council's decision to limit their operating hours will likely put them out of business. BY JASMINE GALLUP 10 Since May, nine leaders have departed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. BY PRAVEENA SOMASUNDARAM 13 The N.C. Court of Appeals halted candiate filing then restarted it again; what's to happen with the March primaries is anybody's guess.

Waled Eldwik has sold foil- wrapped hot dogs to hungry bar hoppers in Raleigh for 20 years p. 8 PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

BY LEIGH TAUSS

WE M A DE THIS

ARTS & CULTURE 14 17

The long-running Durham Green Flea Market has faced recent closure rumors, but vendors hope to see it stay open. BY GABI MENDICK A local comedian tells the story of their tumultous break-up....with Jesus.

BY BYRON WOODS

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VAE's progressive momentum sees a new chapter.

BY BRIAN HOWE

P U B L I S H E RS

Contributors Will Atkinson, Madeline Crone, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Layla Khoury-Hanold, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Rachel SImon

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BACK TA L K

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Last week, Jasmine Gallup wrote about how climate change is affecting North Carolina and its most vulnerable communities and how much the impacts of global warming have and will cost taxpayers over the coming

decades. North Carolina state reps.

JULIE VON HAEFEN (D-Wake) and MARCIA MOREY (D-Durham) had some thoughts about the piece.

Durham Oil and gas giants must help pay for climate costs in North Carolina.

Jasmine Gallup’s recent article speaks to a dire reality that we, as elected leaders in North Carolina, have all witnessed in our communities: those hit first and worst by climate change are also least resourced to respond to the increasingly costly damage. Communities across the state will need to find a way to weather the coming storms, and the costs Gallup names are just a start.

But the big question still remains: Why are frontline communities still footing the bill on their own?

Just 100 companies—most of them oil and gas companies—are responsible for over 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change since 1988, according to the latest Carbon Majors Report.

Oil and gas giants have known since the 1960s that their fossil fuel products would cause dangerous climate impacts, but spent decades undermining climate science and lying to lawmakers and the public to prevent policies that would threaten their business-as-usual. Oil executives continued to line their pockets while efforts to address climate change remained at a standstill—and our communities were hung out to dry (or drown, as the case may be).

That history was highlighted at the first-ever congressional hearing on climate disinformation this past October. The executives of oil giants Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP America, and others faced questions from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform about their past and ongoing efforts to mislead Americans and delay climate action.

Fossil fuel companies must be held accountable for the climate-driven damage now plaguing our communities in North Carolina. It’s long past time for this industry to pay its fair share—our infrastructure, livelihoods, homes, and safety all depend on it.

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indyweek.com @INDYWeekNC

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e

15 MINUTES Ashley Ward, Age 49 Senior policy associate at Duke, candidate for the 6th Congressional District

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

Tell me about yourself—why did you decide to run for public office?

I’m not a career politician. I never would have imagined myself doing something like this. I grew up in a rural area from a very workingclass family. My father was the first person in his family to get a high school diploma. My grandparents were sharecroppers, they worked in tobacco factories. [When I first graduated high school], I waited tables, worked at a grocery store. Eventually I enrolled in the community college and completed a business degree. I met my husband and got married, but my dream was to go to college.

When I got pregnant with my second daughter, that’s when my husband said, “We’re gonna be on one income … so if you’re gonna go back to school, now’s the time to do it.” I was 30 years old with a four-year-old and a newborn, and off I went to college to get my bachelor’s degree. It was a wonderful experience, a lonely experience, but I learned a ton. I was constantly trying to navigate [childcare and school], but somehow I did it. I graduated with highest honors and I went on to get my master’s and my PhD. I taught at the university for several years. Then I got a job at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].

How does your professional experience prepare you for a job in Congress?

[My job at NOAA] was to work with communities in North and South Carolina to help them navigate federal policy and use science to improve decision-making and build resilience for climate change. It was a moment for me to learn about what really matters to communities. I know there were people at that table who didn’t agree with each other. They didn’t vote the same. [But] everybody

cares about their community, they have a vested interest that they’re safe and well.

Besides climate change, what issues are important to you?

Voting rights. We have to ensure access to free and fair elections. We have to ensure that districts are drawn in a nonpartisan fashion. We have to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and we have to pass the For the People Act. Gerrymandering is a serious threat to the democratic process. I would love to hear why we don’t have a standalone anti-gerrymandering bill. Third-party [independent] redistricting is what we have to do.

Why should people vote for you?

I would be the first person elected to Congress that has expertise in climate health and resilience.

There are a lot of champions for climate change in Congress, but I think there’s a benefit to having someone who’s worked on the ground with communities on this issue. I’m the only candidate in the race who has worked in the federal policy space.

I [also] have a fairly unique background. I hear people say all the time that they are tired of career politicians. People say they want things to be different. What I’m asking is that people, if they really want someone different … to take a leap of faith. I’m asking them to vote differently, for the person who has the practical experience, who does know what it’s like [to live an everyday life].

I have student loans. Our youngest daughter has had health issues, there were years we had an excess of $15,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses. I know what that’s like. I know what it’s like to work multiple jobs. Those are my life experiences. W INDYweek.com

December 8, 2021

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America’s Real Crisis In cities like Raleigh, Black and low-income residents are excluded from and forced out of housing. That’s by design. BY KIMBERLY MUKTARIAN backtalk@indyweek.com

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nce again, America has whitewashed history and managed to label the need for housing a “crisis.” White supremacy is America’s real crisis, which in turn has affected the availability of housing for many people.

The term “housing crisis” is worse than the term “self-defense,” one that protects itself from scrutiny or is used to relieve a group from personal accountability. This wordplay is as detrimental today as Christopher Columbus and his crew eventually using words such as “savages” to describe the Natives living in what we call America.

Today’s gentrifiers, or gentle liars, and white vigilantes of the housing market are here to save the industry with their presence. They, too, will strap their white value across their chest and run proudly down the sidewalks of urban communities, crossing the lines of crime and poverty, using phrases like “missing middle,” while forgetting to address the “missing man crisis.”

What man is that? The Black man, who has been removed from America’s economy and family structure. He is now housed in penitentiaries across America, leaving thousands of Black women to depend upon government assistance, from subsidized housing to eviction assistance.

Locally, this “housing crisis” dates back to 1870, when newly freed slaves built North Carolina’s first prison—Central Prison. The formerly enslaved would no longer work for the private plantation owner. Now, he would be property of the state.

The efforts of Blacks to build would always be thwarted by challengers who engineered obstacles and roadblocks, such as developing sharecropping schemes and denying Blacks wealth access through loans, the GI Bill, and other wealth-building opportunities. Yoked to unjust wages and racketeering ventures, Black people could never hold on to land. Meanwhile,

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“Throughout American history, the so-called housing crisis was deliberately manufactured.” the vigilantes of their day could walk boldly into a man’s home, remove him, and lynch him.

Throughout American history, the so-called housing crisis was deliberately manufactured. As Blacks migrated away from the fields into the inner cities and northern states, hopes for a better future appeared promising. However, crime and congestion would surface, attracting an increased police presence.

But now, urban areas that once made white women grip their purses and clutch their pearls are the “number one” places to live.

The so-called housing crisis is nothing more than the privileged few cashing out on their discrimination. With this formula, the legacy of manifest destiny will continue, and instead of expanding west, opportunities will allow them to build up where the plantation-style homes extend to the heavens and lie directly beside the historic plantations of their forefathers.

Their quarter houses are now called ADUs. Maids cannot afford to live in them, but these units will serve as a second stream of wealth, minus the hotel tax.

No longer will they retire to their person-

al parlors filled with scotch, bourbon, and brandy. Instead, they will leave their baby mansions and stroll to the local breweries, conveniently located in walking distance.

Their carriages have since transformed into the Raleigh transit system’s bus service, driven by Black individuals who make up 80 percent of the city’s transit system workers. Their drivers will drop them off at home, courtesy of the city’s free transportation.

The so-called housing crisis is more about who has access to wealth, political influence to redraw district lines, and the power to create an entirely new narrative by picking up where they left off without being detected.

If historic plantations are preserved, then where are the neighborhoods of former slaves that should also be preserved?

Have we been relegated to only paying for the upkeep of old plantations via federal dollars, though we can’t afford to live anywhere nearby?

Prior to enslavement, Native Americans were placed onto reservations. Now, reservations are made for the formerly enslaved, whole families, at local hotels.

Not only have the same culprits stolen equality, but they’ve drained the equity directly out of our homes.

Perhaps Black people should be thankful that they were not slaughtered by the millions. Instead of trekking across the country to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, they’re only pushed out into the county, to Knightdale.

How can we call a “crisis” something that was done on purpose? W Dr. Kimberly Muktarian is president of Save Our Sons, a nonprofit and faith-based lobbying firm designed to engage agencies, legislators, and stakeholders from a moral perspective.

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PUBLIC MEETING REGARDING

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

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Pay for educators Digital learning Summer school, misc.

Pay for support staff

Other employee pay Buildings, supplies Unbudgeted

Wake County Schools

sident of ith-based agencies, m a moral

$2.7M $12.3M $8.6M

$30.3M

PURNELL ROAD IN WAKE COUNTY

Raleigh –The public is invited to a virtual public meeting with the N.C. Department of Transportation this month to discuss the proposed project to make improvements to U.S. 1 (Capital Boulevard) in Wake County.

The proposed improvements include conversion of U.S. 1 (Capital Boulevard) to a controlled access highway from I-540 in Raleigh to Purnell Road/Harris Road in Wake Forest.

Controlled access means access is provided only via ramps at interchanges. Some cross-streets will be grade-separated, and no driveway connections will be allowed.

Project details, including maps and a video can be found on the NCDOT project web page: (ncdot.publicinput.com/capitalboulevard-upgrade).

A project presentation will begin at 6 pm on Dec 9, 2021.

Interested persons are encouraged to register by visiting https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3944497283958451981.

To listen to the presentation by phone, call (415) 930-5321 and enter audio pin 268-435-629.

$152.7M $104.2

$34.4M

People may also submit comments by phone 984-205-6615 project code 3243, email (capital-boulevard-upgrade@publicinput.com) or mail at the address shown below by Jan 7, 2022.

By Mail: Terry Farr, PE NCDOT Project Management Unit 1582 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-1582

Durham County Schools

NCDOT will provide auxiliary aids and services under the Americans with Disabilities Act for disabled people who wish to participate in this virtual hearing. Anyone requiring special services should contact Diane Wilson, Environmental Analysis Unit, at 1598 Mail Service Center in Raleigh; 919-707-6073; or pdwilson1@ncdot.gov as early as possible so that arrangements can be made.

$18.7M $35M $14.3M

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BETWEEN I-540 AND HARRIS ROAD/

STIP Projects: U-5307

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US-1 CAPITAL BOULEVARD UPGRADE

orth Carolina school districts are spending millions in state and federal funds this fiscal year to fight COVID-19. Wake County has budgeted $192 million, with another $150 million unspent, while Durham County has budgeted $113 million.

reserved, ds of forreserved? paying for a federal live any-

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NCDOT TO HOLD VIRTUAL

COVID Cash

$7.5M

$4.2M

$33.5M

Those who do not speak English, or have a limited availability to read, speak or understand English, may receive interpretive services upon request prior to the meeting by calling 1-800-481-6494.

Aquellas personas no hablan inglés, o tienen limitaciones para leer, hablar o entender inglés, podrían recibir servicios de interpretación si los solicitan antes de la reunión llamando al 1-800-4816494.

Source: WCPSS, DPS INDYweek.com

December 8, 2021

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Raleigh Ethiopian Americans in Raleigh protest the Biden administration’s sanctions against the African nation PHOTO BY THOMASI MCDONALD

Protest Vote Ethiopian Americans comprise a small portion of the United States’s population. But their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s foreign policy positions toward the African nation could mean Democrats won’t be able to rely on their votes in next year’s elections.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

L

ast month, Teshale Gebremichael helped organize a protest for members of North Carolina’s Ethiopian American communities who condemned the U.S. government’s support of what they describe as a “terrorist” group that is attempting to usurp their country’s democratically elected government.

On November 21, the demonstrators assembled in front of the old state capitol grounds near the intersection of Hillsborough and Salisbury Streets at about three p.m. before marching to the front of the old Wake County Courthouse on Fayetteville Street. There, a man with a bullhorn exhorted the crowd to a call-and-response protest.

“African solutions for African problems!” he shouted into the bullhorn.

“African solutions for African problems!” his countrymen and women replied in unison.

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“We are united!”

“No more! We say no more!”

“We stand with Ethiopia!”

“We stand with the Ethiopian government!”

Gebremichael, an Ethiopian American, has been living in the Triangle for over a decade.

“Why is the Biden administration standing with bad people? Why is Biden standing with gangsters?” Gebremichael asked, while speaking with the INDY last week.

“And now our country is about to fall apart.”

Nearly 200 Ethiopian Americans, many of them wrapped in the red-green-and-gold flags of one of the world’s oldest nations, assembled at the old state capitol and voiced their disapproval on a day when similar protests were taking place across the globe.

The Ethiopian American protesters were joined by expatriates from neighboring Eritrea and gathered under a ban-

ner stating #NoMore to denounce what they described as the Biden administration’s “disastrous foreign policy” by way of sanctions that have hurt their country; the threat of sending U.S. ground troops into the country, and a disinformation campaign carried out by Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to discredit the current government.

It’s a complicated issue.

A civil war erupted late last year between the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and inhabitants of the country’s Tigray region.

On October 8, the United Nations issued a 156-page report following a nearly three-month joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights “into alleged human rights violations and abuses, and violations of international humanitarian law, and refugee law” as a result of the conflict.

At the end of the investigation, the joint investigation team found that combatants on both sides of the conflict had carried out attacks on civilians that caused deaths and injuries, including ethnicity-based killings.

There was also evidence of torture, abductions, sexual and gender-based violence, the displacement of thousands of refugees and disappearance of hundreds more, pillaging, looting, and destruction of property, along with denial of basic freedoms and trauma inflicted on children and the elderly.

The report marks a remarkable fall from international grace for Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, who was elected in 2018 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize one year later “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea,” according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There have been recent calls from some quarters on the world stage to revoke the prime minister’s Nobel Prize. But as The New York Times recently reported, the embattled leader has the support of younger Ethiopians.

Many of them—including two-time Olympic gold medalist Haile Gebrselassie—cheered his arrival late last month on the front lines of the conflict, where he vowed to lead the army against a group of Tigrayan rebels who were advancing into Addis Ababa, the country’s capital city.

That conflict is more than 8,000 miles away in the country’s northern region. The fighting and subsequent U.S. government sanctions could have dire consequences for Democratic Party candidates during the 2022 election. If President Joe Biden does not lift the sanctions, Ethiopian Americans here and across the United States are threatening to vote for Republicans next year.

Ethiopian Americans typically cast their votes for Democratic Party candidates, but they are deeply hurt by the Biden administration’s decision on September 17 to authorize sanctions that do not single out specific factions but hold the governments of Ethiopia and

“Why is the Biden administration standing with bad people?

Why is Biden standing with gangsters?”

Eritrea and the Tigray forces responsible for participating in a civil war that has left “nearly one million people living in famine-like conditions” while “millions more face acute food insecurity as a direct consequence of the violence,” according to a White House statement.

“I am appalled by the reports of mass murder, rape, and other sexual violence to terrorize civilian populations,” stated President Biden, who added that the “sanctions are not directed at the people of Ethiopia or Eritrea but rather the individuals and entities perpetrating the violence and driving a humanitarian disaster.”

But Ethiopian Americans here in the Triangle, and across the globe, say the sanctions are hurting their families and neighbors back home in an impoverished country that ranks 173 out of 189 countries and territories in human development, according to the 2020 Human Development Report.

On November 2, Biden suspended Ethiopia from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) “for gross violations of internationally recognised human rights,” according to Reuters.

Days later, officials with the global fashion giant PVH Corp. announced that the company was shutting down a manufacturing factory in Ethiopia, owing to the loss of duty-free access to the United States because of the war.

Muna Mengesha, one of the organizers of the Raleigh protest and a real estate agent and mother of two, told the INDY the factory closing has left 150,000 people without work, but according to Reuters, officials in her homeland warned the shutdown “could take away 1 million jobs, disproportionately hurting poor women, who are the majority of garment workers.”

Mengesha says that in addition to factory workers losing their jobs in Addis Ababa, the country’s suspension from AGOA is also being felt in the rural parts of the country.

“Without AGOA, small farmers can’t send what they produce to the United States tax free,” she explains. “That’s their livelihood. That’s how they send their kids to school. That’s how they provide for their family.”

Raleigh’s protest organizers say there’s currently a global movement among Ethi-

opia’s expatriates to heed Prime Minister Abiy’s call to return home for the Christmas holidays with the aim of supporting their country’s economy to offset the Biden administration’s sanctions.

“It’s a big movement right now,” Gebremichael said. “I’m not going because I went back last year. But I wish I could.”

Ethiopian expatriates point to last month’s gubernatorial election in Virginia where the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, narrowly beat incumbent governor Terry McAuliffe. According to reports, a coordinated effort from Ethiopian expatriate voters helped contribute to Youngkin’s narrow margin of victory.

“That’s the plan here, too,” Mengesha said. “Personally, I don’t want to vote Republican, but at the end of the day that’s my homeland. In Virginia, people who don’t ever vote voted just because of the Biden administration and the way they handled the situation.”

Another Raleigh protest organizer, Fitsum Kedebe, 37, is a native of Ethiopia now living in Durham.

During the past presidential election, Kedebe helped Democratic Party candidates by canvassing in Bull City neighborhoods.

“Donald Trump was saying things no world leader should ever say,” Kedebe, a married father of two children, told the INDY. “But I was never expecting Biden to go this extreme. I never expected him to go this far to support Tigray. Even [the U.S. government] has been saying since 1992 that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front is a terrorist group.”

Kedebe acknowledged the Sisyphean irony of casting a vote for an American political party enamored with misinformation to help bring about the downfall of a political party in his native country that also thrives in a false news ecosystem.

He brushes aside the suggestion that a Republican administration may feel more comfortable with TPLF holding the reins of power in his country.

“The Democratic Party says it looks out for the poor, but it’s fractured,” he said.

“It’s losing ground. The only reason Biden was elected was because of Black Lives Matter, and 79 million people still voted for Trump. We should be united. We see freedom losing.” W INDYweek.com

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Raleigh Waled Eldwik, Foodland owner PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Deep Cuts Raleigh’s city council voted to reduce hours of operation for pushcart vendors.

Vendors say the move will destroy their small businesses.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

O

n a small patch of sidewalk in front of Sullivan’s Steakhouse, Waled Eldwik sells foil-wrapped hot dogs to a pair of young women in heels and halters, millennials out for a night of barhopping on Glenwood Avenue.

In the hustle and bustle of Raleigh’s nightlife, Eldwik’s food cart draws passersby like an oasis in the middle of a desert. The bright yellow umbrella atop his stand is a welcome sight to people stumbling out of clubs at two a.m. with a craving for something salty.

Eldwik has been selling hot dogs and chicken kabobs in Raleigh for almost 20 years, he told the INDY. “We used to do this even before [the city council] assigned us spots,” he says. ”I moved from New York to here, so we were working with them to set the rules.

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They didn’t know anything about the law, the vending business, so we helped them.”

After decades in business, however, Eldwik’s food cart may be about to shut down. A recent change to the hours he’s allowed to operate will make it impossible for him to make money, he says.

“Now they turn on us,” says Eldwik, offering a dire summation of the situation.

Two weeks ago, the Raleigh City Council voted 7–1 that food carts should close by one fifteen a.m., effectively killing Eldwik’s source of income. The food cart operator usually arrives downtown around 10 p.m., setting up his cart so people will see him as they’re going into clubs, he says. Then, as bars close and people emerge around one thirty or two a.m., they’ll stop by to get a bite to eat.

About 70 percent of Eldwik’s business comes between one and two thirty a.m., he says. Until the city council vote, food carts had been allowed to operate until three a.m. Now, as the change goes into effect December 16, they’ll have to close by one fifteen and be off the street by one forty-five.

“It’s gonna kill us,” Eldwik says. “It’s gonna kill the business. What we can do? We still work until one a.m., until one fifteen a.m. This is what we’ve been doing for 20 years, so what else to do?”

Eldwik, who lives in Raleigh, has struggled to make a living during the pandemic, he says. His food cart is his main source of income, and he usually also works during the day, outside museums or government buildings. With everything shut down, however, there were no customers. And since he wasn’t a restaurant, he couldn’t get any government assistance.

With COVID on the loose, Eldwik made ends meet by working in restaurants and picking up gigs as a DoorDash and Grubhub driver, he says. But now, it’s not COVID that’s taking money out of his pocket; it’s the government.

“I have a mortgage, I don’t want to lose my house,” he says. “That’s the dream here, you come to America, you get a home. Now, we’re gonna face [hardship] again.

Before it was destiny, it was a disease, COVID-19. Now, we’re facing it because the city council wants it.”

Despite pleas from operators and owners of food cart companies, the vote by the city council was overwhelmingly in favor of downtown residents, who have complained about the noise and congestion nightlife on Glenwood creates.

Glenwood South has long been a problematic street for police, who are often called upon to respond to shootings or fights in the area. Of the 132 guns confiscated downtown by police in 2018, 57 were seized in Glenwood South, according to a News & Observer report.

Citations for less serious crimes like parking violations, public intoxication, indecent exposure, and public urination number in the thousands. “[The change in hours] is a tool that can be utilized by [Raleigh Police Department] to bring that particular area under control,” said council member Stormie Forte during the November meeting. “And to avoid the additional issues as it relates to folks spilling out of the bars and lingering in the area causing a lot of noise, and then filtering into communities after three or four o’clock in the morning.”

Food cart operators, however, say they’re being blamed for problems that already exist.

“The current congestion is not caused by vendors on the street,” said Ammar Jawad, president of food cart

“I have a mortgage, I don’t want to lose my house.

That’s the dream, you come to America, you get a home. Now, we’re gonna face hardship again.

Before it was destiny …. Now we’re facing it because the city council wants it.” company Taste of New York. “Sidewalks are full of people talking and hanging out, and they would continue to do that even if we weren’t there.”

Council member Jonathan Melton, the lone dissenter in the November vote, shares some of Jawad’s concerns. Melton says he voted no because he was worried about putting pushcart owners out of business, he says. He was also worried about creating a bigger problem by limiting late-night food options for people who have been drinking.

“I understand we’re trying to make sure folks are safe when they go out and have a good time, but I don’t necessarily believe that folks waiting to get food from a pushcart are the reason some of the other issues on Glenwood South are occurring,” Melton says.

“The council and the city are doing things to address some of the unintended negative consequences of having an entertainment district in Glenwood South.

They’re increasing lighting, they’re having more police presence to crack down on gun violence.”

Melton, who is working with Downtown Raleigh Alliance to revitalize downtown, suggests the city might consider pushcarts an asset. Not only are they small businesses, but they also create more food access in the area.

“I’m all for making sure we’re addressing legitimate concerns, but I don’t want to quell the good aspects of Glenwood South,” Melton says. “And I certainly don’t want to do that at the expense of small business owners. It just felt like the wrong decision.”

This isn’t the first time Raleigh has considered changing the hours of operation for food carts. In 2019, it was suggested as a way to get people off the street earlier and make the downtown district safer.

But over the years, it’s become clear that the controversy over food carts isn’t really about food carts. It’s about the boisterous behavior of club-goers who linger in surrounding neighborhoods until three or four in the morning. It’s also, to a lesser extent, about the difference of opinion between longtime Raleigh residents (who want their neighborhoods to

stay quiet and calm) and younger adults moving into the area (who want the city to have a better nightlife).

For urban millennials and young tourists, Raleigh isn’t much to look at. Compared to cities like Memphis or even Asheville, after-dark activities are thin on the ground. Many residents love Raleigh’s wealth of restaurants and microbreweries, but by midnight, the city is a quiet place.

One of the few exceptions is Glenwood Avenue, where bars and clubs stay open until two a.m. Kristin Hommel, a young woman who was out with her friends Friday night, says the chicken kabobs at Eldwik’s food cart have “literally kept me alive multiple times.”

Hommel is baffled by the city council’s decision, she adds.

“People who are out here that late are usually very, very drunk and having food in their system helps make them a little more solid, less volatile,” she says. “[It] gives them an excuse to take a pause, get a little more sober, and make better choices. Having the food carts forced to leave before the bars even close makes no sense to me.”

The debate over how to keep downtown areas safe at night has raged for years. The fight between development advocates and people who want to keep Raleigh residential has been going on even longer.

But in the meantime—as city council members debate policy and middle-class Raleighites sign petitions—it’s gig workers who suffer the consequences. These are people who don’t live paycheck to paycheck but on Venmo payments and tips.

They’re trying to build a life for themselves in a tough world, surrounded by strangers.

A block away from Eldwik’s food cart, another operator takes payment from a short blond woman in a sparkly dress.

Approached, he conveys he doesn’t speak English, only Arabic. After a painstaking pause, a translation app reveals he immigrated from Egypt six months ago.

There are a few words he knows, though.

“No family,” he says. “No friends.

“I am alone here.” W INDYweek.com

December 8, 2021

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Chapel Hill Nine leaders have left UNC-CH for retirment or other opportunities since May 2021.

GRAPHIC BY KENDAL ORRANTIA

Mass Exodus Since May, nine top leaders at UNC–Chapel Hill have announced their retirements or departures from the university.

BY PRAVEENA SOMASUNDARAM backtalk@indyweek.com

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utside Terry Rhodes’s office in South Building at UNC–Chapel Hill, students in Carolina blue robes take graduation photos with the university seal that reads “Lux Libertas” on the ground in front of them: Light and Liberty.

To Rhodes, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the scene represents the joy and progress students have made during their time at the university.

Now it’s Rhodes’s turn. After 25 years on the faculty and nine years in senior leadership, she’s retiring in June.

And she’s not alone.

Including Rhodes, nine top leaders have announced their retirement or departure from the university since last May, including Bob Blouin, executive vice chancellor and provost, a position only second to the chancellor.

Five of the departures are deans of prominent schools: Rhodes, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Nena Peragallo Montano, dean of the School of Nursing; Susan King, dean of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media; Barbara K. Rimer, dean of Gillings School of Global Public Health; and Julie Byerley, dean of Adams School of Dentistry.

In addition to Blouin, three others are top-ranking staff members: Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, interim chief diversity officer; Joel Curran, vice chancellor of communications; and Joanne Peters Denny, director of UNC media relations.

The exodus comes as questions of transparency, academic freedom, and political influence engulf UNC, causing 10

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concern among many about its future as North Carolina’s flagship public university.

“I have been in the middle of so many of our challenges here at Carolina,” Rhodes said. “And I will say, I do very much feel that this university has to face its past realistically—not paintbrush over it.”

H

olden Thorp, who served as UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013, has a rule of thumb for leadership change: when there’s a new executive, half the team turns over, either because they had intentions of retiring or have been exhausted by controversy.

“People tend to get very, very worn down when that happens, in a way that has nothing to do with them doing anything wrong or anything else,” Thorp said.

“It’s just exhausting to be in the blender for months on end. And some people just say, ‘OK, I don’t want to do this anymore.’”

Many of those who have left UNC directed Media Hub to their departure announcements or did not respond to an interview request, including Blouin.

Curran and Peters Denny both said they’d received other job opportunities that led them to leave the university. For others, it was their intended time of retirement.

Rhodes’s move to the deanship paralleled other leadership changes that followed controversy surrounding the administration’s handling of the Confederate monument

Silent Sam, which was toppled by demonstrators at the start of the fall 2018 semester.

During a closed meeting in 2019, the day after then chancellor Carol Folt’s unexpected announcement of both her retirement and an order to remove the pedestal of the Silent Sam monument, the Board of Governors accepted her resignation—and moved up her termination to January 31.

That forced a domino effect within university leadership.

One week after Folt’s time at UNC officially ended, then College of Arts and Sciences dean Kevin Guskiewicz was named interim chancellor. Rhodes was tapped to step up 20 days later.

Since then, Guskiewicz and Rhodes—whose titles became permanent—and the university’s administration have dealt with continued controversy and questions surrounding UNC’s handling of Silent Sam. More recently, university leadership has been plagued by two crises that made national headlines: a failed reopening during the coronavirus pandemic and halting the decision to grant tenure to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

In her 34 years at the university, Rhodes said she’s developed trust and relationships with many people. But even so, the hardest moments as dean have come as she’s noticed the community’s lack of trust in leadership.

“That has been painful sometimes, to think that either I’m not communicating enough or not doing enough or maybe my ideas do not converge with others in terms of certain decision-making,” Rhodes said.

But conflicting opinions and the absence of trust are not new to UNC–Chapel Hill.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of one of the biggest scandals at the university—academic dishonesty as UNC athletes were directed toward paper classes for nearly two decades.

In 2011, Thorp, now the Science family of journals editor in chief, was doing what he called “threading the needle”— trying to find a balance and compromise between groups of opinions that often cannot coexist.

But, Thorp said, it was “ridiculous” for him to think that it would have been possible to bring those groups together.

“We all think that we’re going to find the magic words and have the magic meeting that’s going to bring resolution to these things instead of saying, ‘You know what, this is intractable,’” he said.

Thorp resigned from the chancellor position in 2013.

He said the political elements during that scandal were secondary—but now, the controversies at UNC are “overtly about the politics.”

S

ince the tail end of the academic-athletic scandal in 2011, the Republican Party has controlled the North

would allow the board to approve hires at the level of assistant vice chancellor, associate vice chancellor, associate dean, and assistant dean in a meeting in October.

This potential change, coupled with the current turnover, raises questions about UNC’s recruitment processes for senior leadership, Chapman said, and puts the university at risk of being a less competitive option for candidates seeking top roles.

Looking forward, Thorp said UNC’s leaders need to get to a point where they can handle disagreement in a transparent way.

“Yeah, some of them may lose their job when they do that,” he said. “If I’d walked out on the steps of South Building and said, ‘Guess what everybody, we cheated at sports for 30 years. I’m really sorry,’ I very well could have lost my job 10 minutes later.

“But I had to leave anyway.”

L

ike Rhodes, who’d known she wanted to retire when she turned 66 in June 2022, Hussman School dean Susan King always intended to be in the position for no more than 10 years, a span that ends in January.

But her departure comes after a summer where UNC, again, made national headlines when it delayed granting tenure to Hannah-Jones.

On May 30, it was revealed that the journalism school’s namesake, Arkansas newspaper magnate Walter Hussman, had expressed concerns in December 2020 about hiring Hannah-Jones, according to reporting from The Assembly.

While Hussman worried about “the controversy of tying the UNC journalism school to the 1619 project,” students, faculty, and community members worried that Hussman’s interference and the BOT’s actions were reflective of the issues of structural racism, donor influence, and chilled speech.

King called the fight for tenure and eventual result a “difficult time” and a “disappointment,” as she had hoped to bring someone of Hannah-Jones’s caliber onto the faculty—and she’d wanted to bring in Hannah-Jones specifically—but was surprised by the BOT’s reaction.

Over the summer, several Black and Indigenous faculty members and faculty members of color, including interim chief diversity officer Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, decided to leave the university. They cited Hannah-Jones’s initial tenure denial as one more in a long line of harmful decisions and glaring inequity at UNC. “For me, the decision to leave really came to a head with the whole

h t

s u

ke up w a W i

Carolina state legislature. The legislature has considerable influence in electing members of the UNC System’s governing bodies.

The Board of Governors, which has 24 voting members who oversee all UNC System institutions and elect the system’s president, is elected entirely by the General Assembly.

The Board of Trustees advise both the BOG and the UNC chancellor. Of its 13 members, eight are elected by the BOG and four are appointed by the legislature.

The 13th member is UNC’s student body president, who is a nonvoting member.

From Silent Sam to the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure case, the campus community and UNC System governance members have often disagreed on the university’s decisions.

“Kevin tried to thread that needle,” Thorp said. “He got himself in the same old spot that Carol and I were in.”

Talks of Guskiewicz potentially being ousted began this summer when Mimi Chapman, chairperson of the faculty, called an emergency meeting to discuss concerns that the chancellor would be removed by the BOG. Chapman said she’d heard from an anonymous source that names were being floated as options for interim chancellor, including Clayton Somers, vice chancellor for public affairs and secretary of the university, and John Hood, president of the conservative Pope Foundation.

These would be political appointments, Chapman said at the meeting, and “at best, controversial choices.”

For current leaders at UNC, she said despite the opportunities the university offers, it’s also been a challenge to have “crisis after crisis happen.”

“Just surmising, if you were nearing retirement anyway, and you were thinking, ‘Should I stay on for another two or three years or should I go ahead and retire?’”

Chapman said. “Certainly, the level of what is demanded and what has been demanded of senior leadership positions might push you to say, ‘I think I’m ready to go ahead and call it a day.’”

Particularly over the past few months, UNC community members raised questions about the political affiliations of BOT members and the power Republican leaders have in appointing them.

But newly appointed BOT member Marty Kotis III, who formerly served on the Board of Governors, said a focus on politics draws attention away from the school’s progress.

“The drama sometimes feels like someone searching for a Kardashian show out there that may not exist,” Kotis said.

The BOT discussed a proposal that

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11

Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure case,” Anderson-Thompkins said in a June interview with WRAL. “We have espoused this strong value of community and belonging and standing against racial inequity, and yet we are still making decisions that are very inconsistent with what we say are our values.”

As King is set to step down from her role as dean, she said whoever assumes the post next should be cognizant of the hurt the community is feeling.

“We need a leader who sees the opportunities but is aware that there’s been trauma by the school, that people were upset it was a long saga over Nikole and then she decided not to come,” King said. “And some of our, particularly our faculty of color, are really disappointed in that, and so there’s healing that needs to be done as well.”

Though some leaders predetermined their departure and others received offers from different institutions that they chose instead, King and Rhodes emphasized the time of change UNC is in—and the work left to be done.

“We are in a difficult place, I think,” Rhodes said. “But I also think it’s a time of opportunity.” W A timeline of UNC leaders’ departures.

This story was originally published by UNC Media Hub.

GRAPHIC BY KENDAL ORRANTIA

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e Bu s i n e s s L a w UNCONTESTED In c o r p o r a t i o n / L LC / DIVORCE Pa r t n e r s h i p MUSIC BUSINESS LAW Wi l l s INCORPORATION/LLC WILLS C o l l e c t i o n s SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c

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N E WS

North Carolina North Carolina’s newly gerrymanderd congressional districts map PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NCGA

All Over the Map The North Carolina Court of Appeals halted candidate filing in the congressional and state legislative races Monday before reversing the decision that evening. Now, Governor Cooper wants the state Supreme Court to take up the case. BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

K

aren Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, was standing behind the main registration table at the state fairgrounds Expo Center Monday morning. In just 30 minutes, candidates would gather there to start filing for the 2022 election cycle—but then her phone rang. It was a lawyer.

She put the call on speakerphone, and a small group of employees huddled together silently to listen.

A few minutes later, Brinson Bell got on the loudspeaker and told the 30 state employees and a gaggle of candidates waiting to file the news: an unnamed, three-member panel of judges on the North Carolina Court of Appeals had halted candidate filing for the congressional and state legislative races due to lawsuits challenging the process Republicans had used to craft heavily gerrymandered district maps intended to shape elections through 2030.

The maps were rated “F” in terms of partisan fairness by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Lawsuits from

the North Carolina NAACP and Common Cause claimed Republicans did not follow the correct procedure in drawing the maps by ignoring racial data.

What Monday’s injunction meant was out for interpretation. Courts could order all contests and races delayed, as has happened before, or let the U.S. Senate, judicial, and municipal races proceed on schedule but order a second primary for the races delayed by litigation.

Or it could just be another hiccup in the endless drama typical of North Carolina elections.

“Every way you can imagine it to resolve has happened in the past,” says Gerry Cohen, former special counsel to the General Assembly and Wake County Board of Elections member. “There’s all sorts of possibilities here and we just don’t know right now.”

Behind the scenes, several plays were in motion. By sundown, Governor Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein asked the Democrat-leaning state Supreme Court

to take up the case, bypassing the 15-member court of appeals, which has a Republican majority.

“These cases involve legal and practical issues of the highest order, and that delay in this Court’s adjudication would cause substantial harm to the functioning of our State’s democracy,” the brief reads.

But what felt like minutes later, the full appeals court reversed the injunction, allowing filing to start Tuesday.

The maps could give Republicans as much as an 11–3 majority in Congress and potentially a supermajority in the state legislature. Democrats say the gerrymandered maps undermine democracy, but Republican leaders insist they are legally sound.

The lawsuits claim “the districts will dilute the voting power of Black North Carolinians” and “diminish the ability of voters of color to elect the candidates of their choice.”

Republicans did not consult racial data when drawing the maps and hope this will help them skirt Democrats’ accusations of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The federal Supreme Court has so far declined to block partisan gerrymandering.

“Voters deserve delayed primaries, which includes a delay in candidate filing deadlines, to address the serious problems with the state’s voting maps, including what the N.C. NAACP, Common Cause NC, and individual plaintiffs have asked for: a review of the flawed procedures by which lawmakers drew the maps,” says Southern Coalition for Social Justice attorney Allison Riggs. “We look forward to continue making our case on appeal that all North Carolinians deserve a fair and constitutional process.”

For the state Board of Elections, losing a day of filing won’t have much impact. But the timeline leading up to the primary doesn’t leave much wiggle room, if any. Should maps need to be redrawn, state elections workers will have to ensure voters and candidates are in the right districts before absentee ballots go out and early voting begins.

“We are pushing up against a pretty tight schedule just simply because of the printing requirement for ballots for the various districts and how those need to go out per federal law,” says Michael Bitzer, professor of history and politics at Catawba College.

On Tuesday, state Board of Elections spokesman Pat Gannon said filing opened for candidates at eight a.m. By 10 a.m., one candidate had filed to run for Congress.

Gannon’s office is accustomed to the legal roller coaster that comes with elections. Monday’s drama was par for the course.

“Until we hear otherwise, everybody is filing [Tuesday],” Gannon says. “We’re used to court actions in elections and this is just another one of those.” W INDYweek.com

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FO O D & D R I N K

DURHAM GREEN FLEA MARKET 1600 East Pettigrew Street | Open Saturdays and Sundays, 7 a.m.–4 p.m. | www.dgfleamarket.com

Nicolas Epitacio Santos, owner of Aca Fruit at the Durham Green Flea Market PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Evergreen For more than a decade, The Durham Green Flea Market has been a taste of home for the Triangle’s Hispanic community. Amid closure rumors, vendors hope to see it stay open. BY GABI MENDICK food@indyweek.com

E

very weekend at 1600 East Pettigrew Street in Durham, you can find an authentic, delicious breadth of Latin foods that can be found nowhere else in North Carolina—or at least, not all in one big parking lot. Without breaking the bank, you might, in just one visit, try freshly fried pork rinds, walk 20 feet and have a loroco pupusa, then round the bend and round out your feast with a refreshing agua fresca.

The Durham Green Flea Market, which has been open since 2008, offers your typical flea market wares—stalls with electronics, household items, and used clothing are 14

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all on offer—but it’s the smells that waft through La Pulga (literally “The Flea”), as regulars call it, that truly transport visitors. But this beloved mainstay of Durham’s Hispanic community has recently been the subject of closure rumors, making the future of La Pulga and the more than 100 businesses that operate there uncertain.

On a recent visit to La Pulga, I approached three popular vendors. At each truck, stall, and tent that I visited, I asked the young person working the cash register if I could speak to the owner for an article; all three were family members of the vendor owner.

It was a Saturday, typically the quieter day of the weekend, and even slower because it was a bit chilly, so Edy Epitacio offered to take a break from her work and translate for her dad, Nicolas Epitacio Santos, the owner of Aca Fruit. The two spoke to me from behind the colorful fruit- and snack-filled counter.

“It’s mostly Hispanics who come here,” explains Epitacio Santos. For many families, he says, the market is a place to get familiar dishes from the countries where they were raised. The market serves a significant segment of the local community.

As of 2019, Hispanic and Latino populations make up 13.7 percent of Durham County residents. Latin American vendors at the market represent the diversity in that population, selling an array of specialty dishes and regional cuisines that go beyond the typical fare available at taco trucks or fast-casual burrito shops.

From his stand, Epitacio Santos points out some of his favorite foods at the market, like the tacos al pastor and the carnitas. You have to try it all to appreciate the differences, unique spices, and techniques.

“There are different areas of Mexico and they make tacos, but there’s a different flavor to each one,” Epitacio Santos says. “It’s a traditional thing, but it’s also very authentic to their region.”

Nicolas Epitacio Santos moved to the United States about 20 years ago from Acapulco, the resort town on the west coast of Mexico that has long been popular with foreign tourists. He says he initially moved here for “a better life, the American dream, basically”; after he had worked and sent money back to his family for four years, his wife and five children joined him in the United States.

About seven years ago, after working in local restaurants, Epitacio Santos decided to open Aca Fruit at the flea market. Since the beginning, Edy, who is now 19, has been helping out on weekends; like many other stalls at the market, Aca Fruit is a family-run business.

“This is what our work is—apart from this, my dad isn’t working, so we dedicate our whole lives to the business, and thankfully, thank God, we are able to get something from it,” Edy says. “As well as bringing a little piece of Mexico here.”

The flea market itself is also somewhat of a family endeavor: father and son Robert and Trans Perry are co-owners of the eight-acre market and surrounding land. Robert has lived and worked as a lawyer in Durham for 39 years, raising his family, including his son, Trans,

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in the city. The green industrial building at the center of the market, he explains, was initially a tobacco warehouse. Later, he says, it “was in decay back in the nineties, and [at] the turn of the century it basically sat vacant and was used somewhat for storage.”

The market opened in 2008 with just five vendors, and over the years it has gradually grown into the bustling hub for culture and local business that it is today.

Trans Perry describes the opportunities the market creates.

“An entrepreneurial mind-set started the market and now it’s entrepreneurs that are keeping it going,” he says. “It’s a place for commerce, a place for people to come in and start their new product; it’s just an entrepreneurial hub for small businesses here in Durham, and all over North Carolina, in fact. We have vendors that come from all over the state.” (Robert Perry also acknowledges an additional benefit the market has given him: “Quite frankly, I get a lot of clients from the market. It benefits my law practice for me to interact with the vendors and the patrons.”)

The market would seem to be a winning proposition for everyone—owners, vendors, and customers alike—but in recent months, its future has seemed uncertain.

“There have been rumors that it [the market] is for sale, but apart from that, we haven’t heard a word from the owners. So it’s kind of weird and we’re kind of confused about it too,” Edy explains. “We actually didn’t find out until some of the customers came to us and they were asking us, ‘What are you gonna do after the

flea market closes?’ So yeah, that caught us by surprise.”

The Perrys confirmed that under the right circumstances, they would sell the land that La Pulga occupies. Increased development and rising prices make a sale enticing: just between 2012 and 2018, the median price per square foot for East Durham homes went from $37 to $122.

But despite major development and the booming real estate market in Durham, Robert is not sure that major change is imminent.

“If someone were to come by and offer you a large sum of money that you can’t refuse, we probably would sell it,” he says.

“But, we’re asking a price that we really don’t think we’re gonna get. I don’t think the prospect of it selling now is that feasible.”

The property, which is located in an Opportunity Zone in East Durham and zoned IL/Light Industrial, was listed for sale with Reformation Asset Management over a year and a half ago at $11 million.

While the property has not yet sold, rumors have understandably drummed up anxiety among vendors. The Perrys, though, reassured me that the flea market is not going away anytime soon.

“If somebody was to buy this, we have property that we’re eyeing to build another market here in Durham,” Trans says, explaining that in the case of a sale, “we would work out something for operating the market while we potentially close on another property and develop it and open up another market …. Hopefully the operation wouldn’t be interrupted in the sale.”

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Boots for sale at the Durham Green Flea Market Epitacio Santos also hopes this is the case.

“After we were being told multiple times, I was wondering, what we are going to do if the flea market closes?” he says, “This is what we dedicate our lives to.”

Epitacio Santos describes some of the vibrant-looking-and-tasting beverages he sells that are authentic to Acapulco.

“What’s more popular with us are the tornados and the rusas,” he says. “When we first started people were scared to try it. But over the years it got more popular and now that’s what people like the most.”

Edy describes the tornado on their menu: “Orange juice with diced-up fruit.

We put all different types of fruit, some Japanese-style peanuts, tamarind, and chamoy, which is an authentic Mexican

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

hot sauce—it’s not too hot, it’s bitter and sweet.”

La Pulga offers a taste of home for many immigrant communities, but it also gives those communities a sense of rootedness and belonging.

“People like to go to the market to interact with their friends and buy things, they really enjoy the food, they enjoy the produce and the clothes,” Robert Perry says, describing the market as “a joyful place to be.”

“We are happy to bring a little piece [of Mexico] over here and share [it] with the rest of the people, especially with those who are from Mexico,” Epitacio Santos says. “They usually try food from our region. That’s also a way for us as a community to share a little bit of our background.” W

STAGE

JOSEPH RICHARDS: BREAKING UP WITH JESUS

UNC Media Arts Space, Chapel Hill | Thursday, Dec. 9–Friday, Dec. 12

Cross My Heart Comedian Joseph Richards on Breaking Up with Jesus

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

A

t first, the relationship seemed idyllic, filled with professions of eternal love and lengthy love letters telling teenager Joseph Richards that they were special.

Then things turned dark. Richards’s love interest became jealous and possessive, causing them to doubt themself. In the end, Richards concluded, their partner wanted them isolated from friends “and what I needed to survive …. He wanted me weak and broken. That’s the only way he knows how to love.”

That’s when Richards ended things with Jesus Christ—or, at least, the Jesus depicted in the Southern Baptist church they were born into during a childhood in rural Wilkinson County, Georgia.

This week, the comedian, autobiographical monologist, and UNC Communication PhD student premieres their solo show, Breaking Up with Jesus, at UNC’s Media Arts Space, an intimate new performance venue in the site of the former Walgreens on Franklin Street.

These are the edited highlights from our interview.

INDY Week: You frame your loss of faith in Christianity as the breakup of a gay relationship. Why? JOSEPH RICHARDS: One of the things I’ve been dealing

with since I was five years old is the nature of desire, especially queer desire and what that means. I think two things are at play here.

One is the absurdity that certain forms of Christianity would be so anti-gay, and yet they want people deeply in an intimate relationship with another man—nothing less than an intimate relationship; that’s how it’s thought of.

The punch line of my opening section is that I let Jesus come inside me, which is actually the whole thing: that Jesus comes into your heart. There’s nothing more intimate.

He’s the only person allowed into your bedroom every night. He’s supposed to be watching you while you’re asleep. So, already, how do you extricate that from a deity who is framed as male, as the Son of God—who, for some reason, needs to be in your bedroom every night?

The story is a way to acknowledge just how absurd it is that Christianity could frame it that way but not recognize its own framing is already queer.

An old Southern hymn calls him “Jesus, lover of my soul.”

The other thing, that I don’t fully explore in the piece is that southern male Christian heterosexuality is so weird

Joseph Richards

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

and fraught. It seems so always on the cusp, always trying to keep that tension: “OK, no, we’re just brothers in Christ.”

There’s a whole scene I cut out where I was in a youth group in high school. Several of us went upstairs with these young adult men who were the leaders. We all had this experience where we were like speaking in tongues, all kind of babbling and giddy. It’s like we all just had a spiritual orgy together. That’s the only way I can think of to frame it. Those bonds were very flirtatious in some ways.

I think that, in some ways, for southern Christian men who may have other-than-heterosexual desires, Jesus is the place they can put those desires.

Your character finds a different faith as your story develops: a faith in themself and their ability to perceive what’s actually happening in different relationships. But that journey begins with a loss of faith.

The story’s about a loss of faith and also about a loss of trust, particularly in spaces where you could be who you are and explore that fully.

But even more, I think this is a story about the loss of unconditional love. That’s what Jesus promises, right? But it’s not the reality of the situation. It’s the story of how we try to find love in different places in our lives, and acceptance as we’re learning who we are. And sometimes, we get hooked on people or relationships that twist us up in ways that require a lot of undoing. For me, the whole piece is untwisting those threads.

Abusive relationships promise a certain intimacy, but after the initial seduction phase, the abuser becomes increasingly dissatisfied and controlling. It’s interesting that you find this dynamic in a relationship with a religious figure.

Ultimately, it’s a very controlling, contingent kind of love.

The Christian version of God is incredibly capricious; his emotions can go from “I’ve created you and love you” to “I will wipe you off the face of the earth.”

Your character’s relationships with Jesus and others are in a crisis over authenticity and self-abandonment. Your character’s so dominated and overrun, they’re basically a proxy to Jesus. They can’t have authentic relationships, because they can’t let themself be present.

A lot of times, I don’t think we recognize the selfabandonment that’s an obligation, that’s required in these spiritual relationships. But how we treat ourselves in a spiritual relationship is how we’re also potentially going to treat ourselves in a human, material, corporeal relationship.

It’s just reflective.

My relationship with Jesus was reflective of my own self-abandonment, my own self saying, “Well, I can’t be myself, so let me try to be whoever I’m with right now. Let me try to be their version of me.” Through this piece, I’ve come to realize that there is no real material difference for me between my relationship with Jesus and my relationship with another human being. The patterns are the same, the traumas are the same, and the healing is the same. W INDYweek.com

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A RT From Outgoing VAE executive Photoleft: caption goes here director PHOTO TK Brandon Cordrey and incoming executive director Kayla Coleman PHOTO BY JADE WILSON / COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

Though it’s natural to regard this as VAE 4.0, it seems that phase 3 might have a lot of life left after Cordrey.

T

VAE 4.0 How the progressive momentum of Brandon Cordrey’s leadership lured his replacement, Kayla Coleman, away from a plum job in New York City and back to the nonprofit fundraising fray BY BRIAN HOWE arts@indyweek.com

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ince VAE Raleigh first opened in 1980, the community arts nonprofit and First Friday fixture has had three distinct phases. For the first 25 years, it was mainly just a place to show and sell local art; its name, which stands for Visual Art Exchange, is a vestige of that time.

For the next 10 years, while briskly rotating through exhibits, the nonprofit refocused on professional-development services, with programs to help artists with everything from retail to taxes.

Its third phase, which began around 2015, has been more fluid. A period of soul-searching, experimentation, and concerted change has produced the twin values of transparency and accountability. Those values are now enshrined in a publicly available policy that emphasizes community leadership, social justice, and diversity—one that was set in motion years before the Black Lives Mat18

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ter protests of 2020 compelled many arts organizations to grapple with these issues for the first time.

Though he would be the last person to claim sole credit for it, this transformative phase has coincided with the tenure of Brandon Cordrey, who will step down as executive director at the end of the year.

His replacement, the result of a national search, is Kayla G. Coleman, whom the public can meet at an annual fundraising gala on February 26 at Raleigh’s Dorton Arena.

Coleman’s move to VAE means that she will be leaving her job as deputy director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, which allocates a fraction of city-funded construction budgets to public art.

That a small, relatively obscure nonprofit should draw such a hire underlines the concrete advances in financial sustainability and ethical clarity it has made in recent years.

hough born and raised in Harlem, Kayla Coleman has family in Raleigh and has regularly visited. Over the last two years, working for New York City’s Department of cultural affairs, she has spread hundreds of site-specific art projects through the five boroughs. The role was the first time she’s ever had one full-time arts job rather than patchworking together part-time gigs, and it came as a relief.

And yet, Coleman says, when the VAE job posting went up, “I said, ‘Kayla, this is for you.’ Middle of the day, on the clock, I put my work aside and started an application.

I don’t even remember what I wrote, it was almost like a stream of consciousness took over.”

Whatever it was, Cordrey says it earned the instant and unanimous approval of the hiring committee. Coleman also had a deep background in nonprofits and community art spaces, which were still what she loved most, and was familiar with VAE, having attended a SPARKcon festival it produced.

“I enjoy the work I was doing with the city, in that it was already funded and providing opportunities to artists,” she says. “But I felt really stifled, even silenced, in a way. God forbid that I say the wrong thing on the internet and The New York Times decides it’s an official statement from the city. The work I do involves using my voice.”

Coleman first went to college at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia. “I’m a child of immigrants, so I was supposed to be a doctor,” she says, laughing. “I was taking the worst course I’ve ever taken, Statistics of Psychology. I had never failed anything in my life, but I failed it because I was reading my gen ed art history textbook instead of studying.”

She knew that she wanted to study art, but the school had only a minor, so she moved back home. There, she hustled to pay off student loans and double majored in gallery and museum studies and photography at Queensborough Community College, a CUNY school. Next were four years of art history at Brooklyn College, followed by grad school at City College in Harlem.

“All my studies were at CUNY, and I would not change it,” Coleman says. “There are all kinds of ideas about where one should go and how that affects your career, but I enjoyed going to school in New York City. While I was doing these courses, I was also going to the openings on Tuesday and Thursday nights and drinking the cheap wine and networking.”

In her work for the city, Coleman is particularly proud of getting art into public schools without art programs; before that, she did similarly service-oriented work in places like an overpoliced South Bronx neighborhood. Her interest in the racial and commercial dynamics of the art world began

with the same gen ed art history textbook.

“I was looking for myself in it, and, living in Harlem, I know that Black people made this stuff, so why isn’t it here?” she says.

“I discovered this question that fuels me: Who controls the discourse, who controls the narrative, who gets to say what has historical relevance?”

As a newcomer to Raleigh, Coleman says that she’s not eager to upset VAE’s foundation, which is freshly painted and working well, though she agrees with the suggestion that Raleigh provides more room to try, fail, and try again at the unprofitable work of creating a just arts culture than the high-stakes New York art world does, especially with VAE’s existing progressive momentum.

“One thing I love about VAE is that they’re very transparent, and they have this amazing strategic plan,” Coleman says. “I could see myself in that. I could see the amazing work they had been doing and how I could contribute. The diversity of their board and staff let me know they are very open to different perspectives and serving the community. I think it’s amazing Brandon was able to do that in the time he was able to do it—because, let me tell you, that kind of work isn’t happening in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world.”

B

randon Cordrey is from Rutherfordton, a tiny rural town in western North Carolina. Though artistic role models were hard to come by, he started drawing and painting at an early age.

“Practical humans surrounded me,” he says. “But my dad had an auto body shop, so the idea of painting a car—those very perfect finishing touches, doing something in the correct, layered process— took hold.”

Later, while studying painting and drawing at East Carolina University, he also worked at the Greenville Museum of Art and had a lofty-sounding title directing arts programming for the city, which mainly involved tiring out summer camp kids in fields.

After he graduated in 2010, a friend suggested Raleigh for its affordable housing (yes, just a decade ago); there, Cordrey landed in a full-time apprenticeship with the famously colorful, cantankerous late gallerist Lee Hansley.

“That was the first time I got to fully lay out an exhibition,” Cordrey remembers. “If Lee wasn’t paying attention, he’d let me do it.”

After three years with Hansley, Cordrey moved on to a hodgepodge of jobs, working simultaneously at Flanders Gallery, the

“I discovered this question that fuels me: Who controls the discourse, who controls the narrative, who gets to say what has historical relevance?”

YMCA, CAM Raleigh, and, most important, Arts Access, which serves adults and children with disabilities.

“When I met Betsy [Ludwig], I texted my husband, ‘Oh, she has the job that I want,’” Cordrey says. “It’s art, but it also matters.

It has a purpose beyond putting paintings on a wall.”

All of these experiences honed Cordrey’s interest in the practical, granular ways that art can meet community needs.

“Sometimes, the arts get used to paper over problems—literally murals on the sides of police stations,” Cordrey says. “I hate art speak, and I hate going into a space and reading the wall text, the ‘liminal layers’ and all that. I think funders should drill down more on how this is helping the community.”

Cordrey connected with VAE when Erika Corey, its director of operations, hired him as a contract worker for the freewheeling public arts festival SPARKcon at a time when a part-time exhibitions manager position happened to be opening.

Executive director Sarah Powers hired him in 2013. Three years later, when she left to helm the Office of Raleigh Arts, the board voted in Cordrey. He slowed down the gallery’s pace, trimmed its programs, and started to take stock.

“I’m very lucky because I inherited such a concrete foundation from Sarah’s work,” Cordrey says. “In 11 years, she had built a loyal following of financial supporters and volunteers and artists. It was a process that worked, but it was a very hectic pace.”

In Cordrey’s view, VAE has always evolved to meet the needs of its moment.

When spaces for emerging artists were scarce, VAE met that need. Later, when such spaces had proliferated and bred a generation of artists that needed profes-

sional guidance, VAE did that too, opening a retail shop and educational program for local artisans in a time before DECO and Edge of Urge.

Then, when organizations like Triangle ArtWorks ably took up those functions, VAE “began to ask a lot of questions,” Cordrey says. “Why are the arts so white?

What is the end goal? Why do opportunities and funding seem to funnel so narrowly in Raleigh? How can art provide real opportunities or solve problems rather than just generating conversations about them?”

As VAE’s programming has grown more representative of Raleigh, its board of directors, almost all white when Cordrey took over, now has no single-race majority. Diversity has grown among what was once an all-white, able-bodied, and predominantly female staff. Employees now receive health care options, paid time off, and salaries that are competitive, as far as arts nonprofits go. And, according to Cordrey, funding for artists has increased 18-fold, with significant gains from a longsought Andy Warhol Foundation grant.

More uncertain is where VAE will be located this time next year. Since leaving its longtime home on West Martin Street, it’s had a temporary lease with TheGifted Arts on Glenwood Avenue, but that expires sometime in 2022 when a construction project begins.

“I’d really love to find a space for VAE, but the control freak in me has to let that go,” Cordrey says, laughing. “Or, maybe I’ll sign a lease in the next four weeks.”

For Cordrey, a white man, the logical endgame of his efforts to undermine white supremacy in his role at VAE was for him to give it up. He wasn’t sure what he would do when he decided to leave, but he recently accepted a position as development director for North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm that aids incarcerated people and advocates for criminal-justice reforms.

“I really enjoy having goals and meeting them, and VAE was up for that when I got here,” he says, sitting before a banner emblazoned with the brief, direct mission statement about social consciousness.

“Now, we can actually afford to pay someone who doesn’t look like me or rely on second income from a partner—the systems that keep holding white leaders in the top spots in these nonprofits. Kayla’s qualifications were impressive, and it was remarkable how aligned she was with VAE’s current thinking on equitable compensation for artists, how programming should be built through community collaboration, and racial-disability-queer justice more broadly in the arts.” W

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Ali Siddiq $22. Dec. 10-12, various times.

Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh.

The Comedy Experience: EJ Nonstop $10. Wed, Dec. 8, 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

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Atmospheric Memory by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer $15. Dec. 2-17, various times. Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill.

Durham Craft Market Holiday Show Sun, Dec. 12, 10 a.m. Durham Central Park, Durham.

The Art of Giving Nov. 16-Dec. 31, various times.

Hillsborough Gallery of the Arts, Hillsborough.

Lunchtime Lecture: “NCMA Artists in Mucha’s Time” $5 (members), $7 (nonmembers). Thurs, Dec. 9, 12 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

ARTsy People of Color Pop Up Market Sat, Dec. 11, 1 p.m. Pure Soul, Durham.

CONCENERGY at The Hive: 2021 Artists Ball $55.

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Winter Craft Market Sat, Dec. 11, 9 a.m. University Place, Chapel Hill.

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Ugly Sweater Comedy Show $12. Sat, Dec. 11, 8 p.m. The PITCH, Chapel Hill.

Storybook Tales $19.50. Sat, Dec. 11, 2 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

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Cary Arts Center, Cary.

CSSB: Adeem the Artist / Al Riggs / DJ Severed Fingers $10. Fri, Dec. 10, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Delta Rae: The Light & Dark Tour $20. Fri, Dec. 10, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

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Nothing with Bambara and Midwife $18 (advance), $20 (day of). Wed, Dec. 8, 8 p.m. Motorco, Durham.

Spreadloves / Daring for Glory $5+ (suggested donation). Fri, Dec. 10, 9 p.m. The Cave, Chapel Hill.

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Domestic travel up to 15%. Reqs MS in any engg or quant discipline, & 2 yrs post-Bach exp in statistics (or a BS & 5 yrs progressively resp exp). Qualifying exp must incl: dvlpg innovative analytical approaches; statistical methods; predictive modeling; data mining; claims data; communicating effectively w/ mgmt; SAS; SQL. Drug screen / b-ground check. Resumes: Amy.Wilson2@evernorth.com Financial Analyst (Raleigh, NC) Financial Analyst sought by RTP Capital Advisors, LLC in Raleigh, NC to conduct quantitative analyses of fin’l data for real estate transactions, incl valuation. Must have a Master’s deg in Business, Finance, Mktg, or a related field of study & 1 yr of exp performing fin’l analysis as a Fin’l or Business Analyst/Specialist, or a related role. Must have exp with each of the following special skills: fin’l underwriting & modeling for business proposals; fin’l analysis & Net present value discounting models with fin’l modeling in Excel & Google Sheets; sales comparables & rent comparables research using Internal sales & external sales data; word processing s/ware, incl Microsoft Office Suite & Google Apps Suite; Google Drive; Loopnet; & internal chat channels. Applicants are reqd to send their resume to info@rtpcap.com or 555 Fayetteville St, Ste 300, Raleigh, NC 27601.

Software Engineer IV (Raleigh, NC) Software Engineer IV, F/T, at Truist (Raleigh, NC). Dsgn enterprise solutions, aligning w/ various stakeholders & defining the application architecture. Influence or manage multiple scrum teams. Must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, or related tech’l field. Must have 8 yrs of progressive exp in s/ware engg or IT consulting positions performing the following: applying in-depth knowl in info systems & understanding of key business processes & competitive strategies related to the IT function to identify, apply, & implmt IT best practices; applying broad functional knowl in reqmt gathering, analysis, dsgn, dvlpmt, testing, implmtn, & deployment of applications; planning & managing projects & solving complex problems by applying best practice; providing direction & mentoring less exp’d teammates; & utilizing exp w/: Rally, SOAP UI, Swift, Mobile Applications (incl iOS, &roid & XCode), AWS, GIT, Maven, JavaScript/Angular, HTML, & Java. Email resume w/ cvr ltr to: Paige Whitesell, Paige.

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