INDY Week 6.9.21

R E O S D P E N NE U O Black women professors at UNC say Nikole Hannah-Jones's experience is not a unique one BY SARA PEQUEÑO, P. 10

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Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill June 9, 2021

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 38 NO. 21

Spices at bulk goods store Part & Parcel in Durham, p. 13 PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

CONTENTS NEWS 5

Raleigh residents aren't please with a proposed budget increase for RPD.

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The family of J'Mauri Bumpass filed a federal lawsuit alleging he was killed

by Durham sheriff's deputies. BY THOMASI MCDONALD An N.C. State study finds that vulnerable communities suffer the effects of pipelines in their neighborhoods. BY GREG BARNES

BY CARYL ESPINOZA JAEN

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FEATURE

10 Black women professors at UNC-Chapel Hill and across the country grapple with systemic racism in academia. BY SARA PEQUEÑO

ARTS & CULTURE

13 Package-free bulk good store Part & Parcel offers a new model of inclusive, neurodiverse employment. BY LENA GELLER 14 A chat with local preservationist Gabrielle E.W. Carter. BY ERIC GINSBURG 16 The transcendant power of High on the Hog. BY KHALISA RAE THOMPSON 17 Ready for summer reading? Here are a few of our local picks.

BY SARAH EDWARDS AND REBECCA SCHNEID

THE REGULARS 3 15 Minutes 4 Voices

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WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

EDITOR I AL

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Editor in Chief Jane Porter Managing Editor Geoff West Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards

Copy Editor Abigail O'Neill Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods

Interns Caryl Espinoza Jaen, Ellie Heffernan, Rebecca Schneid

Senior Writer Leigh Tauss

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June 9, 2021

Contributors Madeline Crone, Jameela F. Dallis, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Layla Khoury-Hanold, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Jake Sheridan

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BACK TA L K

Last week, writer Sara Pequeño broke the news that Dr. Lisa Jones, a prominent Black woman chemist currently teaching at the University of Maryland, declined an invitation to teach at UNC-Chapel Hill.

UNC had been trying to recruit Jones for two years, and Jones said in a letter to faculty in the university’s chemistry department that she found the news that the acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied tenure “very disheartening” and that she could not accept a position at a university where such a decision is allowed to stand. Our readers had lots of thoughts.

“UNC has been bought and paid for by one single donor who gets exactly what he paid for. Too bad the board of trustees lacks integrity and courage,” wrote reader LYNNE SAULSBURY on Facebook.

“As a ‘prestigious’ public university, UNC’s leadership has sure been a huge disappointment over the last decade ... the ‘Silent Sam’ controversy, their response to COVID, and now the tenure incident,” wrote Facebook commenter JEFFREY DAVID ZACKO-SMITH. “And anyone who critiques any of it is immediately attacked by the rabid alumni who don’t think their alma mater can do anything wrong. As a professor for 15 years, a university is supposed to be a bastion of ideas and critical thinking, but the reality is something different. Sad.” “Um... not all their alumni,” wrote commenter ALISTAIR GEORGE in response.

“Some of us are rabidly progressive, others like me are just humane, apolitical and reasonable.

Either way we’re sickened by our conservative trustees failing to honor our long-established traditions as an avant-garde institution of societal advancement and defender of civil liberties.”

Facebook commenter JOHN HAMMOND ties the Hannah-Jones crucible to other high-profile debacles the state has garnered national attention for in recent years.

“The board of Governors come from the same ilk that gave NC HB2 disaster,” John wrote.

And reader DONNA ALDRIDGE gets at the heart of the issue.

“Racism is a lifetime commitment to ignorance,” Donna wrote on our Facebook page.

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Carrboro

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15 MINUTES Phoenix Tudryn, 18, and Julian Taylor, 17 and the Carrboro High Black and Brown Students Coalition

BY REBECCA SCHNEID backtalk@indyweek.com

Seniors Phoenix Tudryn and Julian Taylor, along with four other students, started the Black and Brown Students Coalition at Carrboro High School. They have since launched a podcast to amplify the voices of students of color and their perspectives during the pandemic.

What was the motivation to create the Black and Brown Students Coalition at Carrboro High?

Phoenix: At the beginning of the school year, we were in such a stressful time at school with everything going on with George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic. There were different decisions being made inside that school that were happening without student input, and especially without the input of Black and Brown students. Like, how we were going to operate in virtual school and what types of things could be done to support students? And when they asked for student input? They were primarily asking white students. So, we understood that there was a need for a platform where student voices, specifically marginalized voices, could be amplified.

Where did the idea for your podcast come from?

Julian: We’ve seen that there are a lot of student groups who are discussion groups and have a lot of great discussions for students of color. But, there aren’t that many student groups who are able to reach administration. We want to give a platform for students to be able to talk directly to the administration.

How do you choose the topics for your podcast?

Phoenix: It’s pretty organic. We see a need, then we try to get student input. We did a Black Lives Matter one, with Black youth talking about their experience, just processing the whole George Floyd situation and everything that followed. Educators were struggling with how to address systemic racism and the

PHOTO BY REBECCA SCHNEID

effects in the classroom. Another one was about the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board’s decision to leave a Latina out when there’s no Latinx representation on the board, even though we make up 20 percent of the population.

What has the school’s response been like?

Julian: The biggest response has been from teachers. I remember at the beginning of the year, when we released the first podcast about virtual learning and how they can help students, a lot of teachers got rid of due dates and stuff like that just to help students with responsibilities.

Which episode has had the greatest impact?

Julian: The Black Lives Matter one was probably the most impactful, because it went the farthest.

It’s been used in the UNC School of Education. I know that other teachers in the district are using it, and other districts are using it, too.

How does the podcast coincide with the action you engage in within the school and district? What’s the relationship there?

Phoenix: We don’t just do podcasts. We really like having conversations and actually going ahead with action plans with teachers. We helped make all sporting events free for students next year, we partnered with an organization at UNC to bring about free ACT tutoring for our entire school. So, we’re doing a lot of stuff based in action, because in our school, historically, usually affinity groups are just about talking. And there’s really no action plans that address the issues that we always talk about as students of color. If we’re gonna keep talking about something, might as well just do something about it. W INDYweek.com

June 9, 2021

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voices

Pittsboro Is A Town Divided But we can’t allow racists to speak for local interests.

BY NIKOLAI MATHER backtalk@indyweek.com

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n Monday, May 31, my phone lit up with a message from Pittsboro Anti-Racist Alerts. White supremacists had once again gathered in Pittsboro’s town center to fly Confederate battle flags. This stubborn vigil began two years ago when the Board of County Commissioners started considering the removal of Pittsboro’s Confederate monument. And though the statue is long gone, the racist opposition continues to assert itself in my hometown—by disseminating neo-Confederate screeds online, by attempting to push the school board and county political bodies further right, and by menacing downtown Pittsboro and the rest of Chatham County with hate symbols.

This protracted reaction has everything to do with racism. But in looking back on the years of white supremacist protest in Chatham County, the connection to (or rather, manipulation of) class conflict is also laid bare. Pittsboro’s uneasy marriage to the progressive, suburban Triangle has spurred drastic change in Chatham County, causing tension between longtime locals and “transplant” residents. White supremacists have been able to exploit that tension to justify their cause.

North Carolina has a profound urbanrural divide. The N.C. Rural Center has found that rural counties tend to have higher poverty rates, lower average incomes, and less access to healthcare and higher education. Most rural counties in North Carolina are experiencing a significant decline in population, leaving many communities even more unstable than before.

Chatham County is one of the few exceptions. Since 2010, its population has grown

by 16.3 percent, outpacing neighboring al people alluded to the tension between counties like Orange and Durham. North transplants and locals during a public Chatham in particular has exploded with input session. Brantley Webster, who sat new arrivals: massive housing develop- on the board for the Chatham County ments like Briar Chapel and Chatham Park Historical Association, said it was merehave brought in tens of thousands of peo- ly “outside activists” agitating for change. ple, and will only attract more as construc- Keith Roberts pointed out that those supporting removal “have fine homes in tion progresses.

There remain significant differenc- the northern part of Chatham.” But it es between newer residents and those was Kevin Stone, the Chatham County who have roots in Chatham County. probation officer revealed to have ties to the North Carolina Chatham’s median Sons of Confederate household income in Veterans, who made 2019 was $67,031; the most distinct refin Briar Chapel, it erence. “Unfortunatewas $84,783. Many ly, as most working transplants do white class people, we do collar work and comnot have the resourcmute to the Triangle; es nor time that our longtime residents opponents in this are more likely to do matter [of removing local, blue collar work. the Confederate statMany transplants ue] do and we know are solidly progresthat our attempts to sive, at odds with the appeal to reason and more conservative moderation are fallresidents who live ing on deaf ears.” in rural parts of the I don’t mean to sugcounty. Growing up in gest that Chatham North Chatham, the class division was readily apparent even County’s neo-Confederates are primarily at the high school level. Who got dropped motivated by class. Nor do I think that white off and who had to take long bus rides? supremacists can be forgiven for racial terWho went on to college and who stayed rorism due to class background. The fetishiin town? Who worked part-time out of zation of the white rural working class in necessity and who didn’t? It’s fair to say the United States has, at this point, become that a lot of people in Chatham Coun- parodic. From J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy ty feel cheated out of the prosperity our to the proliferation of old-guy-in-a-SouthCarolina-diner-tells-us-why-he-voted-fornewer neighbors have acquired.

Throughout the Confederate statue Trump journalism, there’s no shortage of conflict, those sentiments resurfaced in sympathy for white people in rural areas, the arguments of the racist opposition. At even (and sometimes especially) if they’re one county meeting in May 2019, sever- racist. When taken with the rise of white

“White

supremacists

have been able to exploit this tension to

justify their cause.”

rural demagogues like Madison Cawthorn and the continued domination of white, rural, Republican interests over North Carolina politics, it’s easy to see how this identity is used to further the aims of white supremacy.

Above all, it has allowed racists to re-establish control over the narrative.

Instead of racists versus antiracists, it’s transplants versus natives. Instead of racists versus antiracists, it’s the working class versus the upper middle classes.

This distorted thinking allowed them to capture state attention in 2019. It drives them to continue their campaign of racial intimidation, no matter where the statue now stands.

Maybe it’s too late to make that point.

That thinking is already championed by so many—not just in Pittsboro, but in Graham, Wilmington, and every other small town struggling with its white supremacist past. However, as Chatham County continues to expand, it is imperative that we put that myth to rest. Transplants are making irrevocable and at times unwanted changes here. The solution is not allowing racists to speak for local interests. The solution is to empower those spoken over: the Black Chathamites who can trace their family lineage back hundreds of years, the growing community of working class Latinx people in South Chatham, and the rural, working class white people who lead antiracist lives. We can’t settle for easy stories about slighted white conservatives waving Confederate flags by the courthouse. Otherwise, they’ll just keep showing up. 2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

NIKOLAI MATHER is a freelance writer based in Chapel Hill. Follow him on Twitter at @ntmather. Comment on this column at backtalk@indyweek.com.

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Raleigh

Money to Burn Raleigh residents decry a proposed $5 million budget increase for the police department

BY CARYL ESPINOZA JAEN backtalk@indyweek.com

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ollowing a year of hardship, Raleigh city manager Marchell Adams-David is optimistic. The city has “a renewed spirit of hope,” she wrote in a message last month, and with that new spirit of hope comes a $1.07 billion proposed city budget.

But many Raleigh residents didn’t share that spirit of hope during the budget public hearing last week. More than 20 public speakers denounced a proposed $4,856,283 funding increase for the Raleigh Police Department, which came under fire from residents last year for using tear gas and other weapons against protesters, involvement in the deaths of multiple men of color since 2013, and, more recently, drug-framing Black residents in Raleigh.

“We do not need to reform the ways that the police kill us,” said Braxton Brewington, a resident who spoke at the June 1 public hearing, adding that it was embarrassing to see an increase in the police budget following last year’s protests for racial equity. “We don’t need to make the police sign forms before the police murder us. We need to end the murder, their stakes into violence.”

This is not the first time the council has heard calls for police reform and defunding from Black residents and activists.

Last year, following violent confrontations between Raleigh police officers and protesters condemning racial violence after the death of George Floyd, the council held a special session to hear public comments around potentially reforming the Raleigh Police Department.

Since then, the police department has undergone some reform measures, including instituting a ban on chokeholds and strangleholds, implementation of the ACORNS (Addressing Crisis Through Outreach, Referrals, Networking and Service) unit, as

well as a racial-equity training for council members that has been postponed.

Some policing policies, including five of the 8 Can’t Wait reform proposals, the city had already implemented prior to last year’s protests. The last fiscal year was the only year the Raleigh Police Department did not receive a funding increase since 2008.

During last week’s public hearing, city manager Adams-David said a large portion of the increased funding was part of a state-mandated requirement to compensate retiring law enforcement officers.

The other portion of the budget increase, meanwhile, provides resources for new, non-sworn personnel—including crisis and trauma counselors, family violence units, and community ambassadors—as well as an upcoming greenway patrol team after instances of violence in the city’s greenways.

“So much of the $5 million increase we have combed through the budget with a fine-toothed comb,” Adams-David said.

“Dollar amounts we have no control over; they are mandated requirements from the state.”

But many attendees were dissatisfied with the city manager’s response. Reeves Peeler, a Raleigh resident and speaker at the public hearing, said a required police pension should not mean an increase in the police budget.

“We can buy less ammunition for weapons for RPD, we can buy less gasoline for their cars, we can buy less cars,” Peeler said.

“We can also hire less officers.”

Bryan Collin, another speaker, criticized the newly implemented ACORNS unit, saying social workers should not be working side-by-side with police departments.

“The concern I have is when all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail, and even-

At a June 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Raleigh tually these programs will turn into just another extension into the violent policing of the working class parts of Raleigh, the Black and Brown parts of Raleigh,” Collin said. “It’d be a better social good to take that $5 million, take it out in cash, and burn it in Nash Square than give it to the RPD.” Many attending residents cited support for Refund Raleigh’s budget proposals, which calls for a 30 percent reduction in the Raleigh Police Department’s officer force. Refund Raleigh, a local collective calling for the defunding and demilitarization of the Raleigh Police Department, is also partnering with the Raleigh chapter of the public service workers union, UE Local 150, to demand a $20 minimum wage for city workers and permanent free bus fares once the COVID-19 pandemic is out of sight.

Grant Bunn, a speaker and supporter of Refund Raleigh’s proposals, criticized the City Council’s adoption of 8 Can’t Wait and policies suggested by the consulting firm 21CP to reform the police department.

Both were inefficient ways to end police violence, he said.

“If this council wants to keep us safe, you can invest in actual community needs by giving city workers a living wage, truly solving our housing crisis, making all transportation permanently free, and increasing

PHOTO JADE WILSON

the economic safety net for all residents,” Bunn said.

Residents also criticized the city council for being averse to listening to public comments, with many of the speakers slamming the 60-second speaking time limit. Delaney Vandergrift, a youth engagement coordinator at the NC Black Leadership Organizing Collective, singled out city council members Corey Branch and Jonathan Melton for not publicly standing up for the Black neighborhoods they represent and reside in.

“We can no longer accept your private, whispered conviction,” Vandergrift said. “Do you care about Black people? Do you care about your neighbors? Find the courage to speak about it loudly and quick.”

In a phone interview with the INDY, Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said the council will discuss changes to the proposed city budget this week. As of now, city council members are waiting to see how everyone feels about the feedback — from both within and outside of the public hearing — before beginning to finalize the budget.

“I’ll have a better idea where everybody stands in relation to the budget at that time,” Baldwin said. “And oftentimes, budget will be something that requires some compromise and discussion, so I’m reserving any judgment before I hear what everyone has to say in an open session.”W INDYweek.com

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Durham

Conspiracy Theory The family of a Durham man who died during a traffic stop alleges something sinister occurred

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

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’Mauri Bumpass initially died in a car accident, investigators said, when he crashed his vehicle into a power pole after Durham County Sheriff’s deputies tried to pull him over, down a dark road in North Durham in December 2019.

But the story quickly changed: it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound that killed the 18-year-old Black man, the sheriff’s office said days later.

But the teen’s family believes something different, something far more sinister.

The family has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit that accuses the two deputies who pulled over Bumpass of killing him and conspiring to cover it up. Sheriff Clarence Birkhead was among those named in the complaint for his role in the alleged conspiracy.

Sheriff’s office spokeswoman AnnMarie Breen said in an email to the INDY that the department typically does not comment on pending litigation but added that the two deputies—Anthony Sharp Jr. and Robert Osborne—who pulled over Bumpass neither “fired their weapon nor in any other way” caused his death.

The Bumpass family isn’t convinced.

Almost from the moment Bumpass died, his family has wondered what really happened to the teen—a young man with no criminal record or history of depression, suicidal threats, or other mental issues, according to his family.

As previously reported by the INDY, Sharp and Osborne claim Bumpass’s death was a suicide, with Sharp stating in an incident report that he heard a gunshot, saw the car accelerate forward, heard the crash, called for backup units, drove to the crash scene, and waited for backup to arrive.

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Sharp reported that when he approached the car, he found Bumpass “lying torso down in the vehicle. In between his legs was a desert tan Glock semi-automatic handgun. The barrel of the gun was expelling smoke as if it had just been fired.”

The complaint, filed May 18 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, however, accuses Sharp and Osborne of acting in concert to shoot Bumpass with a single bullet to the head.

The complaint filed on behalf of the Bumpass family by Durham attorney Allyn Sharp (no relation to deputy Sharp) also accuses Birkhead of obstructing justice and being a willing partner in covering up what Osborne and Sharp did.

The complaint alleges that Birkhead and his deputies “intentionally issued misleading press releases, made false statements and reports, destroyed evidence, provided false information to the medical examiners and to the State Bureau of Investigation, withheld crucial information from the Bumpass family while knowingly misrepresenting what had been produced and made material misrepresentations and omissions to Mr. Bumpass’s family and to the Superior Court.”

The complaint also suggests a possible motive for the fatal shooting: Sharp, who was hired by the sheriff’s office in 2012, had a history with Bumpass men during traffic stops.

In August 2016, Sharp arrested Timothy Bumpass Jr. on drug charges after conducting a traffic stop for an inoperable license plate light. Then seven months later, Sharp arrested Timothy Bumpass Sr. on gun and drug charges after another traffic stop, reportedly for speeding, according to the complaint.

J’Mauri Bumpass, hours before his death Timothy Bumpass Jr. and Timothy Bumpass Sr. are distant cousins of J’Mauri Bumpass, whom he never met, according to the family.

At the time of J’Mauri’s death, Timothy Bumpass Sr. was in custody at the Durham County jail for gun and drug charges stemming from Sharp’s arrest, but he was in the process of contesting those charges.

“When Defendants Sharp and Osborne pulled J’Mauri Bumpass over, Defendant Sharp was scheduled to testify at a suppression hearing in Durham County Superior Court that upcoming week of December 16, 2019 in the criminal case of State v. Timothy Bumpass, in which Timothy Bumpass, Sr., was challenging the legality of the March 2017 traffic stop conducted by Defendant Sharp which led to his gun and drug charges,” the complaint states.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BUMPASS FAMILY

Bumpass’s death It was in the early morning hours of December 15, 2019, when Bumpass was driving a Chevrolet Impala he owned that was displaying the license plate of a Honda Accord that he also owned.

The complaint states that Bumpass had recently traded in the Accord for the Impala and was waiting for the title to the Impala to arrive in the mail so he could register the car with the tag from the Impala.

The complaint states that Bumpass was on the phone with a friend while driving to his mother’s house to pick up his sister when the deputies pulled him over at 12:39 a.m. less than a mile from her home.

Bumpass told his friend that the police had been following him for a while and

“Mr. Bumpass told his friend something didn’t feel right.

His friend told him to keep his car in drive.” wondered if they were going to pull him over, the complaint states.

“Mr. Bumpass told his friend something didn’t feel right,” according to the complaint. “His friend told him if he did not trust the situation to keep his car in drive.”

The slain teen’s friend heard the deputies speak to Bumpass then heard a gunshot, the car crash, and then “either Defendant Sharp or Defendant Osborne tell the other deputy, ‘Oh shit, he’s on the phone,’” according to the complaint.

In the lawsuit, the family paints a picture of a motivated young man who received good grades and graduated one semester early from Hillside High School—not a teen with motivations to kill himself.

He lived with his mom, regularly spent time at his father’s home, played drums for Baha’i worship services, and worked at FedEx while preparing to attend college and study sports medicine.

The complaint lists a cache of troubling actions on the part of both the deputies and Sheriff Birkhead, such as the deputies driving a vehicle with an inoperable in-car camera system in violation of county policy.

What’s more, the complaint alleges that the teen’s investigative file is being kept from his family to run out the clock on the two-year statute of limitations for wrongful death lawsuits.

According to the complaint, the wrongful acts of the two deputies resulted in Bumpass being “stopped, seized, shot and killed,” and the teen’s parents “have suffered loss of society and companionship as well as severe emotional distress” as a consequence of not only losing their son but from the cover-up and false report of suicide, which entitles the family to compensatory and punitive damages.W

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North Carolina PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION / FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS

the companies bought easements for the pipeline—either with cooperation from landowners or by the seizing of property through eminent domain—federal regulators began to question the need for the pipeline because the Mountain Valley Pipeline was beginning to take shape nearby.

Emanuel said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission heavily weighed the need for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline but gave little consideration to the environmental justice issue.

“So we know that regulators take these kinds of, I guess, gas supply issues into account for the rest of the network when they’re making these decisions but right now they don’t do that when it comes to environmental justice,” Emanuel said. “Pipelines are more or less considered in a vacuum when it comes to reviewing their environmental justice implications.”

Construction of the pipeline scrapped

Pipeline Problems A new N.C. State study finds vulnerable communities bear the brunt of pipelines BY GREG BARNES backtalk@indyweek.com

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or years, individual case studies have found that natural gas pipelines traverse primarily through socially vulnerable communities, resulting in cries of environmental injustice and lawsuits against big gas companies.

Now, researchers at N.C. State University have taken those studies a step further with a deep data dive to show that the nation’s counties with the most socially vulnerable populations have significantly higher pipeline densities.

The findings suggest that people living in those counties are at greater risk of facing water and air pollution, public health and safety issues, and other negative impacts associated with the natural gas pipelines, said Laura Oleniacz, a spokeswoman for N.C. State.

“This is what the communities themselves have been saying for a long time,” said Ryan Emanuel, the study’s lead researcher and a professor in N.C. State’s Center for Geospatial Analytics. “For the first time, we gathered all of this together and zoomed out and took a national look and said, ‘You know what, these pipelines don’t exist in a vacuum.’”

The study has been peer reviewed and is being published in GeoHealth, a journal that focuses on the intersection of environmental and Earth sciences, and health.

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The authors drew their conclusions using data on socially vulnerable communities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and natural gas pipeline data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Emanuel said.

The researchers used the CDC’s data to examine socially vulnerable communities on a county-by-county basis.

The CDC defines social vulnerability as “the potential negative effects on communities caused by external stresses on human health. Such stresses include natural or human-caused disasters, or disease outbreaks.”

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline In 2014, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy announced that they would construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline from the shale fields of West Virginia through Virginia and ending in Robeson County in North Carolina. At the time, the proposed 600-mile-long pipeline was projected to cost between $4.5 billion and $5 billion.

The two energy companies said demand for the project was driven in large part by retirement and conversion of coal-fired power plants to natural gas plants. But as

Last July, Dominion and Duke announced that they were scrapping the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, blaming costs that had ballooned to $8 billion and anticipated delays in permitting and construction caused, in part, by lawsuits and federal court rulings.

In a joint statement on July 5, 2020, Dominion Chairman Thomas F. Farrell and Duke Chairman Lynn J. Good announced the pipeline’s cancelation: “We regret that we will be unable to complete the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. For almost six years we have worked diligently and invested billions of dollars to complete the project and deliver the much-needed infrastructure to our customers and communities. Throughout, we have engaged extensively with and incorporated feedback from local communities, labor and industrial leaders, government and permitting agencies, environmental interests and social justice organizations …This announcement reflects the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States. Until these issues are resolved, the ability to satisfy the country’s energy needs will be significantly challenged.”

Emanuel and others believe the lawsuits over environmental issues, including environmental injustice, were among the primary reasons that the pipeline was canceled.

Last year, a federal court invalidated a key permit for a natural gas compressor station as part of the pipeline. The compressor station would have been built in Union Hill, a historic Black community in Virginia founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The court ruling was hailed as a major victory for the environmental justice movement.

Emanuel thinks his study will bring environmental injustice issues even more into the forefront.

“Are we re-entrenching the historic patterns that already exist ... or are we going to do something different?”

“What I hope we can take away from this study is that when new pipelines come up for review the environmental justice component of that review won’t be treated in isolation,” Emanuel said. “We’ll think about what are we doing to the whole network when we add a new pipeline with respect to environmental justice.

“Are we re-entrenching the historic patterns that already exist in the landscape, or are we going to do something different?”

Pipelines are surging The recent boom in extracting natural gas from shale deep underground, a practice known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, has resulted in an ever-increasing number of pipelines being proposed and constructed in the United States.

With that comes the increasing burden of determining where the pipelines should go that will have the fewest environmental and social impacts.

“The pace of U.S. pipeline development signals an urgent need for research about health, socioeconomic, and other impacts associated with pipelines and other midstream infrastructure,” the study says.

“In particular, there is a pressing need to understand the extent to which largescale (e.g., regional or national) distribution of midstream pipelines may create or exacerbate societal inequities in environmental degradation, exposure to health risks, and other harms.”

Citing U.S. Department of Transportation figures, the study says federal regulators documented 36 fatalities, 164 injuries, and about $2.5 billion in costs associated with industry-reported incidents from natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines.

Problems with pipelines have been in the news in North Carolina of late, with a recent ransomware attack on the management of the Colonial Pipeline, which carries multiple petroleum products up and down the East Coast. A failure of that same pipeline was responsible for a million-gallon petroleum leak in Huntersville in August 2020.

The study was conducted by Emanuel and Louie Rivers III of N.C. State, Martina Angela Caretta of Sweden’s Lund University, and Pavithra Vasudevan of the University of Texas. It did not attempt to offer solutions on how to mitigate pipeline development in socially vulnerable communities.

Energy companies have long argued that placing pipelines near large cities would make little sense because of the likelihood that a catastrophic event could endanger far more people. That’s one reason they choose rural areas, even though more socially vulnerable people typically live there.

Emanuel said he isn’t sure what the answer is, but he’d like the country to start a concerted effort to dramatically curb its dependence on natural gas.

“If you’re going to keep building these (pipelines) you’re going to have to deal with the impacts to either urban communities or rural communities,” he said. “Maybe it’s a Catch 22. I’m not really sure.”

Calls for curtailing natural gas use growing Emanuel is not the only one who thinks it’s time for the United States to curtail or eliminate the use of natural gas in the pursuit of stopping global warming.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that a growing fight is emerging across the United States as “cities consider phasing out natural gas for home cooking and heating, citing concerns about climate change…”

According to the publication, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and New York have either enacted or proposed measures to ban or discourage the use of natural gas in new homes and buildings.

Meanwhile, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana have enacted laws outlawing municipal bans on fossil fuels in their states before they can spread, saying they are overly restrictive and costly. W

CONGRATULATIONS, CLASS OF 2021!

William Butts Schmidt Needham B. Broughton

Words can’t express how proud we are, You’ll always be our world star, May all of your Fridays be four bar!

Skylar J. Noble

Broughton Magnet High School

Skylar graduates Magna Cum Laude from Broughton HS and will attend NC State majoring in Fashion Merchandising. We love you!

This story was originally published by N.C. Health News.

INDYweek.com

June 9, 2021

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R E S O D P N E U N O

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W

ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

UNC-Chapel Hill’s refusal to grant tenure to acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is emblematic of the systemic racism chronicled in Jones's 1619 Project BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com 10

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A

t the end of the final episode of the 1619 podcast, Nikole Hannah-Jones chokes up as she looks out onto the water where the first ships brought enslaved Africans to colonial Virginia.

“The one thing I didn’t realize when I started this project was how raw everything still is when you’re Black in this country,” she says. “And white people always want to tell you to get over it and to move on, but there’s never been a reckoning for what was done, and it’s hard to move on. And just spending so much time thinking about it constantly, I just realized that the wounds are still very raw. They’re still there.”

The show premiered in 2019 upon publication of The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine. It was about 18 months before the board of trustees at Hannah-Jones’s alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, refused to hire her with tenure for her position as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism and then refused to reconsider that decision despite the threat of a lawsuit and the repeated endorsement of Hannah-Jones from the journalism school faculty. The controversy stems from this 2019 body of work.

Hannah-Jones’s story is not unique. In 2019, there were eight Black women serving as full, tenured professors at UNCCH, and 23 tenured associate professors, a total of 31 Black women with tenure, down from a high of 32 in 2017. White men, on the other hand, held 337 tenured full professorships and 148 tenured associate professor positions that year—485 tenured professors, down from a high of 535 in 2017.

At public and private universities, in North Carolina and across the country, at predominately white institutions but sometimes at HBCUs, Black professors— especially ones with other marginalized identities, do not receive tenure at the same rate as do their white counterparts.

Sonja Haynes Stone, now the namesake of UNC’s Center for Black Culture

and History, came to the university in 1974, a few years after the Black Student Movement had demanded the creation of an African American Studies program. She held two master’s degrees and earned her PhD in the year after joining the faculty.

She was Director of the Curriculum of the African American Studies program.

She helped develop the National Council of Black Studies. She received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to start the Southeastern Black Press Institute. She was on committees for UNC’s Black cultural center, the recruitment of Black faculty, and the Campus Y, and served as an advisor to the Black Student Movement.

It wasn’t enough.

In 1979, the university’s chancellor, provost, and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences denied her tenure.

“Stone has fallen victim to a growing trend,” Black students wrote in a letter to The Daily Tar Heel. “Across the country more and more qualified black professors are being denied tenure at institutions of higher education. This trend is not only a slap in the face to black scholars, but in the long run it will be a severe constraint on the quality of education available to the youth of the nation.”

Stone appealed, and her tenure dossier went before the UNC Board of Trustees.

Two hundred students crammed into Morehead Planetarium to support her.

Harry Amana, the first Black professor hired by UNC’s journalism school, was interviewed by Stone during his recruitment. He came to the university the same year her tenure battle began.

“They took it to an outside arbitrator, and it was decided that the people who evaluated her work knew nothing about African American Studies,” Amana told the INDY. “Her packet was sent outside the university to noted scholars and historians in the field of African American Studies, and that's how she got the recommendation for tenure.”

The UNC Board of Trustees and the UNC System Board of Governors finally awarded Stone tenure, but with a catch: she was not given a promotion, and stayed an assistant professor.

“She was one of maybe two or three people on the whole campus who had tenure as an assistant professor,” Amana says. Stone wasn’t named an associate professor until 1984. She was still an associate professor when she died unexpectedly in August 1991.

Sharon P. Holland, now a distinguished professor in American Studies at UNCCH, has moved around a lot. She is often an outlier, and not just because of her

“Everywhere I've been, I've been one of a handful—if not the only—out Black women on campus.

And in several of the places ... I was actually the first tenured Black person full-time in that department." race: Holland, who is queer and gender nonconforming, says that additional identity made her an exception even among Black professors.

“Everywhere I've been, I've been one of a handful—if not the only—out Black women on campus,” Holland says. “And in several of the places where I either was a tenure track or gained tenure, I was actually the first tenured Black person full-time in that department.”

As a postdoctoral researcher at Wesleyan, Holland recalls the chair of her department told her that she and other post-doctoral students were supposed to be at the office from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every weekday except Friday. One weekend, she left town to workshop a chapter with some classmates from graduate school. They got snowed in, and Holland had to miss work that day.

“I called the chair, and she just chewed me out for like, half an hour about me being irresponsible,” she says. “Clearly what was happening was ridiculous, but I didn't know that; I was a postdoc, fresh out of grad school.”

Holland worked up the nerve to bring this slight to the director of their program.

It was through him that she found out that there was no such rule requiring postdoctoral students to be at the office for a set amount of time.

From there, Holland decided to end her position early to make up for lost time, and headed to Stanford. While there, her close friend and colleague, Lora Romero, died by suicide. They’d grown apart in recent years; since Holland was queer, and Romero was bisexual, others in the department assumed

that a romantic relationship had fizzled, and led to Romero’s death.

“It allowed certain members of the department to basically say, ‘Well, if Sharon hadn’t treated Lora so badly, Lora wouldn’t have killed herself,’” Holland says. “I kind of felt held responsible for that, and so I had to leave. You can’t stay. You can’t stay when people are being not only ungenerous, but also stupid and homophobic.”

Other incidents at other universities were in line with the microaggressions Holland experienced: a secretary not allowing her into a meeting that was being held for her specifically, a potential hire assuming she was an office manager instead of on the hiring committee.

Her work was also undervalued in a literal sense—she says she took a $35,000 pay cut when she left a job at Duke University to come to UNC-CH. In 2020, The Daily Tar Heel reported that Holland had previously considered leaving if the university did not increase her pay at UNC, and give her the resources to create the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective.

"Carolina is committed to creating and sustaining an inclusive community of students, faculty, and staff," a university spokesperson said in response to a request for comment from the INDY. "We are dedicated to building a diverse learning environment with the highest caliber faculty and we remain committed to that mission.”

While Holland beat the odds, she still feels the weight of her experiences, and acknowledges how few distinguished Black professors there are. Sometimes, like with the case of Stone, or with the recent death of professor Randall Kenan, the pool just keeps getting smaller.

H

annah-Jones’s, Stone’s, and Holland’s experiences are not singular struggles for recognition, nor does it appear that there was a time when these struggles weren’t present for Black women working in academia.

In 2013, a public relations professor named Queenie Byars and her husband, Napoleon, decided to retire from the UNCCH journalism school after Queenie was denied tenure; despite getting faculty approval and her decades of experience doing PR for the U.S. Air Force and teaching at Carolina, an outside board composed of professionals from across the U.S. denied her.

This problem also exists at other universities in the Triangle.

North Carolina State University had nine Black women full professors and 10 Black women tenured associate professors

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June 9, 2021

11

in 2019. Duke University had eight and 12, respectively. Some Black women academics consider themselves lucky; Dr. Khalilah R. Johnson, an assistant professor on tenure track in the UNC School of Medicine, says she has supportive faculty members surrounding her who aren’t concerned with her outspokenness on racism in the university. Despite this, she’s constantly aware of the possibility that her public stances on issues like Silent Sam could mean backlash from the Board of Trustees.

“I exceed every benchmark really that the university puts forward, so on paper, it would seem that I shouldn't have any issues,” Johnson says. “But the reality of it is I am a very public-facing academic. I have a reputation—good or bad—in some professional circles for being vocal, and I am aware that people at my institution know that. I think the possibility of not being promoted is real, but I can't worry about that.”

Amana, similarly, says his tenure process in the 1970s was not as stressful as it was for others, since he had the support of the UNC-CH journalism school’s dean at the time.

We still don’t know what will become of Hannah-Jones’s position at UNC-CH. As of the publication of this story, she has not said whether she will still go to work in Carroll Hall this upcoming school year, as was planned.

In the meantime, the board’s decision is clearly driving a wedge further between UNC’s self-proclaimed investment in diversity and the reality of its academic environment. Lisa Jones, a world-renowned chemist, rescinded her candidacy for coming to UNC-CH after seeing the experience of Hannah-Jones.

Lindsay Carbonell, an adjunct professor at the Hussman School, announced that she won’t be returning. Jones is a Black woman. Carbonell is white but cited Hannah-Jones’s treatment as her reason for leaving UNC. “I feel that a premier university, in a state where my family’s blood is in the soil, is missing the opportunity to remain a premier university,” Holland says. “And when I say premier, I'm not talking about status. I'm talking about absolutely leading the way, and what we do—especially in this region and in this part of the world—what we do for our future as human beings. It is a profound lack of vision. People are concentrated, fixated, on what we can and cannot do, because 12 people, six people, eight people in a room have made it difficult. That's more like the slavocracy than anything, and we need to break that legacy.” W 12

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FO O D & D R I N K

PART & PARCEL 600 Foster Street, Durham | Pnpdurham.com

Bulk Good Package-free store Part & Parcel offers dry goods and a new model of inclusive, neurodiverse employment

BY LENA GELLER food@indyweek.com

L

ong before the pandemic, Jonah Sanville knew what it was like to take off a mask at the end of the workday.

During their first few years in the workforce, Sanville, who has autism, was up front with employers about their neurodivergence. But after realizing that employers were unwilling to accommodate their needs as a disabled person—and that, once made aware of Sanville’s autism, they would often treat them worse than their neurotypical coworkers—Sanville decided to do everything they could to conceal their disability.

“I did my very best to not be autistic,” Sanville says. “It worked and worked until I couldn’t pretend anymore. So then I would come out as autistic, or through my actions I would come out as autistic, and I would get treated poorly again.”

Sanville, 25, says they’ve held somewhere around 12 different jobs since entering the workforce six years ago. But a new chapter is starting: last month, Sanville began work at Part & Parcel, a new bulk dry goods store in downtown Durham committed to hiring employees of all neurotypes.

“I’ve definitely had better integration here than at any other job,” Sanville says.

“It’s been very accepting and accommodating of my disabilities.”

In efforts to reduce packaging waste and promote environmental justice, bulk grocery shop Part & Parcel offers a package-free shopping experience, carrying dry goods items, cleaning supplies, and personal care products all in bulk. Customers are asked to bring their own containers—plastic Tupperware, glass jars, tote bags—and fill them with goods, which are then sold by weight.

The store’s interior looks similar to the bulk section at Whole Foods, with large, clear cases holding spices, nuts, beans, and

a variety of flours, as well as dish soap, shampoo, conditioner, and lotion.

Part & Parcel affords shoppers an eco-friendly way to stock up on the basics without having to purchase products in mass quantities, as is the usual trade-off with buying in bulk. Because of the store’s proximity to the Durham Farmers’ Market, owner T Land says they foresee Saturday morning shoppers stopping by Part & Parcel to get their dry goods after picking up produce at the Market.

Land, the executive director of Durham’s Autism Support and Advocacy Center, opened Part & Parcel in May as an offshoot of their non-profit. Land says their decision to open the store was rooted in a desire to create employment opportunities for the neurodivergent community.

“I was running programming for high school students who have autism, looking toward what they would be doing postgrad,” Land says. “[Students had] lots of skills and assets that were ready for the workforce, but it was really difficult for employers to be willing to take the change.”

With Part & Parcel, Land aims to create a space where neurodivergent people feel comfortable bringing their full identity to work and advocating for the tools they need to be successful.

“Masking [one’s identity] is exhausting and does not help anyone be their most productive and creative selves,” Land says.

To support their staff, Land allows employees to take breaks as needed, wear comfortable clothing, and help design organizational processes in ways that work for them. In collaboration with employees who are visual learners, for example, Land has developed picture-based guides to illustrate tasks like cleaning and restocking goods.

Part and Parcel owner T Land

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

“This structure is very clear, it’s very direct, it means anyone can jump in and know exactly what the expectation is,” Land says. “Most of the things that you would put in place to support a neurodivergent employee also help your neurotypical employees.”

Beyond providing sustainable employment, the package-free store also strives to promote sustainability in environmental practices. About 30% of municipal solid waste in the U.S. comes from packaging material, according to the EPA, with over 30 million tons of packaging waste ending up in landfills each year.

“Most packaging is excessive to serve the end of convenience,” Land says. “In stores, sometimes you’ll see three bananas on a Styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic. Bananas have their own natural wrapper!”

North Carolina landfills are “disproportionately located in communities of color and low wealth,” causing long-term negative effects on residents’ health and property value, according to an Environmental Health Perspectives study. Most of

Durham’s trash gets sent to a solid waste facility in Sampson County, where nearly a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line.

“It’s environmental racism,” Land says. “[The landfill] is there because white communities who have more power and more privilege are making sure it’s not in their community.”

Though the operation is currently smallscale, Land has a number of plans to expand in the coming year, including broadening Part & Parcel product selection and using the space to house a market for neurodiverse vendors. And the store is just the first piece of providing employment under the Autism Support and Advocacy Center, Land says. They intend to acquire the apartment above Part & Parcel and turn it into an Airbnb unit, hiring neurodivergent employees to maintain it.

“Workplaces need to be able to see the strength and the ability in neurodiversity,” Land says. “We want to be the model for that. We want the community to see that it’s replicable.” W INDYweek.com

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FO O D & D R I N K Gabrielle E.W. Carter PHOTO BY DERRICK BEASLEY

over, directly and more broadly—who are just excited to see themselves in this context and to have something that feels like it’s for us. It was written with us in mind. The whole process was done thoughtfully and non-linear, which I think is a very beautiful and Black way of telling stories.

What does the series mean to you personally?

I had a few friends over to watch the first two episodes and we just cried so many different types of tears. First, it was awesome to see Stephen [Satterfield] telling the story. To see his vulnerability and honesty and transparency on the screen like that was powerful. And then also to see them in a place like Benin telling a story of culture and art and food that didn’t center enslavement—talking about life before that and how those traditions remain and exist and are being passed forward. That felt very powerful, and like something I have never seen.

Sowing the Seeds In a new Netflix Series on Black foodways, local preservationist Gabrielle E.W. Carter gets her due BY ERIC GINSBURG food@indyweek.com

I

t makes perfect sense that Netflix’s new series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America would include Gabrielle E.W. Carter. The Apex native and cultural preservationist has done a little bit of everything, from working with acclaimed chef JJ Johnson to hosting communal dinners inspired by her family’s culinary traditions. More recently, as a co-founder of Tall Grass Food Box (alongside Gerald C. Harris and Derrick Beasley), Carter created a way for Triangle residents to directly support local Black farmers through and beyond the pandemic.

Hosted by sommelier and Whetsone Magazine founder Stephen Satterfield, High on the Hog is a narrative correction, focusing on the foundational role that African ingredients, techniques, and culinary knowledge played in the formation of the American table. It also illustrates the countless historical and current Black and African American 14

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figures who drew from this wellspring, including Carter, who is one of the most recognized standard-bearers and inheritors of that proud tradition in this region and state.

In a recent conversation with the INDY, Carter discussed her preservation work, family land, and reclaiming red-hot links.

INDY WEEK: There’s been a celebratory outpouring in admiration for High on the Hog, including the portion of Episode 2 that highlights your work and your family’s homestead in Apex. What stands out to you about the responses you’ve been getting directly?

GABRIELLE E.W. CARTER: I think how necessary it is and how we’ve been needing something like this for a long time. All types of Black folks throughout the diaspora are reaching out—from Brazil and Panama and all

In a recent Instagram post, Satterfield refers to you, writing that “her family becomes a proxy for ours.”

What does that mean to you?

I love that he said that. I think of my work as a cultural preservationist. I hope to create a framework for other artists to intentionally preserve the culture. It’s really about the questions we ask, the time that we spend, it’s about us deeming these things important, and archiving them in whatever way we can. I hope that my work will serve as a framework for others to do the work of preserving our culture. It’s going to take all of us telling our individual stories and unearthing some of the older stories that are with some of the griots and culture keepers in our communities.

There’s this sense of discovery that comes from this work that helps me ground myself in something bigger than myself. To see other people discovering their family history is rewarding in a way that I don’t have words for.

One thing that’s changed since filming this back in 2019 is the pandemic, which led you to co-found Tall Grass Food Box. For folks who are unfamiliar, can you introduce the project?

When there’s a need, people in my neighborhood turn to fundraisers, whether it’s a fish fry or a food drive. This started, at least for me, as a very casual thing where we would buy the produce directly from farmers and sell some boxes.

We started with 30 boxes and now we have around 200+ families that we’re feeding.

At the peak, we were doing this awesome program with the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association to feed hospitality workers. When that was up and running, we were feeding 400 families. We’ve reimagined Tall Grass, which initially was more like relief, and now it’s more like, Oh, we have agency to figure out how we want our local food economy to look and grow and work and to empower the people we want to empower.

Being intentional about putting this money into Black land and Black food— that just feels good to us as a team and our customer base.

self, from crab apples to pickled squash and okra. I’ve already started playing with some different things that we grow and source from farmers at Tall Grass.

In High on the Hog you talk about how the state of North Carolina is seizing your family’s land in front of the farm to create a highway. How are you and your family persevering in the face of this displacement?

We had to sell a portion of our land and a lot of my relatives were displaced in that process. All of the work that we were doing prior to this even becoming a threat is still moving forward, maybe more fiercely because of this situation.

That’s not to say that seed-keeping and winemaking were not important prior to the highway project, because they’re the reason I moved home.

The entire process was very harmful. I feel I feel a lot of things, but I especially feel good about the way that I’ve pulled people in to archive how things were prior.

There is this sense of erasure now that the houses are no longer there, and the plants are no longer there, and the trees are no longer there. That was all a very violent process.

Coming out of something like that, the information, the people, the understanding, the seeds themselves—all of those things are still here. I’m finding a lot of power in reimagining what’s most important, because as much as the houses and the proximity meant to us, it’s important to keep sight of the individuals and stories and the other things as well, and all those things we still have access to.

Do you have an example of that?

I’m playing with some ideas that represent our history but also are tied up with our Southern nostalgia. I’m currently working on reclaiming the red hot [links]. It’s this mildly spicy, super-red sausage. Every good cookout had red hots on the grill, and the good ones were burnt. You just eat it on white bread or a bun with some mustard.

I wanted to reimagine red hots knowing what I know now about where that meat is sourced from and how many types of dye are in that. I’m in the test kitchen trying to recreate this dog with pork that is sourced from one of the farmers who’s actually in High on the Hog. I’m going to try and get the same crazy red, but with hibiscus and paprika, and things that I don’t feel sad about putting in my body. I don’t know if you know Andrea [Reusing] from Lantern, but she is my co-conspirator and we’re trying to figure it out. That’s exciting and fun right now.

How can people get involved in the work you’re doing?

Revival Taste Collective is something that I’m bringing back to life. I’m looking at that as a platform where I’ll be able to bring in people like Uncle Andrew and different elders and youth who are doing really beautiful culture-keeping work.

I started a Patreon specifically for some of the food preservation work that I’m doing. I’m currently in the R&D phase of a fermented food and beverage line.

It’s going to be a small-batch, kind of thoughtfully curated collection of items that are co-inspired or co-created by people like Uncle Andrew and the various farmers that we’re working with who have these long, familial food traditions and histories. I’m centering us and our stories: Black and indigenous people from eastern North Carolina.

A great inspiration comes from my Grandma Nancy, who had a whole wall of canned goods that she canned or dried her-

Can you say more about who inspires your work?

My grandfather, Mayfield, definitely inspires my work, and his brothers Herbert and Andrew. My great uncle Herbert, he’s a chef who worked in the legislative building for 20 years and cooked for presidents. Back in the day, him and my grandfather had a little spot called The Basement. They were doing a little hangout spot, but it also had a line outside of it for their wet, batter-fried chicken. That’s one of those recipes that it’s like, Oh, we have to preserve this. Their passion around growing food has inspired me, and how it’s given them access to what feels like wealth and abundance.

And who do you aim to inspire?

First, Black women. They are my audience and my inspiration, too. I always love seeing when little girls are first introduced to something like being on the land and some of the practices that I’m working to preserve. Watching them light up around that information and recognizing there’s a pathway to something different; that’s exciting and inspirational to me. I’m focused on trying to make sure they have access to this information, and that they know this is their culture and their inheritance to take forward however they want. W This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Visit patreon.com/gabrielle_ewcarter to learn more about Carter’s work.

INDYweek.com

June 9, 2021

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SCREEN

HIGH ON THE HOG

Now streaming on Netflix Still from High on the Hog PHOTO COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Culinary Cartography Docuseries High on the Hog is a transcendent journey through Black American foodways and the African diaspora BY KHALISA RAE THOMPSON arts@indyweek.com

“T

ell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you where you come from,” says Benin artist Romuald Hazoumè onscreen in the new Netflix show High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, as we tour his brilliantly crafted studio in the heart of his city. Such is the premise of High on the Hog—a masterful history book of Black culinary craft, its origins, and its multiple pathways. The mini-docuseries, inspired by the homonymous book by African food historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris, is an atlas for Americans to find their way back to the cradle of where Black American cooking began.

The docuseries opens on the shores of Benin, West Africa, a major hub in the transatlantic slave trade. While in Benin, Harris and host Stephen Satterfield travel through an open-air marketplace, revealing that many staple African American dishes—including candied yams, okra, black-eyed peas, and rice—are crops that originated in Africa, something that culinary classes and history books conceal.In their discussion, Harris reveals what drew her to African food exploration was the way she thought, “I know this,” after eating African cuisine. At every stop on the journey, High on the Hog revels in spiritual and ancestral food connections between Africans and Black Americans.

Through the course of four episodes, we follow Satterfield from Benin to South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and beyond as he learns from historians, artists, and chefs how African tradition traveled through and helped shaped the American South via enslaved people.

High on the Hog not only unpacks the culinary cartography, but also the cartography of chattel slavery and the reverent fight to preserve history through griot food stories. From mangi mangi and jollof rice to Bellevue Broth and macaroni pie, each dish highlights the culinary dexterity of Black craftsmen/women and tells the salacious prose of American gourmet. In the series, Black cooking is not only familial

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but also the source of centuries of commerce—from hearth cooking in Philly to cattle ranching in Texas to oyster shucking on the shores of South Carolina, Black people have not only been the originators of elevated food but also the masters of home-cooked meals.

The magic of High on the Hog, however, is more than the history and even more than the phenomenal-looking food— which is so expertly described by Satterfield that viewers can almost taste it.

The magic is in the people we meet along the journey, the stories they tell, and the connection they make with us by way of Satterfield’s emotional tours of historical landmarks like slave quarters, ports, and descendants’ homes of the enslaved.

In each episode, the themes of resilience and endurance are palpable, as is the love people have for each other and for feeding their communities. In North Carolina, for example, we meet chef and farmer Gabrielle E.W. Carter, who is contending with the fact that the city is forcibly displacing her relatives and cutting through her garden with an expressway.

But she persists and, alongside Brother BJ Dennis, an expert in Gullah cooking, is working to keep the roots of Southern Sea Islanders alive in the Carolinas.

As culinary historian Michael Twitty explains, “We call our food soul food… something completely transcendental.”

And that’s exactly the word: transcendental. Unlike a cut-and-dried history lesson, High on the Hog is a celebration and unearthing of Black legacy, wealth, and innovation, and its impact on American cuisine.

The journey of Southern American fare has long been a concealed history with very little credit to Black master-chefs and enslaved people.

High on the Hog—coined from a notorious double entendre about how Black food has been stereotyped as “less-than” and in need of elevation—reminds us that American people have, for centuries, been getting “high” off the hog cured and crafted by Black hands. It’s an essential map of the culinary truths we should not only celebrate, but share with our communities. W

PAGE Raleigh's Community Bookstore

Listen to the latest podcasts on Bookin’

What We’re Reading this Summer

Jonathan Ames, A Man Named Doll

Available

6.07

Slip these titles from local authors and presses into your vacation bags Virtual Events

BY SARAH EDWARDS AND REBECCA SCHNEID arts@indyweek.com

Monica West, Revival Season

THU

6.10 8PM

Searching for Amylu Danzer

John Rosenthal [Waywiser Press; June 2021]

Nate’s New Age

Michael Hanson [Atmosphere Press; 2021]

A Chapel Hill writer and photographer plumbs the depths of time, memory, and loss in this memoir as he recounts a childhood friend, Amylu, who grew up and disappeared at the age of 20. Her powerful imprint on his life in the decades that have followed is acute and aching; this slim, poetic volume reflects those aches and will resonate with those who have wrestled with impossible questions after loss. —Sarah Edwards

In his new novel, UNC-Chapel Hill librarian Michael Hanson follows Nate, a 28-year-old skydiving instructor who is riddled with inner demons and searching for meaning (primarily, yes, through sex and substances) as he angles and longs for more.

Hanson, described by James Dickey as a “dead-serious and talented writer,” hits the mark with an ability to write his character’s flaws with clarity, and then give him the pages to grow. —SE

Bone House

Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating

K-Ming Chang [Bull City Press; June 29] From Lambda Literary Award finalist K-Ming Chang, we can expect this 25-page micro-chapbook to be a queer Taiwanese-American retelling of Wuthering Heights. Chang, also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree known for her novel Bestiary, writes the story of three women as they interrogate their complicated relationships with love, loss, violence, and history.

—Rebecca Schneid

Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old

Steven Petrow [Penguin Random House Publishing; June 29] An inevitable part of being young is reckoning with the fear of getting older. Thirteen years ago, Hillsborough writer Petrow started channelling the fears and frustrations that came up, as he watched his own parents age, into a list: what he wouldn’t do when he got to be their age. He then converted that list into this book—a sage guide to aging that’s equal parts funny and practical, addressing the common, rational (and irrational) fears attached to the process. —RS

with Claire Lombardo

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Jeremy McCarter, In the Heights: Finding Home

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Wyatt Williams [UNC Press; September 2021] What are the implications of eating meat? In this release, former Atlanta restaurant critic Wyatt Williams applies years of investigative reporting to uncomfortable questions about animals and our appetites that, as factory farming proliferates, are only becoming more urgent. More profanely poetic than polemic—Williams is a kindred spirit to experimental essayists like Eula Biss—Springer Mountain gestures at the beating heart of life’s big inquiries. —SE

Complaint!

Sara Ahmed [Duke Press; September 2021] In a powerful new release, British American feminist Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? How is complaint radical feminism? And, how can we learn about power from those who choose to fight against the powerful? —RS W

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