4.20 Indy Week

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Durham | Chapel Hill April 20, 2022

STEALTH SLATE SC H OOL

BY THOMASI MCDONALD, P. 10

The Durham GOP (yes, it exists) wants to take over the county school board

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

"My biggest goal has been, 'How can I make this as welcoming an environment as possible?' says Durham butcher Anna Gibala, the owner of Moonbelly Meat Co., p. 16

VOL. 39 NO. 16

CONTENTS

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

NEWS 5

A total of ten candidates are competing to be Wake County's next sheriff.

BY JASMINE GALLUP

8

Twitter trolls enthralled with Elon Musk harassed a Duke professor to the point that she's fearful for her personal safety. BY NICOLE KAGAN 10 Conservative candidates are stealthily trying to win seats on Durham's school board. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

ARTS & CULTURE 14

A conversation with the historian Treva B. Lindsey about her new book, America, Goddam: Violence, Black women, and the Struggle for Justice.

BY KYESHA JENNINGS

16 Durham butcher Anna Gibala carves out an innovative new space with Moonbelly Meat Co. BY LENA GELLER 17 18

The New York Department of Sanitation's artist-in-residence, sTo Len, shifts from the Hudson to the Haw. BY BRIAN HOWE Garnishing a deeply local loneup with Big Boi, the Hip Hop South Festival closes the gap between the academy and the culture. BY BRIAN HOWE

THE REGULARS 3

15 Minutes

4

Op-ed

20 Culture Calendar

COVER llustration by Jon Fuller

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER S Wake County

MaryAnn Kearns

Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards

John Hurld

Staff Writers Jasmine Gallup Thomasi McDonald Lena Geller

EDITOR I AL

Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

Editor in Chief Jane Porter

Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods

Durham/Orange/ Chatham Counties

Managing Editor Geoff West

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April 20, 2022

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Contributors Madeline Crone, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Gabi Mendick, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Harris Wheless

C RE ATI V E

A D V E RTI S I N G

Creative Director

Wake County MaryAnn Kearns

Annie Maynard Graphic Designer

Jon Fuller Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

Durham/Orange/ Chatham Counties John Hurld Sales Digital Director & Classifieds Mathias Marchington

C I RC U L ATI O N Berry Media Group

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BACK TA L K

Last week, reader Iain Burnett emailed us to say that gentrification isn’t necessarily a bad thing and criticized housing justice coalition ONE Wake for lobbying the Wake County Commission to create a grant to support homeowners at risk of displacement. On behalf of ONE Wake, FR. JEMONDE TAYLOR of St. Ambrose Episcopal Church and REV. LISA YEBUAH of Southeast Raleigh Table take issue with a number of the assertions in last week’s letter, as outlined in the following response:

Iain Burnett’s letter to the editor last week (“Gentrification Needs to Hire a PR Firm”) criticized ONE Wake’s campaign to convince the Wake County Commissioners to create a new, countywide grant program to support long-time, low-income homeowners at risk of displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods.

The letter was inaccurate to the point of misinformation, so we at ONE Wake are writing to set the record straight. In his letter, Mr. Burnett equated our proposed grant program to Proposition 13 in California, which is statewide legislation that restricts property tax increases.

ONE Wake is not proposing anything remotely similar to Proposition 13 (something which the Wake County Commissioners don’t have the authority to implement anyway).

Instead, ONE Wake is calling on the Wake County Commissioners to implement a grant program similar to what has already been passed in several other North Carolina counties, including nearby Orange and Durham Counties. This program would provide financial assistance for long-time, low-income homeowners who pay more than a certain percentage of their household income on property taxes.

Mr. Burnett also states that he looked up ONE Wake’s proposed “legislation” on our website, and that the cost “amounts to a 1cent/$100 property value tax.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Burnett is wrong again. It appears he mistakenly reviewed the details for an entirely separate ONE Wake campaign to create a designated fund to finance and preserve affordable housing developments in Cary. This campaign is limited to Cary; it is not designed to address the issue of rising property taxes, and the designated fund only has implications for the Town of Cary’s budget.

Throughout his letter, Mr. Burnett struggles with our idea to create a new grant that, in his words, would “distort the housing market” or break the “natural housing cycle.” This is a concept that deserves a strong refutation.

There is nothing natural about the housing market today. Many of the neighborhoods that have seen the highest increases in property taxes are historically Black neighborhoods where government at every level has intervened for generations to keep values artificially low through segregation and redlining.

Now, private investment is pouring into neighborhoods long considered undesirable by white lenders and families. The resulting gentrification in communities across Wake County like College Park and Rochester Heights in Raleigh, Kingswood in Cary, West Town in Wendell, and the Northeast Community in Wake Forest is the “kissing cousin” of this history of segregation.

ONE Wake is calling on the Wake County Commissioners to lead the way in addressing this injustice, either through a property tax assistance grant as we have originally proposed, or through a Homeowner Care Fund that could provide equivalent public investment to longtime, low-income homeowners.

You can learn more at www.onewake.org/tax_explainer

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Burlington

15 MINUTES Crystal Cavalier, 44 Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, District 4

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I’m an enrolled citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation here in Alamance County. There’s a big Native American presence here [in Alamance, Orange, and Caswell Counties]. We’ve been here for 400 years.

District 4 is the land of my ancestors, so running is really symbolic to me.

I used to work in DC for the federal government. I worked at Homeland Security as an analyst, and then I worked as a special assistant to the chief of staff for the US General Services Administration.

What experience do you have in community service?

I was a former tribal councilwoman, but I stepped down in 2018 so I could advocate against the Mountain Valley pipeline. I cofounded 7 Directions of Service, which is an environmental education nonprofit. During this whole pipeline movement, [my husband and I have] been trying to educate people about sacred places, protection, eminent domain, and property rights. I also founded and am the executive director of Missing Murdered Indigenous Women Coalition of North Carolina.

What are your policy goals?

I’m focused on the environment, health care, and education. [“Environment”] is kind of a buzzword, especially in this election, but I’m not hearing the urgency [we need] with respect to our vulnerability. No one has been standing up for Mother Earth. Corporations are damaging our water, our land, and I’m telling you, we’re not getting any more land.

There’s no more land being produced.

Environment kind of interconnects with health care because I always say the health of the water in the area

determines the health of the people. As a country, we no longer reflect our prosperity as it relates to the health of our citizens. Health care for all is what I’m going for. We need to bite that bullet and reinvent that wheel and put the health of our people first, especially our children and elders.

I’m a mother of five with my husband, [and] we are so behind in education. We’re arguing whether education is too much information for our citizens or not enough, and we’re just wasting money to argue these points.

These politicians get on the floor and they just filibuster over crazy stuff. Meanwhile, our children are just academically left behind and they can’t compete globally. Our children are our best citizens.

What distinguishes you as a candidate?

Why should people vote for you?

We’ve seen what safe and predictable, PAC-funded representation looks like and what it feels like: apathetic, stagnant, disappointing. Now we have a chance to decide if we continue to vote for the suit or if we shift our trust and vote for the boot. We have to have that boot that’s on the ground.

I’ve been doing this work on the ground for so long, being out in the community, meeting people. I advocate, I educate. I’m no different from anybody else, but I just have gotten so fed up with how these representatives who we elect only come around when it’s election season. I’ve been out here fighting for people’s clean water, whether they know it or not, I’ve been fighting.

Social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, economic justice, all of those isms that you can think of.

It’s all rolled in together. I always tell people, “Together, we will rise.” W Read an extended version of this Q&A at indyweek.com INDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

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OP - E D

New Green Deal North Carolina is ready to lead on cannabis legalization. Here’s how we can get it done even with a GOP majority in charge.

BY GRAIG MEYER backtalk@indyweek.com

R

ight now, as readers pick up a copy of this column, there are students at UNC and Duke who are smoking or otherwise consuming cannabis with little fear of repercussions.

Meanwhile, all over North Carolina, Black and brown users of the exact same drug are being arrested and convicted at over twice the rate of their white counterparts.

There’s nothing new here. The war on cannabis and broader “War on Drugs” has always been pursued selectively. And while we might want to dismiss the law enforcement zeal of the 1980s and 1990s—with its racist disparities between prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine—as a relic of another time, we cannot.

As Attorney General Josh Stein and I discussed recently, racial justice issues in North Carolina cannot be addressed without taking on the continued prohibition of cannabis. In North Carolina people of color make up more than 60 percent of convictions for marijuana possession, despite being only 30 percent of the population, and despite the fact that the drug is consumed roughly equally across racial lines, according to Governor Cooper’s racial equity task force.

Arrest and conviction have implications far beyond a fine and time behind bars.

Criminal punishment often leads to crippling, lifelong issues, like the loss of housing, difficulty finding employment, and even challenges to a parent’s custody of their children.

It’s time for a change. Whether you care about safety in your community, honestly dealing with abuse and addiction, racial justice reform, or raising tax revenue, cannabis prohibition—which has always been rooted more in racism than in concerns over public health—is outdated and must end.

We can make this change responsibly, with a bipartisan effort in the General Assembly.

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April 20, 2022

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“There are many issues on which my Republican colleagues and I may never agree. But on this, I believe there is a chance for joint action.”

It is time for bold reforms. North Carolina should learn from states that have already gone down this path and do this in the way that is right for our people. We have to guard against growing cannabis outside the legal system. We have to carefully regulate the products for consumer safety. We have to deter underage use by avoiding harmful advertising and funding strong health and safety education programs. And we have to ensure that the economic benefits of legalization help reinvest in the communities most damaged by our terrible history with cannabis.

That’s why last year Senator Jay Chaudhuri and I pushed forward and introduced House Bill 576, the Marijuana Justice and Reinvestment Act. Our bill sets out a framework for decriminalizing marijuana and expunging the criminal records of those people who have been convicted of offenses that would no longer be illegal. The bill would regulate and tax the sale of cannabis. And it would dedicate portions of the economic opportunity and tax revenues to reinvesting in the communities most damaged by the war on drugs.

Broad majorities of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike— agree that the draconian crackdown on drugs that ruined the lives of millions and continues to have repercussions today went too far and was largely a failure.

Those numbers include upward of 80 percent of Republicans.

With the proper safeguards, planning, and regulation, I am ready to work across

the aisle with my GOP colleagues to make cannabis legalization a reality. My Republican colleagues see legal sales ready to begin in Virginia as early as next year—and the billions that come along with it in tax revenue. They see a political environment where 21 states and territories, including Washington, DC, have already legalized.

In the South, even Louisiana and Mississippi have legalized medical cannabis, finally acknowledging the health benefits that cancer and other sufferers of chronic illness have touted from the shadows for generations.

What we can’t do, what I will not do, is continue to pretend that the use of cannabis isn’t widespread already. Turning a blind eye to this issue is no longer an option. It is time for a legal system to regulate and tax this widely used drug.

What North Carolina can do is put in place a system that is the gold standard and envy of the rest of the nation. We can do this by implementing a new legal cannabis regime in a framework that: • Uses generated tax dollars to reinvest in communities of color. Taxation of cannabis will be a huge windfall for North Carolina. We must use a large portion of these proceeds to invest in communities that have been hardest hit by racist selective enforcement.

• Allows North Carolinians to benefit from raising, producing, and selling cannabis. In other states, multinational corporations control the marketplace and take profits away from

the community. North Carolinians need a chance to prosper from every part of this new economy.

• Uses safeguarding mechanisms even stronger than our liquor distribution model. Love them or hate them, ABC stores allow the state to control place, price, and distribution, leading to one of the lowest rates of alcohol abuse in the country while also generating more revenue for the state than a private sales model. Cannabis should have even stronger state control, including the use of a state lab that is responsible for testing and labeling product.

• Supports a robust public health advocacy campaign. This will discourage underage and other irresponsible uses— such as driving while intoxicated—and inform residents about the science behind cannabis, not the hype. If there’s ever been an industry that doesn’t need advertising to be popular, this is it. Simply put, cannabis should be legalized but not glamorized.

There are many issues on which my Republican colleagues and I may never agree. But on this, I believe there is a chance for joint action. The people of North Carolina are ready. We should seize the opportunity to deliver a legalization regime that moves North Carolina past the fear and stigma of the drug wars and into a 21st century that responsibly ends prohibition and creates a fairer and more prosperous society for all.

I’m ready to lead us there. W Rep. Graig Meyer is a Democrat representing House District 50. He is a candidate for North Carolina Senate, District 23, in the Democratic primary on May 17. The new state senate district includes Orange, Person, and Caswell Counties.

N E WS

Wake County

Candidates’ Recent Campaign Spending

New Sheriff in Town?

Why are so many people running to replace Wake County sheriff Gerald Baker after just one term in office?

$150,000 Key Money spent on campaign

$120,000

Self-funding

$90,000

$60,000

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

$30,000

T

en candidates. When there are 10 candidates in a political race, you know something is wrong. It’s only when people are clamoring for change—a shift in policy or leadership—that 10 people throw their hats in the ring.

The Wake County Sheriff’s Office has been in flux for the last several years, ever since Democrat Gerald Baker was elected in 2018. Baker, then an underdog who raised just $15,000 in donations, upset Republican sheriff Donnie Harrison, who had held the office since 2002.

Harrison’s policies during his 16 years as sheriff were a mix of moderate and conservative. He called for bail reform and pretrial release programs but also proposed the creation of an independent police force for Wake County schools and began cooperating with ICE to deport immigrants.

Harrison’s participation in the 287(g) program became a flash point during the 2018 campaign season, as liberals accused him of pushing then President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. Baker, a deputy at the time, pledged to end the county’s cooperation with ICE and improve relationships with heavily policed communities.

He took the election with a solid margin of about 10 percent, joining the wave of local Democrats who won races during the midterms.

Since then, however, Baker has faced significant criticism.

In 2020, hundreds of people gathered downtown to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the many other Black men and women killed by police. They were met with tear gas and less-lethal bullets fired by Raleigh police officers and Wake County Sheriff’s Office deputies.

“We want to see a sheriff who is committed to upholding folks’ constitutional rights to assemble and to protest without the fear of facing chemical weapons,” says Dawn Blagrove, executive director of Emancipate NC, a nonprofit aimed at ending mass incarceration and dismantling structural racism.

Blagrove and other advocates are unhappy with the pace of change since the Black Lives Matter movement resurged in 2020. Although Baker has done a “commendable job” of ending cooperation with ICE, ending overpolicing in Southeast Raleigh and changing the culture inside the sheriff’s

$0

Randolph Baity (D)

Joe Coley (D)

Cedric L. Tommy Herring Matthews (D) (D)

Willie Rowe (D)

Roy Taylor (D)

Donnie David Tivon Harrison Blackwelder Howard (R) (R) (R)

*Gerald Baker’s campaign has reported no expenditures as of 12/31/21, according to campaign finance reports from NCSBE

office, he’s not the “pillar of progressive policing reform” people hoped for, Blagrove says.

“The elected officials of Wake County are definitely on some kind of time delay. They are not in tune with the needs of their constituency, and I think they are not responding rapidly enough to demands for change,” Blagrove says.

“We know [strong and sweeping changes] are possible.

We’ve seen really progressive policies being implemented all over the country, and we have seen positive outcomes from those changes.”

What do people want from the next sheriff?

Emancipate NC supports a variety of law enforcement reforms that are becoming increasingly popular nationwide, according to polls by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Republicans and Democrats alike say communities will be safer when officials reduce the number of people in prison and increase treatment of mental illness and addiction, according to a 2015 survey. Overall, voters say they think officials should focus more on rehabilitation than incarceration.

Blagrove says Wake County’s next sheriff should be someone with a deliberate plan to reduce jail populations, especially given that detention centers are understaffed.

He or she should also ensure incarcerated people are being treated humanely—that they have adequate access to health care, education, nutritious food, and phones so they can speak with their family, Blagrove says.

In another survey last year, the ACLU found that 66 percent of voters support “eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession and reinvesting drug enforcement resourc-

es into treatment and addiction services.” Again, those views align with those of Emancipate NC, which is pushing for a reduction or elimination of prosecution of low-level marijuana charges, Blagrove says.

In past years, there’s been little transparency and less accountability from law enforcement, Blagrove adds. Emancipate NC wants to see the next sheriff publicize information about disciplinary actions that are taken against deputies, as well as who is promoted and how. Investigations into misconduct should be outsourced to an independent group, Blagrove says.

“We have a lot of pretend progressives, people who say the right thing, who show up during election time and promise things, but when it comes to actually using the power that was given them to implement those transformative changes, they no longer have the political will to do so,” Blagrove says.

“Hopefully with these upcoming elections, the people will once again use the power of their vote to find people … who will be actual progressives and use the power of their offices to implement real systemic change.”

Who’s likely to win?

Among the candidates for Wake County sheriff, seven are Democrats and three are Republicans. With such a crowded field, name recognition may end up counting for a lot. In that arena, Baker and Harrison have the advantage.

Next month’s primary will whittle the number of candidates down to just two, a Democrat and a Republican, who will ultimately face off in November’s general election.

Despite the upswell of support for liberal police reform, HarINDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

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rison or another Republican may have a shot at taking back the sheriff’s seat. Democratic turnout will likely be low with President Joe Biden in office during the midterms.

Whoever does win the race will control the flow of nearly $102 million through the sheriff’s office, plus oversee more than 900 employees, some on patrol and some in Wake County’s detention centers. The sheriff also heads up the county’s permitting process for guns, serves warrants and eviction notices, and patrols the Wake County Justice Center and courthouse.

Who are the Democratic candidates?

GERALD M. BAKER, 59 Baker’s platform has remained unchanged since his 2018 election. If reelected, he plans to continue his work “restoring the integrity” of the office, he says. Baker points to his reorganization of the agency as a success and says he and his employees have “answered the call” to address the COVID19 crisis and civil unrest.

Baker’s hiring and firing policies have caused some controversy, however. The sheriff got into hot water this year when it was reported he faced four lawsuits from five different employees. One suit, in which former longtime deputy and chief of operations Richard Johnson alleged wrongful termination, was settled for $99,999 last week. Three other people allege discrimination and retaliation.

Baker says the Johnson lawsuit was “frivolous” and other allegations are purely political. In a report from The News & Observer, Baker said the lawsuits he’s facing are from people who would not accept the new leadership and expected to continue problematic practices that existed under the previous administration.

During a conversation with the INDY, Baker dropped a lot of buzzwords—“transparency,” “diversity,” “accountability”—but some may question whether his efforts to prioritize those principles have resulted in real change. In talking about changes he’s made, Baker cited his creation of a community relations unit, the seizure of 40 million grams of drugs in the past three years, and increased patrol of lakes and waterways.

“Being accountable for your staff, the training, the policy, [setting] expectations, it starts at the top,” Baker says. “I did that immediately, when I walked in. We’re accountable for who we are and what we do.”

RANDOLPH BAITY, 46 Baity, like the five other Democratic candidates, is a political outsider with years 6

April 20, 2022

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of law enforcement experience. He currently works as a police officer with the Clayton Police Department in Johnston County, continuing a 22-year career in policing.

Baity says one of his top priorities is community engagement, a major talking point among all candidates in the race.

Baity plans to build trust between law enforcement and citizens with a quarterly meeting between the sheriff, police chiefs, and residents. “[People] don’t want to fear police intimidation, fear excessive force, police brutality,” Baity says. “In order to bridge those gaps we got to have not only communication, but you got to have leadership in the community. The sheriff needs to be available and visible.”

Baity also wants to enact a “duty to intervene” policy, which means if an officer on the scene sees another officer engaging in misconduct, they have a duty to do something. When officers do “egregious things,” they shouldn’t be given the opportunity to resign and move to a different department, Baity says.

“My vision is to bring resources to the community,” he says. “I want to bring in a human trafficking task force. I want to implement a citizens’ academy program, so citizens can be a part of law enforcement, so we can learn from each other.”

JOE COLEY, 51 Coley is a sergeant with the State Capitol Police, which guards government buildings.

Like other candidates, he’s hit on some of the biggest issues currently facing the sheriff’s office, namely understaffing.

“The first major thing that’s got to be done is we got to get more deputies and more detention officers,” Coley said in an interview with WRAL. “Right now, the jail’s working on emergency staffing. That makes it unsafe for the people who are incarcerated there. Definitely makes it unsafe for the officers.”

Coley says he wants to make the county safe again by hiring more officers and lessening call response times. His plan for community involvement revolves around historically successful programs like senior well-check and citizen’s academy.

Ultimately, Coley is a solid candidate, but he’s mostly running on issues that are widely accepted as necessary to the continued survival of the sheriff’s office. His talking points don’t include some of the progressive reforms activists are pushing for.

CEDRIC L. HERRING, 53 Herring, a retired sergeant of State Highway Patrol, has an audible passion for social justice. He speaks ardently about the

need for sweeping change in the sheriff’s office, including ending overpolicing, releasing body camera footage, and reallocating money from guns to de-escalation training.

Herring says change starts with recognizing the current culture of policing, that “Black and brown people are treated a certain way.”

Today’s police culture rewards making arrests, even if it’s for low-level offenses like vagrancy, Herring says. He plans to meet with police chiefs to talk about why officers are taking so many people to jail for low-level crimes. Next, he wants to talk to the magistrate about releasing people on a promise to appear instead of a $500 bond they can’t pay.

“If everybody is on board where we’re trying to go with this, then we can have true police reform,” Herring says. “But it won’t happen until you got a sheriff that is in agreement that there’s a true issue with the way officers have been conducting themselves out here.”

Herring’s first priority, if elected, is to recruit and retain more officers, he says.

Like other candidates, he notes the current lack of patrol and detention staff creates a public safety issue. When Herring worked for the sheriff’s office in the early 2000s, there were about 20 or 25 cars on the road to patrol half a million people, he says. Today, there are eight cars on the road, patrolling 1.2 million people.

Herring is determined to implement reform, but is it enough? Although he has plenty of on-the-ground law enforcement experience, he lacks political experience that may enable him to hit the ground running. Herring says he will be a “working sheriff,” getting out into the community and leading by example.

“The sheriff’s office is struggling right now because they have no structure. No one knows what the other person is supposed to be doing, so no one’s doing anything,” Herring says. “Walking in the door, that is one of the first things we have to do.”

TOMMY MATTHEWS, 68 Matthews, after spending about 25 years in the investigations department of the sheriff’s office, first retired in 2004 as a major. He then went on to serve under Republican sheriff Harrison as the assistant director of detention services, working to improve medical and mental health care for people who were incarcerated.

Matthews has a good record on improving the conditions in the detention center, including training staff on federal labor standards, sexual harrasment, and the use of personal protective equipment.

He’s also talked about increasing trans-

parency and improving the relationship between Wake County schools and school resource officers.

But Matthews’s platform doesn’t revolve around progressive police reform. Rather, he stands on issues widely supported by the majority of people—improving mental health care, improving community engagement, and reducing the officer turnover rate.

WILLIE ROWE, 62 Rowe, yet another former law enforcement officer aiming to take the top job in the county, has a little more management experience than some other candidates.

During his 28 years at the sheriff’s office, he helped develop policy, manage the budget, and supervise staff and daily operations, he says.

Rowe is also deeply embedded in the community he hopes to serve. He is a deacon at First Baptist Church, where he has worked to increase affordable housing, reduce homelessness, and reach out to at-risk youth. If elected, Rowe plans to hold weekly meetings with community members, he says.

“The purpose of those meetings is for me to listen and learn, to hear concerns and gather the input of the community,” Rowe says. “[We need to] establish open and honest communication so the community and law enforcement can work together to prevent crime and create opportunity. This way, people don’t feel like they have to resort to crime as a means of survival or acceptance.”

Rowe has a somewhat old-school approach to policing. When people vote for him, they will get “proven leadership, proven experience, and proven relationships,” he says.

On reform, Rowe says the sheriff’s office needs to ensure it has a qualified, diverse, and inclusive workforce. Rowe also supports a pretrial release program and increased education opportunities for people in jail.

“We can’t arrest our way out,” he says.

“It’s really a matter of prevention, deterrence using education, awareness, and engagement.”

ROY TAYLOR, 59 Taylor, also a former employee of the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, brings some more diverse experience to the table.

In addition to spending 40 years in law enforcement—including serving as chief of police for several agencies—Taylor is a military veteran whose jobs included inspecting prisoner of war camps and managing disciplinary barracks.

In that role, Taylor had to ensure that the constitutional rights of imprisoned

Who are the Republican candidates?

DONNIE HARRISON, 76 Despite calls for change, Harrison’s vision for the sheriff’s office hasn’t changed much—not necessarily a bad strategy given that his former policies won him more than a decade in the seat.

If reelected, Harrison seems likely to reinstate the controversial 287(g) program, resuming cooperation with ICE. He stood by previous statements that the program helps keep immigrant communities safe, saying it keeps people who are wanted for crimes off the streets. Harrison says he will support the program “if I think it can make this county safer for the Hispanic community, or for anybody in this community.”

Harrison also plans to continue investment in mental health training and community engagement, he says. He cited his open-door policy as evidence he was available and willing to talk to residents.

Like other candidates, recruitment and retention of officers is a priority for Harrison. Harrison criticized the current administration, saying his experience will help him hit the ground running and reunite the agency.

“So many people don’t understand what law enforcement officers do,” Harrison says. “Even the news media don’t understand how quickly we have to make decisions involving our life and other people’s lives. So we’ve got to educate the public.

One thing I’ve said probably millions of times to my deputies [is] ‘Put God first, your family, your job, and treat people like you want to be treated.’”

DAVID BLACKWELDER, 36 Harrison’s defeat in 2018 has drawn other Republican candidates out of the woodwork, hoping to usher in a new era of leadership. Blackwelder, an attorney who works in antitrust law, presents a more liberal alternative to Harrison.

The former police officer has a checkered background, however. He was arrested in October for driving while intoxicated, a charge that was ultimately dismissed due to lack of witnesses. He’s been a strong critic of Baker’s administration, saying if elected, he will remove the sheriff’s right to hire and fire based on political affiliation.

Blackwelder worked as a police officer for 10 years before becoming disenchanted with the profession, he says. As sheriff, he thinks he can make a bigger difference in changing internal policies and ultimately rebuilding trust between law enforcement and the public.

If elected, Blackwelder says he plans to empower people in their interactions with police by educating them about their constitutional rights. He wants to start using consent forms for police searches to ensure people know what they’re agreeing to.

Blackwelder also supports the legalization of marijuana, he says.

TIVON HOWARD, 46 Howard, an officer with the Zebulon Police Department, has a platform almost identical to that of other candidates. Like some of his opponents, he supports mental health and de-escalation training for officers. He wants to address the opioid epidemic and engage the public with a Wake Citizen Corps program.

“I’m here for the community,” he says. “I’m willing to listen.”

Howard prioritizes transparency and wants to create a civilian board to oversee the promotion process, he says. He also has some ideas for improving officer morale— annual cost-of-living increases, for one—and reducing recidivism through education and community service. Overall, however, there’s nothing eye-catching about his platform.

And although he has on-the-ground experience, some may question whether he’s ready to take charge of the sheriff’s office. W

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people were upheld, he says. If elected, one of his priorities is to improve conditions for people in Wake County detention centers. Taylor plans to restart education programs, counseling programs, clergy visits, and substance abuse support groups in the jail, he says.

“With 1,500 people, you’ve got to house them, you have to clothe them, you have to feed them, you have to care for them,” Taylor says. “That means you have to be cognizant of their religious beliefs, their dietary needs, their medical needs, their psychiatric needs, their dental needs.”

Taylor also has a doctorate in criminal justice from Walden University and works as an expert witness. Having testified in cases where police officers shot and killed people, he’s a strong advocate of providing de-escalation training, demilitarizing the police, and teaching officers how to deal with people with mental illnesses.

“One of the things that happened to our country after 9/11 was that police officers were trained to be warriors and not guardians,” Taylor says. “Warriors occupy territory. We go in as soldiers and take over a piece of ground and control it.

Well, that’s not the job of law enforcement. Our job is to protect the community residents from harm.”

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Durham Missy Cummings (l), photo courtesy of Duke University; Elon Musk, photo from Wikimedia Commons

succeeds with the Twitter takeover and his promise to make his favorite battlefield “broadly inclusive.”

This account is based on the tweets and public statements made by the many parties involved, a Change.org petition, LinkedIn posts by Cummings, and the syllabus she used for her Duke engineering course at the time of the tumult on Twitter. Cummings declined to comment to The 9th Street Journal. Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to requests.

a man out of his chair with a single punch, suggesting she might do the same to Musk.

Cummings has since deleted and apologized for that tweet. “I was trying to make an admittedly bad joke that I would pull no punches if in a conversation with Elon Musk,” she posted in February. She clarified that she loves Tesla as a company and believes electric cars are the future, but feels obligated to voice the safety concerns she has with an automation system that is “terribly flawed.”

The apology apparently didn’t do much to mend her relationship with Musk or his fervent supporters.

When President Joe Biden appointed Cummings to be a senior adviser for safety at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on October 19, Tesla supporters immediately took to Twitter to air their grievances, however profane and inappropriate.

Insults were hurled at Cummings calling her “anti-American,” a “tacky, petty woman,” an “obnoxious female,” and a “b*tt hurt old woman.” One since-removed tweet responded to the news of Cummings’s appointment by saying, “If they try and take Autopilot [Tesla’s automated driving system] away from us we will riot so hard January 6 will look like a day at Disneyland.”

A handful of users voiced their support for Cummings online, saying, “Missy, I’m sorry this is happening. I support you!” or “thank you for your service Missy.” The Naturalistic Decision Making Association, an organization that helps clients navigate high-stakes decision-making, issued a statement acknowledging its support of Cummings. But these voices were far outnumbered.

Following her appointment, Cummings refrained from responding to the trolls. She was still directing research at Duke’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, which focuses on the interactions between humans and computers with autonomous features. (The lab’s acronym is HAL, a nod to the evil computer in one of Cummings’s favorite films, 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

“Killer robots”

No stranger to stress

The online feud traces back to at least 2017, when Cummings, a widely known former Navy pilot who became a professor in Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, began tweeting her concerns about Tesla’s highly automated cars, saying that they were “killing people,” among other criticisms.

Sometimes she was clinical, tweeting that Tesla’s autopilot technology gave drivers “mode confusion.” Other times she was blunt, saying that Tesla’s “killer robots” are so dangerous her students who tested them in the lab should “get hazardous duty pay.”

On occasion, she got personal toward Musk. Cummings went as far as posting a GIF of a woman knocking

During the Twitter battle, she was teaching a class at Duke’s engineering school called The Human Element in Cyber Security, lecturing her undergraduate students about cybersecurity breaches. On the last page of her class syllabus, Cummings pasted a link to a list of Duke resources meant to help students who are experiencing “a range of issues that could pose a challenge to learning” including anxiety, stress, and feeling down.

Cummings is no stranger to stress. Her interests put her in situations where she has to regularly contemplate life-or-death scenarios. She’s also no stranger to sexism or to being challenged by powerful men.

Musk Mob How Elon Musk and his trolls attacked a Duke professor on Twitter

BY NICOLE KAGAN backtalk@indyweek.com

I

t is not unusual for Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tweet 30 times a day. Twitter is his marketing platform, his customer service hub, and, unfortunately for his opponents, his battleground. (And now, he is seeking to buy it.)

Last October, Musk used Twitter to target Missy Cummings, a Duke University professor and automation expert. “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla,” he tweeted in response to one of his fans.

Those nine words—just the latest in an ongoing disagreement between two outsized personalities in the booming field of automation—unleashed a fury.

Musk’s tweet mobilized an army of virtual trolls that attacked Cummings, who initially responded with grace. “ Happy to sit down and talk with you anytime,” she tweeted back to Musk. This only enraged the trolls further, who smeared her online. And two days later, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of online harassment, Cummings deleted her Twitter account, stopped all public commentary, and for the next few months largely went silent online.

This is the tale of that feud, which represents two distinct viewpoints about the technology behind the nation’s most popular electric car. The feud continues to simmer in different corners of social media and will likely boil over in new ways in the future, especially if Musk 8

April 20, 2022

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“I am increasingly concerned about my personal safety around people who are clearly not capable of rational and reasoned thinking.”

In the Navy, men went out of their way to make Cummings’s life difficult. “I saw all the problems that come around with being one of a minority that’s trying to break into a majority,” she said in a podcast interview with Forward Thinking.

One of her call names, nicknames given to aviators, was Medusa, a formidable woman in Greek mythology.

Cummings pivoted to a new career path.

Her interest in preventing plane crashes led her to space systems engineering and eventually to Duke, where she focused on operator trust of autonomous systems and simulating unmanned robotic environments. The common thread: safety.

Written under the moniker “Autopilot Users for Progress,” the petition gained over 30,000 signatures in 48 hours before Change.org took it down due to “defamatory” content. The tweets however, continued to flood in, and on October 21, Cummings deleted her Twitter account.

This measure, though drastic, did little to tame the trolls. They continue to harass Cummings on Twitter, even if she may never see it. Some found her personal email and began to send her threats privately. The emails prompted Cummings, who had declined to comment on the attacks, to break her silence.

The trolls

“In case anything happens to me”

Cummings has seen what can happen when there is miscommunication between human and machine. It’s what compels her to speak out against Tesla.

Her main gripe is not with Musk, it’s with his refusal to incorporate a particular safety technology, LiDAR, into Tesla’s automation system.

LiDAR is a radar system that uses lasers to measure the distance between a sensor and surrounding objects. Cummings believes LiDAR is crucial for self-driving cars to accurately make sense of their surroundings. But Musk disagrees, calling the system “a fool’s errand.”

So, Cummings called him out.

The trolls responded right away. The day after her NHTSA appointment, one [troll] ventured beyond Twitter to create a petition on Change.org that called on the Biden administration to reconsider its appointment of Cummings to NHTSA due to “violation of agency guidelines and ethical principles concerning conflict of interest and bias.” It cited Cummings’s role on the board of directors at Veoneer, a Swedish automation company in competition with Tesla (she has since resigned); the unproven charge that she was a member of TSLAQ, an online collective of Tesla critics; and her public statements.

Two months ago, on her LinkedIn page, Cummings posted screenshots of threatening messages she’s received “so that there is a traceable and public record in case anything happens to me.”

The use of words like “consequences” and “karma” in these messages are what scares Cummings, she said. “I am increasingly concerned about my personal safety around people who clearly are not capable of rational and reasoned thinking,” she posted.

One person suggested on LinkedIn that Cummings seek protection from the university, but Cummings responded “unfortunately Duke has not been supportive, they are afraid of controversy.”

Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, declined to comment on her critical LinkedIn post.

Cummings also wrote, “When women say they are afraid for their physical #safety, especially those of us who are public facing, they need to be believed.” W

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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INDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

9

NEWS

Durham

Stealth Slate How conservative candidates are trying to win seats on the board of Durham Public Schools

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

L

ast month, the Durham-based partisan science data firm EQV Analytics published a report entitled Can the GOP Take Over Blue Durham County’s Board of Education? (They’re Betting On It).

Days later, INDY staffers began receiving emails expressing alarm about what’s being referred to as the “Better Board, Better Schools, Better Futures” (BBBS) slate of school board candidates.

Meghan Lyon wrote in an email that she and her husband reached out to District 3 school board candidate Gayathri Rajaraman to learn more about her platform.

“Her answers alarm me,” Lyon says.

Lyon and her husband aren’t the only Durham residents alarmed at the prospect of the BBBS’s so-called stealth slate capturing seats on the county school board.

“I worry that many Durham residents may think we are immune to these extreme conservative challenges to our school board since we are used to being in our blue Durham bubble,” wrote Rebecca Bramlett in an email. “But it’s not the case, and I hope people are paying attention.”

Not one of Durham’s three most influential political action committees has endorsed any of the five GOP candidates who are running for seats on the county school board, including the nonpartisan Friends of Durham (FOD) PAC. “We interviewed all of the [BBBS] candidates and chose not to endorse them,” Durham attorney and FOD PAC cochair Patrick Byker told the INDY this week..

Byker says a combination of factors dissuaded the FOD from endorsing the GOP candidates.

First and foremost: the BBBS slate finds it easy enough to play armchair quarterback and fling a barrage of criticisms 10

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about the school board and Durham Public Schools (DPS) policies but offers next to nothing by way of problem-solving.

“We really expect candidates to have solutions for the problems they identify,” Byker says. “It’s easy to complain about a problem. It’s difficult to put forth sound thinking about how we as a community can support our superintendent and students and then identify and implement cost-effective solutions.”

There are also questions in the community about the ethics of BBBS’s campaigning, and whether they are abiding by the rules.

This week, Paula Januzzi-Godfrey, a Glenn Elementary School librarian and 2020 school board candidate, told the INDY she received a text Monday morning from a teacher at Merrick-Moore Elementary. The teacher had requested donations of copy paper on her neighborhood listserv and received some reams of paper at the school with stickers of the BBBS candidates’ faces, Januzzi-Godfrey told the INDY in an email.

“When I was running for school board it was made clear that I was not allowed to campaign, wear a button or sticker for my campaign on school premises, and no other teachers could either,” Januzzi-Godfrey wrote.

Based on some of the candidates’ social media posts, the BBBS slate might be best described with the letter Q followed by “Anon.”

Consider that Joetta MacMiller, who is campaigning for the Consolidated District B seat, announced on January 5, 2021, on social media that she had “arrived in DC” at the “Stop the Steal’’ rally that morphed into violence at the US Capitol, where a

STEALTH SLATE

SCHOOL

ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

mob thought it apt to attack police officers and smear feces on the walls.

“It is going to be WILD!!!!!” MacMiller announced, echoing the words of the January 6 insurrection’s chief instigator, Donald Trump, who on December 19 tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

One day later, MacMiller announced, “My group got tear gased [sic] but we are safe and on our way home to NC.” MacMiller could not be reached for comment.

In late January, MacMiller and Proud Boy member John Fischer—who is running for a seat on the Johnston County school board—were among the attendees of a statewide education forum held by the far-right groups Education First NC, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. No Left Turn describes itself as “a movement to combat racial indoctrination in our K thru 12 education system.”

District 1 candidate Curtis Hrischuk is a Canadian immigrant who registered to vote for the first time in December.

Hrischuk, in an email to the INDY, derided a description of him by EQV Analytics as “an evangelical Catholic” who “reveals himself on Facebook to be an antisemitic, climate-denying, anti-vaxx creationist in favor of starving local governments (including our public schools) of revenue.”

Hrischuk told the INDY that he views “eqvanalytics.com as a satire or humor site and they aren’t worth my attention.”

An INDY review of Hrischuk’s Facebook page shows that on August 30, 2016, he posted a Breitbart story about George Soros “manipulating [the] government for his own very sick agenda.” The Breitbart story claims that Soros was an unseen participant in efforts to reform law enforcement agencies after Black people across the country died at the hands of the police.

“Quote of the day,” Hrischuk posted in 2016 on his Facebook page. “People can

and should do everything they can to pay as little in taxes as possible.”

Valarie Jarvis is a school board District 4 candidate and GOP Durham County precinct chair who is married to Immanuel Jarvis, the county’s GOP chair, who declared in a July 2020 podcast that being a Black Trumpist is akin to being a “homosexual Black man in the ’70s in a southern state.”

Regarding Black voters, he said, “If they had a cardboard box running for president, 85 percent of the African American community would vote for the box.”

Immanuel Jarvis, during the podcast, said he agreed with Donald Trump’s claim that he has done more for Black Americans than Abraham Lincoln.

“That’s pretty close,” Jarvis said, offering as an example his daughter being the recipient of a financial grant owing to a bill the former president signed into law. Jarvis said it was imperative that Black Americans move from “poverty to prosperity.”

The other two candidates are Christopher Burns, vying for the District 2 seat, who EVQ Analytics reports is an independent contractor “with zero employees” and who “pocketed over $30,000 in subsequently forgiven Paycheck Protection Program loans in 2020/2021,” and Rajaraman, who announced that she’s running for the school board at the behest of Immanuel Jarvis.

Rajaraman, like Burns, has a scant social media presence but told the INDY she doesn’t think younger students should learn about topics like the historical racism upon which the nation was largely built.

“Especially at elementary and middle school age, children’s brains are still growing, they are hungry to learn. They should be taught math concepts and science at an early age like they do in countries like India,” Rajaraman wrote. “Instead we are distracting and overwhelming them with social topics such as racism, [gender identity] and political viewpoints in school classrooms. We are dumbing our kids down while other developing nations are putting focus only on math, science, arts and STEM programs.”

Perhaps the short answer to Rajaraman’s concern has to do with Black Americans’ lived experience in a nation that has a long history of targeting the group with racism, bigotry, and violence. Last year, GOP legislators at the General Assembly sponsored House Bill 324 that proposed to make white people feel less uncomfortable about the negative aspects of the nation’s racial history.

It appears no one in the GOP considered how not teaching those aspects of the nation’s history would make Black stu-

dents and the Black community at large feel uncomfortable. As the INDY previously reported, Durham’s city council and school board each adopted resolutions opposing HB 324. Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill on September 10.

Last year, the website Right Wing Watch warned of a far-right “campaign to stifle teaching and discussion about racism in U.S. history and institutions” with “fear mongering about critical race theory to mobilize right-wing activists and conservative voters to take over local school boards.”

“Critical race theory is an academic analytical framework for exploring the existence and impact of systemic racism,” Right Wing Watch writer Peter Montgomery explained. “Over the past year, the term has been aggressively deployed as a right-wing culture-war weapon that is being used to smear educators and social justice activists.”

School board chair Bettina Umstead, who is up for reelection in District 2, echoed Montgomery’s analysis.

“I’m worried that they are not prepared to do the equity work here in Durham County on behalf of Black and brown students who are in our schools,” Umstead told the INDY this week about the BBBS slate.

The current school board is cited on a watchlist by Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative nonprofit that states its mission is to “educate, train and organize students to promote freedom.”

According to TPUSA, the Durham school board is “actively trying to indoctrinate children with Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other hateful, divisive and Anti-American curriculum.”

TPUSA also asserts the school board has undergone “extreme scrutiny for publicly supporting a resolution that teaches CRT to the students throughout the district.”

Well that’s a lie, plain and simple.

“No, we do not,” school board member Natalie Beyer says about TPUSA’s claim that DPS is teaching CRT—normally taught in law schools—to K-12 students.

“But we very much believe and are focused on equity, and we are not shying away from this nation’s difficult history.”

Beyer, whom Valarie Jarvis is challenging in District 4, told the INDY this week that she has never seen the BBBS candidates at a school board meeting or received an email “about anything” from them during her board tenure.

“It’s highly unusual for Durham, and they haven’t been showing up,” she says. “They aren’t out in public, and they haven’t been to any of the forums,” she adds, save for a virtual meeting that was hosted by a community located off of Leesville Road.

Durham County Board of Elections

NOTICE OF DURHAM COUNTY PRIMARY AND ELECTION Tuesday, May 17, 2022 The Primary and Election for Durham County will be held in Durham County, NC on Tuesday May 17th. All Durham County precincts will be open from 6:30 am until 7:30 pm.

17-year-old Durham County voters who are registered and will be 18 years old on or before Nov. 8, 2022, may vote in Durham’s Primary. 17-year-olds are not permitted to vote in School Board or Town of Cary elections.

Party primaries will be open to voters registered with that respective party. Unaffiliated voters may vote a non-partisan ballot that will only include the School Board Election and Town of Cary (if applicable) OR choose to participate in either the Republican or Democratic primaries. Registered Libertarians will be given a non-partisan ballot.

The following contests will be on the Durham County ballots*: • US Congress • NC Supreme Court • NC Court of Appeals • NC General Assembly • NC District Court • Durham County Sheriff • Durham County District Attorney • Durham County Clerk of Court • Durham County Board of Education (Final Election) • Town of Cary Council (Final Election – Cary residents only) *Offices will only appear on your ballot if you are eligible to vote for the respective contest.

ABSENTEE ONE-STOP (EARLY VOTING) LOCATIONS South Regional Library 4505 S. Alston Ave., Durham

North Regional Library 221 Milton Rd., Durham

Durham TechNewton Building 1616 Cooper Street, Durham

The River Church 4900 Prospectus Dr., Durham

East Regional Library 211 Lick Creek Lane., Durham

NCCU Law School 640 Nelson St., Durham

Durham County Eno River Unitarian Main Library 300 N Roxboro St., 4907 Garrett Rd., Durham Durham

Early voting schedule: Thursday, April 28, 2022 – Saturday, May 14, 2022 Hours are consistent at all four early voting sites.

• Weekdays: 8:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

• Saturdays: 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

• Sundays: 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

ELECTION DAY POLLING PLACE LOCATION CHANGE • Precinct 25, previously located at Northern High School has moved to Lucas Middle School, located at 923 Snow Hill Rd., Durham.

VOTER REGISTRATION DEADLINE: The voter registration deadline for the Primary and Election is Friday, April 22, 2022 (25 days prior). Voters that miss the registration deadline may register and vote during the Absentee One-Stop Voting Period (Early Voting). Voters who are currently registered need not re-register. Registered voters who have moved or changed other information since the last election should notify the Board of Elections of that change by April 22, 2022. Party changes are not permitted after the voter registration deadline.

SAME DAY REGISTRATION: Voters are allowed to register and vote during early voting. It is quicker and easier to register in advance, but if you have not registered you can do so during One Stop voting with proper identification. This same day registration is not allowed at polling places on Election Day. Information regarding registration, polling locations, absentee voting, or other election matters may be obtained by contacting the Board of Elections.

Website: www.dcovotes.com Phone: 919-560-0700

Email: elections@dconc.gov Fax: 919-560-0688

PAID FOR BY DURHAM COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS

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11

Beyer says the slate is trafficking in “fearmongering” and divisiveness.

“It’s not about the schools,” she says.

A review of the GOP candidates’ website, betterboardbetterschools.com, gives scant information about what the group is proposing to create a more effective learning environment in the county’s public school classrooms.

Their campaign promise says that they “will ensure that every graduating student is prepared for the workforce or college.

Our students are cheated by lowering standards and curriculum deviations that do not directly aid in the competition of the worldwide marketplace.”

Rajaraman and Hrischuk were the only candidates to respond to the INDY’s questions. Rajaraman says “school exists to educate our children” when asked about “curriculum deviations.”

Rajaraman’s concerns run counter to the state’s board of education strategic plan adopted in 2019 that defined equity as a guiding principle and recently approved social studies standards “to ensure that a more comprehensive, accurate and honest history was taught to all students, including teaching on racism, identity and discrimination.”

“It’s important for teachers to be able to teach children to think critically from primary sources,” Beyer told the INDY last year. “And as we are more honest about our history we can learn from the past.

We don’t censor teachers. We don’t ban books. We teach children to be antiracist.”

The BBBS’s QAnon slate faces a Sisyphean task in the Bull City, where there are 233,225 registered voters and Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than five to one, according to the Durham County Board of Elections.

However, Durham also has 81,300 unaffiliated voters, along with 1,270 Libertarian voters. With a historically lower voter turnout for primary elections, “the BBBS slate is a highly organized campaign conceived, organized, launched and supported by the Durham County GOP, in hopes of slipping a bloc of Republicans under the voters’ radar to take control of the school board of one of the most heavily Democratic counties in the state,” according to the EQV Analytics report.

When the INDY asked what specific policies or measures the BBBS slate would implement to improve the academic performance of DPS students, Hrischuk began by stating that the current school board is failing its main mission: education.

“In my district four out of five students are not ready to move to the next grade,” Hrischuk wrote in an email. “That is 80 12

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“It’s important for teachers to be able to teach children to think critically from primary sources. ...

We don’t censor teachers. We don’t ban books. We teach children to be anti-racist.” percent of students not ready for the next grade.”

Michelle Burton, president of the Durham Association of Educators, which did not endorse the BBBS slate, told the INDY that Hrischuk and his fellow GOP candidates are focusing on end-of-grade test scores that do not take into account a student’s classroom performance or their total portfolio of academic performance.

“What’s never mentioned is funding of the public schools adequately,” says Burton, who pointedly notes that the BBBS slate is not speaking in support of the Leandro case that has been hamstrung for decades by the state’s GOP legislators and that would give public schools $1.7 billion.

“No one is talking about that,” she says.

Last month, the state supreme court agreed to hear the case after GOP state controller Linda Combs asked the North Carolina Court of Appeals to throw out Wake County superior court judge David Lee’s November 10 order requiring her to fund the $1.7 billion plan to fully support public schools.

Burton thinks the mission of BBBS’s slate “is to alarm and scare people, and get us off focus from what’s really needed and that is funding our schools adequately.”

But can the BBBS slate win seats on the Durham County school board?

William Busa, the director of EQV Analytics, thinks so. He wrote in last month’s online report “that even here in deep blue Durham, it is not impossible that these five radical Republicans might just succeed in wrestling control of the school board away from Democrats,

thanks to meticulous planning, sophisticated organization, a stacked deck of election law, and—most importantly—a flurry of industrial-strength deception.”

Busa says that part of the deception the BBBS’s slate is relying on is a state law that mandates county school board members “shall be elected on a nonpartisan basis”— that is, Busa wrote, “without limiting candidates to a single nominee from each party, and without listing candidates’ party affiliations on the ballot, and that school board elections shall be held during the state’s primary election rather than the November general election.”

Even more insidiously, Busa notes, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature has been “selectively chipping away at this non-partisan status for partisan advantage” by “passing special ‘local laws’ that make selected Republican-heavy counties’ school board elections partisan while leaving Democrat-heavy counties’ elections non-partisan, with the effect of promoting Republican control in GOP-heavy counties while enabling potential stealth-Republican inroads into Democratic counties.”

“Durham thus remains a ‘non-partisan’ school board, with its election on primary day … and its five Republican candidates, campaigning together under the brand name of the Better Board, Better Schools (BBBS) slate, are taking every advantage of this cloaking device,” Busa wrote.

Last week Busa told the INDY that he’s worked with several political campaigns in the past and typically looks up the party affiliation of candidates campaigning in nonpartisan races.

“That’s an oxymoron,” Busa said late last week. “They’re all partisan.”

Busa says he became interested in Durham’s school board races when he noticed that registered Republican candidates had filed to run in each of the five seats, and they all shared the same campaign address of their joint campaign treasurer, “the $1 million home of a county GOP precinct chair, C. Donald Stanger.”

“And they were all recruited by Immanuel Jarvis,” Busa explains. “It became very clear that they were working in concert to pull a fast one on Durham County and take control of the school board.”

Busa says what’s happening in Durham is part of a nationwide attempt by “Republican fascists” to take over school boards.

Burton agrees.

“We’re seeing it all over the state, all over the country, with even more and more due to the pandemic and schools reopening,” she says. “In my assessment they need to do the research to understand what’s really going on in education.” W

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PAGE

BOOK LAUNCH: AMERICA, GODDAM: VIOLENCE, BLACK WOMEN, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE BY TREVA B. LINDSEY

Treva B. Lindsey in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry | Friday, April 22, 6:30 p.m. | Register at rofhiwabooks.com | Rofhiwa Book Café, Durham

Treva B. Lindsey and the cover of her new book PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Treva B. Lindsey Writes With and For Black Women and Girls Talking with the historian about her new book, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. BY KYESHA JENNINGS arts@indyweek.com

I

n 1964, performing in front of a mostly all-white crowd, North Carolina native Nina Simone released what would be known as one of her first protest anthems: “Mississippi Goddam.” Disturbed by the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama in 1963 that took the lives of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair—all of whom were either 14 or 11—the genre-bending songstress vowed to use her voice to make a difference.

Simone’s frustrations were further intensified by the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, which took place in Mississippi in the summer of 1963.

Today, the repeated acts of violence and oppression against Black communities across America bring forth feelings for Black folks like those of Simone. And when we look specifically at the treatment of Black women and girls, the statistics reveal that they are at risk of dying at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts as relates to police violence, maternal and infant care, and intercommunal violence.

In her new book—America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice, published on April 5—the scholar Treva B. Lindsey traces the uniquely harmful experiences of Black women and girls. As a self-identified 14

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survivor of multiple forms of violence, who has been writing and thinking about violence for many years, Lindsey blends the structure of a memoir with history and theory.

“The ethical framework of this book is informed by Ntozake Shange’s call to handle Black women warmly,” says Lindsey, an associate professor and current chair of undergraduate studies of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University.

Ahead of her April 25 book launch at Rohwifa Book Café in East Durham—where she’ll be in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry—INDY Week spoke with Lindsey over Zoom about her inspiration for writing and the effects of anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and capitalism on Black women and girls.

INDY WEEK: I can imagine what the inspiration for the book was, but I would love for you to share what led you here.

TREVA B. LINDSEY: You know, in college, I was thinking about violence against Black women. I was thinking about it in graduate school when I began looking at lynchings of Black women and thinking about the work of other scholars who were asking us to consider what kinds of cisgen-

der-specific forms of terror Black women and girls endured.

This includes looking at the pervasiveness of rape and sexual violence in the history of Black women. It has always been a part of my excavation as a historian to find the violence and to find ways that Black women and girls are distinctly targeted and why—what structurally and what systemically leads to persistent harm?

In addition to that, when I was writing my first book, in the intro, I literally talk about the different ways that we talk about anti-Black violence and how even our framings of anti-Black violence tend to be masculine …. I wanted to have a kind of historical understanding that allowed me to do a very precise and rigorous contemporary analysis of what violence and harm against Black women looks like.

The data is right there and so alarming and heartbreaking. I wanted to be able to tell those stories in ways that goes beyond the data into a sense of urgency, but with care around the severity and gravity of various forms of violence and their impact on Black women and girls and gender-variant people.

Who are you imagining when you’re writing, and what do you hope that they can gain from this book?

I write for and with Black women and girls, and the “for” is very intentional. I want to make sure Black women see themselves in my work or hear their stories. This is a comprehensive but not exhaustive collection in terms of assessing what violence and harm against Black women and girls look like.

But I hope that people who are non–Black women and girls picking up this book take seriously the gravity of what we’re talking about. It’s important they understand the depths of history and how much work we have to do. It’s one of the reasons I included some of my own experiences with violence in the book so that I’m also a guide for readers. It’s a hard book. It’s very emotionally draining. The experience won’t be like, ‘I’m sitting, I’m reading, I’m finishing.’ Readers will have to sit with the things they read.

I also provided at the end a list of organizations that I think people should learn about, invest in, and support. I’m not necessarily asking co-conspirators or potential accomplices to look at things as much as I’m asking them to support and believe that Black women and girls and gender-expansive people are already building. We have organizations, collectives, institutions, campaigns, and initiatives that can absolutely benefit from support and resources. In order to come into these established spaces, as transparently and as informative as possible, here’s the book, and here are all the people I’m citing from …. There’s a whole body of work that’s asking us to contend with harm and violence against Black women and girls, and if you contend with that work, then you might be apt to be in those spaces and really be a genuine, generous, and generative co-conspirator or accomplice.

Because the book is so emotional, what did your research and writing process look like? How did you consistently care for yourself?

Citations for me are a collaborative and accountability practice. I am collaborating with thinkers who came before me and hopefully opening space for more collaboration for thinkers who are going to gauge my work in their work. I’m accountable to those thinkers, artists, activists, organizers, and ancestors who’ve done such incredible work that has helped me think through this and offer the ideas that I’m offering.

The research for this book really began almost seven or eight years ago. I did not want to write this book and had been putting it off for years. I started writing in more public outlets, and as I started cultivating a voice as a writer that wasn’t overly informed by my training as an academic and my training as a feminist historian in a very particular way, I wanted to have a voice in whatever my next book project would be that had both effective and affective registers.

My goal is for people to read it and gain a lot of knowledge, but I also want them to feel and resonate with it, which meant a certain kind of bearing of witness, of baring of myself, and most importantly, the opportunity to think about what was the best way to write this story with care. That meant that in the book, I refer to everyone by their first names, not their last.

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What does the future look like for Black women and girls? Specifically—what do you think is the realistic future and then also an imaginative future?

That’s a great question. So, you know, despite the epilogue, the conclusion was originally about the discipline of hope. My thinking is informed by prison and police abolitionist Mariame Kaba, specifically understanding what traditions are being created and what futures and worlds are imagined. And I bet on us! I believe so strongly in Black women’s and girls’ ability to create new worlds because we have done it before. We’ve created new ideas of liberation and we’ve practiced freedom all the time in the ways we love, dance, rap, and write. We are active practitioners of liberation. And so, in that way, I have always been about us, and I will never bet against us.

In reality, there are some really stark things to contend with. When I started diving into the writing for this book, a Black woman was being murdered every 17 or so hours. Crime data is about a year behind, so right now the available data reveals an average of four Black women and girls are murdered per day. So even in that two-year period, the shift is awful. W INDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

15

FO O D & D R I N K

MOONBELLY MEAT CO. moonbellymeatco@gmail.com | moonbellymeatco.com

A Cut Above With Moonbelly Meat Co., Anna Gibala carves out an innovative new space in the local butchery business.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

A

nna Gibala was 11 years old when her dad pulled off the highway and told a police officer to shoot a deer in the head.

For context: the deer had just been hit by a car, and the officer, called to the scene of the accident, was preparing to put the animal out of its misery.

After Gibala’s father told the officer how to shoot the deer humanely, he said, “I’ll take it.”

He then put the carcass in the trunk, drove back to the family’s home in Durham, and hung it over the monkey bars in the backyard playset. They ate venison for dinner.

Watching her dad process deer so matter-of-factly is what first sparked Gibala’s interest in butchery. He frequently hunted, always utilizing every cut—and though “it might sound weird,” she says, he would sometimes pick up roadkill if it was fresh.

“I used to sit and watch him in the backyard while he’d clean and skin the venison,” Gibala says. “I’d help with some of the cutting and removing silver skin as a kid. And we were always cooking together.”

Gibala’s father passed away 11 years ago, and since then, she’s been mastering his craft. She went to culinary school at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, got a bachelor’s degree in food systems management from Appalachian State University, and spent the next six years working at a range of wholesale meat retailers and combination butcher-sandwich shops on the West Coast.

Three months ago, Gibala returned to Durham to turn her training into enterprise, opening a handmade sausage and charcuterie business called Moonbelly Meat Co. in January. She hopes to one day open a brick-and-mortar location; for now, 16

April 20, 2022

INDYweek.com

she takes orders online and pays a monthly fee to use Redstart Foods owner Matt Northrup’s commercial kitchen in Braggtown. Customers can pick up their Moonbelly orders at the Redstart kitchen, or, if they spend more than $45, Gibala will deliver them to Durham and Chapel Hill locations herself. She’s also working on getting a stand at the Durham Farmers’ Market.

Moonbelly Meat’s menu was initially limited to sausages—breakfast links, smoked andouille, beer brats, Mexican chorizo—but business has picked up over the past few weeks, allowing Gibala to order half hogs instead of isolated pork shoulders. She’s since expanded to offer items that use other parts of the pig, like bacon, smoked ham, pork chops, and Old Bay chicharrones.

Gibala orders all of her pork from Durham’s Firsthand Foods; sourcing good-quality, humanely raised, hormone-free meat is important, she says, for both taste and ethical purposes. Moving forward, she plans to get more experimental with flavors. When she was working at Clove & Hoof in Oakland, California, one of her proudest accomplishments was creating barbecue-chicken-pizza-flavored sausage, modeled after the California Pizza Kitchen dish.

“I don’t think anyone’s really making the weird stuff I want to make,” she says.

Flavoring sausage is tricky because adding acidity can ruin the texture. The key, she says, is to dry out ingredients in a dehydrator, blitz them up in a blender, and work the powder into the raw meat. She’s hoping to make a kimchi-flavored sausage using this method. She also has an idea for a pho sausage, which would include mint, cilantro, warming spices, and chilled

Butcher Anna Gibala at work

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

cubes of pork broth that partially liquefy when the sausage is cooked—kind of like a soup dumpling but in sausage form.

Beyond its uniquely flavored products, Moonbelly stands out as a woman-owned, Korean-owned business in a male-dominated field. Butchery and meat farming remain majority-male professions, but according to data from the US Department of Labor, women are beginning to enter the industry at higher rates: women now account for almost 25 percent of butchers nationwide, up from 21 percent in 2006; and in North Carolina, at least 30 percent of meat farms involve a female operator—twice the national average.

Moonbelly’s name is a nod to Gibala’s Korean surname, Moon (she was adopted from Seoul as a baby), and its logo—a powder-pink-spotted woman in the moon, long-lashed eyes closed and licking her lips—is an intentional departure from the branding of typical butcher shops, which usually feature crossed cleavers or a blackand-white outline of a pig. Gibala wanted to create an image that was less aggressive and more approachable and inclusive.

“I think as a consumer, your experience going into a butcher shop can oftentimes feel a little bit condescending or intimidating,” Gibala says. “My biggest goal has been ‘How can I make this as welcoming of an environment as possible?’”

Gibala’s emphasis on inclusivity also extends to her product. She recently altered one of her most popular items, a Korean-barbecue-flavored sausage, so that it would be accessible to gluten-free folks: it now contains tamari instead of soy sauce and sriracha in lieu of gochujang (Korean chili paste).

She’s even considering branching out to offer plant-based, Impossible meat–style products for the vegetarian crowd.

“I worked at one place that had [shop] stickers that said, ‘100 percent not vegan,’ and I would love to not do that,” she says. “It makes it feel overly exclusive.”

For now, though, her focus lies on the meat. She gets visibly exhilarated while discussing the technicalities of butchery and seems most in awe of the craft’s potential to be both uniform and endlessly versatile.

Gibala says most people don’t realize that butchered animals have nearly identical anatomical structures, just on different scales.

A certain cut of pork parallels the one you’ll find on a lamb, a cow, or even a deer on the side of the road.

“I find that so fascinating,” she says.

“There’s almost a catharsis. When you break it down it’s really all the same, underneath.” W

A RT

sTo Len: Shadow Assembly of the Haw Through May 1, free | Peel Gallery, Carrboro | peel.gallery

The Floating World The New York Department of Sanitation’s resident artist, a collaborator with waste and water, shifts from the Hudson to the Haw. BY BRIAN HOWE arts@indyweek.com

U

sually, the Queens-based artist sTo Len picks up his own trash—and lots of other people’s, too. You’d expect no less from the New York Department of Sanitation’s official artist in residence, who uses traditional Japanese techniques like suminagashi (or “floating ink”) and gyotaku (“fish impression”) to catalog flotsam he trawls from waterways in ecologically damning, strangely beautiful prints. But his residency at Level Retreat in Chapel Hill was short enough that he needed folks to wade in for him. Luckily, a Haw River Assembly river cleanup was perfectly timed to deliver “10 bags full of goodies, like Christmas,” just as he arrived. While the prints, and some of the goodies, are on view at Peel Gallery in Carrboro, we spoke with sTo Len about his fascinating day job, his journey into Japanese printmaking, and his deepening collaboration with the water.

INDY WEEK: What have you done as the New York sanitation department’s artist in residence?

STO LEN: First, I spent a lot of time interviewing and hanging out with workers and following the waste trail, from the household curb to the collection truck to waste transfer stations in all five boroughs. From there, the trash gets put on barges that go down the Hudson or East River to New Jersey, or it gets put on trains to landfills in Virginia or upstate New York.

I wanted a studio, so they took me to this place called the Central Repair Shop, which is the size of the Empire State Building if it were horizontal. Everything broken in New York goes there, from trucks to upholstery projects. They put me in an old silk-screen studio that hasn’t been used in 20 years, and I’m doing mash-ups of their old designs with my own. That’s been really fun to do

around the workers, who come in and go, “Oh my god, I remember that!”

In the same building, there’s an old TV studio, and I’m working with the last guy who worked there to digitize this incredible film and video collection they have, dating back to the 1930s. I’m making video art with it, and I’m working on a television show that should have some episodes out by the fall.

An artist residency at the sanitation department sounds like something an artist came up with, not the city.

You’re absolutely right. In the 1970s, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote to the commissioner and said, “Hi, I’m really interested in sanitation and maintenance and in being an artist in residence,” and luckily, that commissioner said yes. It was an unsalaried, unfunded position that she turned into a career for 40 years. She’s in her eighties now, and I’ve hung out with her; she’s amazing. The city, inspired by her work, started the Public Artists in Residence program in 2015, and that’s what I’m in. I’m basically the second one after her.

How did you get into the Japanese printmaking techniques you use?

I did a show in Japan in 2009, and I fell in love with calligraphy. Coming back to New York and continuing to play with sumi ink, I realized that it floated. I thought I had invented something amazing because you could make a floating painting, and if you put paper down, you could actually print from the surface of the water. Then I discovered that Shinto monks had been doing this since the 12th century.

I got really into suminagashi, the floating-ink printmaking process. Shinto is an animistic religion, so the act of printmaking with water was this connecting of

The artist sTo Len at Peel Gallery PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST spirits—a non-hierarchical way of thinking about things like water and land and animals. You can’t control water; you have to collaborate with it, and that began opening up my ideas for collaborating with nature and situations. It taught me to be more fluid and adaptive in my art process.

It’s funny because we basically live on a series of islands in New York, but it’s not island life at all, and people don’t generally think about the water. The waterways are often some of the least-populated areas, and I was always finding these cool pockets to hang out in. In doing that, I was learning about the industrial histories and pollution of these waterways, and I realized they were like the floating paintings I was printing in the studio.

I had a eureka moment. I started going around New York City with paper, printing the surfaces of the water, which were often combined with sewage overflow and other detritus but came out really beautiful.

I realized that my studio could be a boat or the waterways. In New York, people would say, “I didn’t even know that was there!” So, it’s a placemaking process that also brings awareness to issues like combined sewage overflow.

What about gyotaku, which is the printmaking technique you use in this exhibit?

The fish-impression technique was something that I got interested in because

I had continually done these river cleanups and had bags of stuff I’d collected laying around. I began inking the objects and printing from them. Gyotaku is considered an art form, but it’s also a way to document the catch of the day and a way of honoring that fish. I’ve done a lot of these river cleanups in Vietnam—I’m half Vietnamese—and it’s just an overwhelming sea of single-use plastic. For me, this process is about acknowledging these objects that we’ve created and abandoned, as they become part of the landscape.

Did your environmental consciousness breed this work or vice versa?

I’ve always been ecologically minded without always knowing how to voice that as an artist. Things like suminagashi sent me on this trajectory when I started to think about the waterways around me as potential collaborators in every town.

Doing weeklong trips along the Saigon River, where my family used to live, and using water as a theme, has enabled me to voice environmental concerns and dig deeper into my cultural heritage while figuring out how to be a traveling artist. I’ve always been jealous of touring bands, but when I did tour in a band, I hated that you were only there for a night. How can you travel as an artist, create real relationships in a place, and get to know it, collaborating with it in a meaningful way? W INDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

17

DIRTY SOUTH SCRIBES Friday, April 22, & Saturday, April 23, free CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, Chapel Hill

M U SIC

HIP HOP SOUTH FESTIVAL

Friday, April 22, & Saturday, April 23, $15–$125 | Various venues, Chapel Hill | carolinaperformingarts.org

Regina N. Bradley and Christopher Massenburg PHOTO COURTESY OF ROFHIWA BOOK CAFÉ

R

egina Bradley says that Southern hip-hop is still underrepresented in scholarship, and she wanted to change that. She’s done so with a distinctly fresh point of view.

“I’m interested in what the American South looks like outside of the shadow of the civil rights movement, which, unfortunately, for a lot of folks, is the be-all-end-all of Southern Black modernity,” she says, recapping the central argument of her book Chronicling Stankonia, which casts Outkast as the avatars of a new Black South.

“As somebody who was raised in the South in the nineties and early 2000s, I don’t fit into that conversation.”

Of course, her research is built on the work of the scribes who came before, sometimes toiling in relative obscurity. “There would be no Southern hip-hop scholarship without Southern hip-hop journalists,” she says. “One of the things we’re trying to do with this festival is give folks their flowers while they can smell them.”

To that end, Bradley organized Dirty South Scribes, a free art exhibit on view at CURRENT during the Hip Hop South Festival. It features painted portraits of five pioneering Southern hip-hop chroniclers by five different Southern artists, including locals like Claire Alexandre and Darius Quarles, with pull-out quotes and oral histories accessed via QR code.

“Their artistic styles are so unique and speak to different things,” Bradley says. “It shows how Southern hip-hop is not one-size-fits-all, and it’s not just emceeing. Everybody listens when André [3000] says, ‘The South got something to say,’ but Dirty South Scribes is honoring the folks who showed us exactly what was being said.”

As for who they are, Bradley isn’t saying, though she enjoys everyone asking. “I’m holding it tight,” she says, laughing. “It feels good to have power.” Find out for yourself at CURRENT during the daytime on Friday or late-night on Saturday.

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Postdoc the Bells Garnishing a deeply local lineup with Big Boi, the Hip Hop South Festival closes the gap between the academy and the culture. BY BRIAN HOWE music@indyweek.com

R

egina N. Bradley and Christopher Massenburg started talking about their vision for a Southern hip-hop festival in 2016 when they were both Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellows at Harvard. But while what became the Hip Hop South Festival was born in an academic setting, it wasn’t originally intended for one.

As a result, Carolina Performing Arts’ (CPA’s) rare foray into rap has a distinctly authentic terroir, from its local roots to its splashy headliner.

“The joke I give is that I’m an academic nine to five, but I’m 24/7 in the culture,” Bradley says via video chat.

An associate professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University—“30 minutes north of Atlanta on a good day”—Bradley cohosts Bottom

of the Map, a Southern hip-hop podcast from PRX, and wrote the acclaimed fiction collection Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South. Last year, UNC Press published her scholarly book Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South.

Its focus on Outkast might have something to do with Big Boi signing on to rattle the stately columns of Memorial Hall.

The festival took root in Chapel Hill through Massenburg, a fellow at CPA who is widely known in the Triangle as Dasan Ahanu: Raleigh native, Bull City Slam Team founder, performer, educator, and community organizer. The festival began in a conversation with Amy Russell, CPA’s director of programming, about the campus-wide Southern Futures initiative, which fosters creative collabo-

rations between the university and local communities, with a focus on racial equity and social justice in the South.

“We started to talk about hip-hop because of its role in providing a response to some of the conditions of the South, especially for Black and brown youth, and how that needed to be part of the conversation,” Massenburg says. “I was like, ‘Well, I know who I want to work with.’”

Most of the performers are deeply connected to Massenburg’s home ground, as Big Boi is to Bradley’s. The festival opens at Cat’s Cradle on Friday (though at the distinctly un-Cradle-like hour of six p.m.) with bookings as Raleigh as Rapsody, as Durham as Shirlette Ammons, and as statewide as Miriam Tolbert’s Carolina Waves platform, which will present a showcase.

“We wanted to move away from essential ideas about what hip-hop culture is: it’s hypermasculine; it sounds a particular way,” Bradley says. “Highlighting women’s contributions to the culture and showing that it’s much bigger than a male gaze is something we were very intentional about.”

“Also, it was just the feel,” Massenburg adds. “Both Shirlette and Rapsody get busy.

Rapsody’s very vocal that she’s not a female emcee; she’s an emcee. At the Cradle, it’s going to give you that real energy of being at a hip-hop show, where folks are just getting after it.”

The feel should be very different on Saturday night, when Washington, DC’s Sa-Roc—one of the only women signed to the storied Rhymesayers label—takes the proscenium stage of Memorial Hall to open for Big Boi, who has enjoyed a robust solo career after Outkast.

“The show he’s been traveling with lately is really dynamic,” Massenburg says.

“He has a band with [Outkast producer] Sleepy Brown, and the energy is ridiculous. We wanted to have that big moment.

That was one of the first thumbs-up responses we got, and we were like, ‘OK, we’re rocking now.’”

Each night, the main event will be followed by a looser session at CURRENT ArtSpace at 10:00 p.m., with The Raleigh Rockers’ B-boy jam on Friday and a beat battle featuring members of 9th Wonder’s

Soul Council on Saturday. Here, the commercial predominance of the emcee gives way to hip-hop’s varied lived traditions, exemplifying the universally local aesthetic that kept the Bronx-born form intact as it splintered into thousands of microdocumentaries around the world.

“A low-key foundation of hip-hop is hyperlocalism: How do we represent where we’re from?” Bradley says. “When it took root in the South, it borrowed the cultural signifiers of Southern Black life—gospel, the church, funk—and utilized that to its advantage.”

But Southern hip-hop is as diverse as the Southern accent, even if neither is always perceived that way by outsiders.

“In the same way that Southern isn’t cookie-cutter, neither are the cultural expressions that come out of it,” Bradley says. “Houston sounds different than Atlanta or Memphis or the Florida Panhandle. But I think what most distinguishes Southern hip-hop is that it is in constant conversation with the South’s past.

Ideas of racism, white supremacy, class, and literacy that continuously show up— we’re consistently revisiting the past to gain an understanding of not only the present but the future.”

CPA’s embryonic relationship with hiphop is far from unusual among academic presenters, which typically focus on classical, jazz, modern dance, and certain refined strains of experimental music and pop. And in fact, CPA is already ahead of some, having brought Tierra Whack to Memorial Hall in 2019 and presented local hip-hop and spoken word in a virtual festival, the Digital Commons, last year. The latter, naturally, was a Dasan Ahanu production.

“What we’re able to do with the hip-hop festival is made easier by the work we did with the Commons, where we were really thinking about our relationship with the local artistic ecosystem,” he says. There is still much work to do, but there’s no doubt that Southern hip-hop is ready for the academy. If there is any question, it runs the other way.

“Hip-hop is a form of cultural resistance,” Massenburg acknowledges. “If you give that to the South, where else would there be so much to push back at? I think that will be reflected throughout the festival, pushing back against constrictions and characterizations. When you think about an institution that sometimes seems inaccessible, it’s important to say that there is room, and we deserve to be a part of this.”

“It’s like, if y’all rock with us, y’all rock with us,” Bradley adds, “but if you don’t, it’s not gonna stop the show.” W

­

INDYweek.com

April 20, 2022

19

C U LT U R E CA L E NDA R

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

LaLa performs at Motorco Music Hall on Wednesday, April 20.

Old-Timey String Band Revue $10.

Fri, Apr. 22, 7 p.m.

Nightlight Bar & Club, Chapel Hill.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO MUSIC HALL

Pop Punk Prom $12.

Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

River Whyless $20.

Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Sharon Van Etten SOLD OUT. Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

music ADULT. $16. Wed, Apr. 20, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro. del Amitri $30. Wed, Apr. 20, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

Duke Chamber Music Program Concert Wed, Apr. 20, 7 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Todrick Hall: The Femuline Tour $30. Wed, Apr. 20, 8:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Twiddle $25. Wed, Apr. 20, 8:30 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

We Back Outside Experience $50+.

Apr. 21-23, various times. Durham Armory and The Fruit, Durham.

Lala Lala $15. Wed, Apr. 20, 8 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

An Evening with Branford Marsalis $10+. Apr. 21-22, 8 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Wed, Apr. 20, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Digital Roses Tour $28+. Thurs, Apr. 21, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Queer Country Night Wed, Apr. 20, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Sierra Ferrell $18.

Wed, Apr. 20, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

The Felice Brothers $20. Thurs, Apr. 21, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Hovvdy $15. Thurs, Apr. 21, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Joe Troop & Friends: April Residency with Charlie Hunter and Brevan Hampden $20+. Thurs, Apr. 21, 7:30 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Lil Durk: The 7220 Tour $29+.

Thurs, Apr. 21, 7:30 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

Little Feat: Waiting for Columbus Tour $60+. Thurs, Apr. 21, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

LIVE@Lake Raleigh: The Barefoot Movement Thurs, Apr. 21, 5 p.m.

Lake Raleigh, Raleigh.

Mellow Swells Thurs, Apr. 21, 7:30 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Pears $12. Thurs, Apr. 21, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Pedro the Lion $20.

Thurs, Apr. 21, 8:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Revelators Sound System Presents: Groover’s Paradise Thurs, Apr. 21, 9 p.m.

Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Shannon and the Clams $23. Thurs, Apr. 21, 9 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

ABBA: The Concert—NC Symphony $43+.

Apr. 22-23, 8 p.m.

Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Anthony Harrison $8. Fri, Apr. 22, 8:30 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

The Band Camino $80+. Fri, Apr. 22, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Bellows $10. Fri, Apr. 22, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Dreaming of the 90s Outdoor Dance Party $7. Fri, Apr. 22, 9 p.m. PS37, Durham.

Duke Chorale Celebration Concert Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m.

Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, Durham.

Hip Hop South Festival $40. Fri, Apr. 22, 6 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Keith Ganz Quartet $25. Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Loving $16. Fri, Apr. 22, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

My Morning Jacket $29+. Fri, Apr. 22, 7 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

Sofia Talvik $20.

Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m.

Down Yonder Farm, Hillsborough.

Three Dog Night $55+. Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Arson Daily / Mo Lowda & The Humble $18. Sat, Apr. 23, 9 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

North Elementary $10. Sat, Apr. 23, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Queer Agenda! $5.

Sat, Apr. 23, 11:55 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Song Building Workshop with Joe Troop $45. Sat, Apr. 23, 2 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Song in My Soul: A Community Celebration of Mary Lou Williams Sat, Apr. 23, 5 p.m.

NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham.

Blanko Basnet $8. Sun, Apr. 24, 6 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham Carolina Cutups & Friends Sun, Apr. 24, 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Snow Tha Product $25. Sun, Apr. 24, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Dance with the Dead $25. Sat, Apr. 23, 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Stick Men $25+.

Sun, Apr. 24, 8 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Easy Tiger Sat, Apr. 23, 7:30 p.m.

Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Be Loud! Sophie High School Showcase 2022 $5.

Mon, Apr. 25, 6 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

ericdoa $15. Sat, Apr. 23, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Kuumba Community Drum Circle Sat, Apr. 23, 12 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Homeshake $17. Sat, Apr. 23, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Gladys Knight $49+.

Tues, Apr. 26, 8 p.m.

DPAC, Durham.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor $35. Tues, Apr. 26, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Guerilla Warfare $12. Tues, Apr. 26, 7:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Live Jazz with the Brian Horton Trio Tues, Apr. 26, 9 p.m.

Kingfisher, Durham.

Mndsgn $18. Tues, Apr. 26, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Money Man $30.

Tues, Apr. 26, 8 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra $25.

Tues, Apr. 26, 8 p.m.

Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

SONAM Spring Concert to Support Urban Ministries of Durham Tues, Apr. 26, 7:30 p.m. First Presbyterian Church, Durham.

Live Jazz with Danny Grewen and Griffanzo Mon, Apr. 25, 6 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Wage War $26.

Mon, Apr. 25, 7 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

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April 20, 2022

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CULTURE CALENDAR screen The Big Lebowski Movie Party $18.

Wed, Apr. 20, 7:30 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Raleigh.

Dazed and Confused With Cast Reunion $10. Wed, Apr. 20, 4:20 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Raleigh.

Napoleon Dynamite $7.50. Thurs, Apr. 21, 8:10 p.m. The Lumina Theater, Chapel Hill.

State of Change: A Screening and Panel Discussion Thurs, Apr. 21, 7 p.m. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.

Earth Day Outdoor Film Screening: Hidden Rivers $7.

Fri, Apr. 22, 7 p.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

Carolina Ballet performs at Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts Thursday, Apr. 21-Sunday, Apr. 24

Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator $10. Fri, Apr. 22, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

PHOTO BY COURTESY OF THE CAROLINA BALLET

WALL-E $6. Fri, Apr. 22, 5 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

NCMA Cinema: We Are Here $7.

Sat, Apr. 23, 2 p.m.

NCMA, Raleigh.

Speller Street Films Presents Black Kung Fu Cinema: The Black Dragon’s Revenge $10. Sat, Apr. 23, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

A curator-led tour for Modern Black Culture: The Art of Aaron Douglas will take place at the Ackland Art Museum on Friday, April 22. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ACKLAND ART MUSEUM

stage The Life of Galileo $15+. Apr. 7-24, various times.

Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

Cascade $10+. Apr. 7-23, various times.

Swain Hall Black Box Theater, Chapel Hill.

Pretty Woman: The Musical $15+. Apr. 19-24, various times.

DPAC, Durham.

art Exhibition Opening for Myth & Memory: Selected Works by the MFA Class of 2022 Thurs, Apr. 21, 7 p.m.

Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

Curator-Led Tour for Modern Black Culture: The Art of Aaron Douglas SOLD OUT. Fri, Apr. 22, 3:30 p.m.

Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

Susan Woodson: Featured Artist Exhibit and Third Friday Reception Fri, Apr. 22, 4 p.m.

5 Points Gallery, Durham.

Teen Arts Council: Our Part—Art in Action Sat, Apr. 23, 12 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Ackland FAM: Fishes and Dishes, Plates and Plants Sun, Apr. 24, 1 p.m.

Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

Gallery Talk: Renzo Ortega Sun, Apr. 24, 2 p.m. The Nasher, Durham.

Guided Tour: Explore the Ackland’s Collection Sun, Apr. 24, 1:30 p.m. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

page

Carolina Ballet: Spring Tidings of Bach, Chaminade and Glass $27+. Apr. 21-24, various times.

Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Carolina Youth Ballet: The Adventures of Alice $28+. Apr. 23, 12 and 4 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Reid Pegram Returns: A Standup Comedy Show Fri, Apr. 22, 8 p.m.

Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Neptunes Comedy Presents: Teresa Lee $8. Sun, Apr. 24, 6 p.m. Hartwell, Raleigh.

North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble: Step in Time $20+. Apr. 23-24, various times. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

No Empty Glasses: Comedy Showcase Sun, Apr. 24, 2 p.m.

Maximillians Grill & Wine Bar, Cary.

Library Fest: The Food Edition Apr. 18-23, various times. The Carolina Theatre, The Nasher, and online.

Artful Story Time Wed, Apr. 20, 10:30 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Laura Whitfield: Untethered Sat, Apr. 23, 2 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

The People’s Showcase Featuring Reid Pegram Sun, Apr. 24, 8 p.m. The Night Rider, Raleigh.

Raleigh Gives Back Benefit Concert: CC & Co $20+. Sun, Apr. 24, 6:30 p.m.

Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Burwell’s Poetry Day Sun, Apr. 24, 3 p.m. Burwell School Historic Site, Hillsborough.

T. Kingfisher: Nettle & Bone Tues, Apr. 26, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

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April 20, 2022

21

P U Z Z L ES

ALL RE A LTHC T HEA ERS GE K R WO

FF O % 10 ON ALKLS

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages” at the bottom of our webpage.

BOO

In-Store Shopping Curbside Pick Up www.regulatorbookshop.com 720 Ninth Street, Durham, NC 27705 In-store and pick up hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10a-6p

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box.

The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered.

Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages.”

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com solution to last week’s puzzle

22

April 20, 2022

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4.20.22 INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

C L AS S I F I E D S M I S C.

HEALTH & WELL BEING

919-416-0675

www.harmonygate.com

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE EMPLOYMENT SERVICES

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Nanny (Raleigh, N.C.) Take care of children, energetic, patient, loves outdoors, housekeeping, grocery shopping, driving, laundry, healthy cooking. Non-smokers only. Req. 2-year exp.(au pair) Min. 40 work hours/weekends + overnights. Bilingual is a plus. $14h/h. jessica@wfpimmigration.com Scientist (Morrisville, N.C.) Scientist (Morrisville, NC) - Provide technical & scientific support in developing, validating, & executing analytical testing. Reqs.: 1) MS + 2 yrs exp.; or 2) BS + 5 yrs exp. Mail resume to: Alcami Carolinas Corporation, 2320 Scientific Park Dr, Wilmington NC 28405, Attn: HR. Principal BI Developer (Durham, N.C.) Principal BI Developer sought by Parexel International LLC in Durham, NC to provide subject matter expertise & project mgmt for the dsgn & dvlpmt of Business Intelligence applications. Position may work from home 1-2 days per week. To apply, please send resume to openings@parexel.com & cite requisition number 00439 or apply at jobs.parexel.com. This notice is subject to Parexel International LLC’s employee referral program. Position may work from home 1-2 days per week.

Senior Business Analyst (Durham, N.C.) Senior Business Analyst sought by Parexel International LLC in Durham, NC to work in the Enterprise Information Management area to drive the analysis work on investments in Data & Analytics dvlpmt. To apply, please send resume to openings@parexel.com & cite requisition number 00757 or apply at jobs.parexel. com. This notice is subject to Parexel International LLC’s employee referral program.

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