INDY Week 6.10.20

N O T T S BE U M

KEN SPO

A WORD THAT

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill June 10, 2020

Systemic racism pervades North Carolina.

It’s considered rude to talk about it. That’s why it persists.

By Gene Nichol p. 14

INDY WEEK CORPORATE PRESS CLUB These companies and institutions proudly support free, independent local journalism in the Triangle. Please support our mission—and our community—by supporting them.

RECYCLE THIS PAPER 2

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

The ArtsCenter Arts NC State Carolina Theatre of Durham Carolina Performing Arts Cat’s Cradle Duke Performances Dr. Jodi Foy, DDS, PA GoRaleigh Kane Realty Corporation Kenan Institute of Ethics MotorCo Music Hall Nasher Museum NC Museum of Art Peace Street Playmakers Repertory Company Quail Ridge Books & Music The Regulator Bookshop Teaser’s Men’s Club Unscripted Hotel Contact advertising@indyweek.com today to learn how you can become a member of the INDY Corporate Press Club.

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 20

CONTENTS NEWS 10 Like many things in Durham, COVID is unequally distributed by race.

BY JAKE SHERIDAN

11

An activist’s late-night arrest has fueled calls for the Raleigh police chief’s ouster. BY THOMASI MCDONALD AND LEIGH TAUSS

FEATURE 14

In North Carolina, we don’t talk about race. We wouldn’t want white folks to be uncomfortable. BY GENE NICHOL

FOOD 19 Filmmaker Katina Parker feeds thousands in Durham.

BY SARAH EDWARDS

MUSIC 20 Jaki Shelton Green's new album reclaims stolen breath.

BY ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

23 Deniro Farrar's Sole Food is the hip-hop record we need now.

BY KYESHA JENNINGS

CULTURE 24 Saleem Reshamwala podcasts the wonders of the world.

25 The American Dance Festival goes local and virtual.

DEPARTMENTS 5 Voices

BY BRIAN HOWE

BY BYRON WOODS

7 A Week in the Life 8 15 Minutes

6 Quickbait

Defund, Reform, Ret hink

A

few weeks ago, the notion of defunding the police existed primarily on the fringes, among academics and a handful of activists. As the George Floyd protests swept the country and we all focused on the abuses of law enforcement, the idea has become mainstream. The Minneapolis City Council is poised to defund its dysfunctional police department. In Durham, Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson took up the banner on NPR’s All Things Considered last weekend.

President Trump, meanwhile, has sought to tie the slogan around Joe Biden’s neck, thinking it will assist his sagging campaign.

To be clear, defunding the police isn’t so much about eliminating any mechanism of public safety so much as rethinking our relationship with law enforcement and rechanneling the money we spend on cops into programs that will seek to head off violence in the first place. It’s also about demilitarizing the cops and prioritizing mental health, among other things.

Short of defunding, several lesser reforms are being floated. Last week, Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin signed on to former President Barack Obama’s challenge to reevaluate the city’s use-of-force policies. Several Durham officials, meanwhile, have signaled support for the 8 Can’t Wait campaign, a series of policies aimed at reducing police violence. And Democrats in Congress have unveiled a bill that would limit officers’ immunity from lawsuits and ban chokeholds on the federal level.

There’s one element to these efforts that’s missing, I think: In North Carolina, there is almost no police transparency. Internal affairs investigations and officers’ personnel files are closed to the public, which means we’re supposed to trust the police to police themselves. Never in the history of law enforcement has this been a good idea.

Whatever the next thing looks like, what we have isn’t working. If it were, you wouldn’t see tens of thousands of people in the streets protesting in every city in the country. It’s not just George Floyd. It’s the fact that marginalized communities have long been overpoliced, that Black men have been locked up at disproportionate rates, that Black families have been torn apart by our carceral policies.

18 1000 Words

—Jeffrey C. Billman (jbillman@indyweek.com)

COVER Illustration by Jon Fuller

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

EDITOR I AL

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

Editor in Chief Jeffrey C. Billman Arts + Culture Editor Brian Howe Raleigh News Editor Leigh Tauss Deputy A+C Editor Sarah Edwards

Contributing Food Editor Nick Williams Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods Voices Columnists T. Greg Doucette, Chika Gujarathi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Courtney Napier,

Barry Saunders, Jonathan Weiler Contributors Jim Allen, Jameela F. Dallis, Michaela Dwyer, Lena Geller, Spencer Griffith, Howard Hardee, Laura Jaramillo, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Josephine McRobbie, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Neil Morris, James Michael Nichols, Marta Nuñez Pouzols, Bryan C. Reed, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Eric Tullis, Michael VenutoloMantovani, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu, Patrick Wall

Interns Mary King, Bella Smith

C RE ATI V E Creative Director

Annie Maynard Graphic Designer

Jon Fuller Staff Photographer

Jade Wilson

ADVERTISING

INDY Week | indyweek.com

A D V E R T I S I N G SA L E S

Director of Sales John Hurld

P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 Durham: 320 East Chapel Hill Street, #200 Durham, N.C. 27701 | 919-286-1972

advertising@indyweek.com Raleigh 919-832-8774 Durham 919-286-1972 Classifieds 919-286-6642

Raleigh Sales Manager MaryAnn Kearns Account Executive Magnolia Wang Classifieds Account Executive Amanda Blanchard

Raleigh: 227 Fayetteville Street, #105 Raleigh, N.C. 27601 | 919-832-8774

E M A I L A D D R E SS E S first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com

Contents © 2020 INDY Week All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.

C I R C U L AT I O N Berry Media Group

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

3

BACKTALK

what

“Th platewrites conce nist is media pers, the st printe “Co don’t care a into s the re are go You fo be rig racist don’t Qu got in they t HAAH at you eat sh to the will pr boy an ed lik HA, yo PAU ed tho ist gro in Por guess black to die ones t they m a few now c Mu was L

WANT

ind @ 4

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

BACKTALK

During the first weekend of George Floyd protests, our Raleigh office was destroyed by looters. Leigh Tauss, who was in the office when someone threw a brick through the glass, also tweeted about it as it happened. Her tweets got picked up by right-wing media types. Guess what happened next.

“The person who threw the brick through your plate-glass window was a hardcore communist,” writes BOB CANUP. “As far as communists are concerned anyone who isn’t a hardcore communist is a racist Nazi. Communists only allow state media to speak to the public. Independent newspapers, like your paper, are not allowed—since only the state speaks the truth, and anything else anyone printed would thus be counter-revolutionary lies.

“Communists don’t do virtue signaling, they don’t care about being politically correct, they don’t care about pronouns, they just want to grind people into submission—with their boot on your neck for the rest of your life. Think only ‘Deplorables’ like me are going to the gulags and the reeducation camps?

You forget you too are a raaaacist Nazi, and you’ll be right there with me. Do you find being called a racist Nazi makes you angry because you know you don’t deserve it? Now you know exactly how I feel.”

Quoth SOOKA MEDEEK (yeah, we know): “You got in bed with the leftist pussy agitators and they turned on your sorry ass! HAHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA, makes me laugh at you disgusting filthy liberal pigs. Fuck you all and eat shit and die! These pussy antifa folks don’t come to the suburbs because they know we are armed and will protect our stuff. They are weak, punk-ass pussy boy and ugly girls agitators that need to be eradicated like cockroaches! HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA, you leftist pigs are really retarded.”

PAUL KERSEY, from Michigan, has well-adjusted thoughts, too: “You idiots supported the terrorist groups BLM and antifa. I guess previous riots in Portland and Seattle didn’t educate you, huh? I guess the Dallas slaughter of five officers by a BLM black radical didn’t either? How many people have to die before you morons wake up? You are the first ones that they’ll attack. And they did. Of course, if they make it to my town, we’ll end their nonsense in a few short seconds. But you disarmed clowns can now cower under your beds sucking your thumbs.”

Multiply this by approximately 3,000, and that was Leigh’s week.

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @IndependentWeekly @indyweek

The System Has Failed Us voices

We must learn from the deadly miscarriage of justice that occurred in Minneapolis. It is time to clean house.

BY COURTNEY NAPIER backtalk@indyweek.com

W

hen I think about George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people murdered by police, I don’t see one guilty party, but a failed system built to uphold the myth of white supremacy.

Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd, had more than a dozen complaints against him.

At least two were nearly lethal, with one person saying he busted down a bathroom door and began beating him without provocation. In fact, the entire Minneapolis Police Department was investigated by the Department of Justice in 2015; the DOJ uncovered systemic failures and “provide[d] recommendations for needed improvements in police accountability.”

The MPD failed to follow many of these recommendations—and failed to keep cops like Chauvin off of the street.

The issue is simple: A police department cannot be in charge of policing itself.

But a police department isn’t supposed to make those decisions, not in Minneapolis, and not here. It is one agency of a local government under the authority of—in Raleigh’s case—the city manager.

Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown’s boss is Ruffin Hall, whose boss is Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin. The latter two would have you believe that they are powerless to call for more accountability from the Raleigh Police Department. As Raleigh PACT and other activist groups have advocated for an oversight board, the first line to come out of City Hall is “only the General Assembly can create that sort of policy.”

That’s debatable. According to Dawn Blagrove, attorney and executive director of Emancipate NC, Governor Cooper could grant police oversight boards subpoena and investigatory power by executive order. She also told The State of Things that the city council determines who is the custodian of personnel files and that there’s “a provision inside of the North Carolina law that says that the city employee [can] put a waiver in their personnel file that says that the community can have access to it.”

It is important, then, to ask why these solutions have not been pursued.

James Baldwin gives us a hint in a 1966 essay for The Nation titled “A Report from Occupied Territory”: “The police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect

white business interests, and they have no other function.”

If Mayor Baldwin has been clear about one thing, it is that she prizes Raleigh’s business owners, especially downtown. Capitalism requires an eager police force that targets marginalized people.

Data on the RPD’s traffic stops suggest that this is exactly what they have. A year after Deck-Brown and Hall took their positions in 2013, the percentage of searches during traffic stops involving Black people decreased to 60 percent. By 2019, however, they’d reached a 20-year high of 77 percent, and 92 percent of drivers on whom police used force last year were Black.

There should have been mayhem the day that Hall blocked council members from viewing the police accountability recommendations drafted by the Human Relations Commission in May 2019. (Currently, there are five vacancies on the HRC. But instead of filling those seats, Baldwin has asked for staff for a report on the HRC’s “effectiveness.”)

Nearly everyone who participated in the special city council meeting on the protests last Thursday called for Deck-Brown’s resignation, and many also called for Baldwin’s resignation. But not a single person called for Hall to be fired. In Raleigh, the city manager runs daily operations. So both Baldwin and Hall allowed Deck-Brown’s police force to teargas and harass peaceful protesters last week. And if Deck-Brown were fired, the city manager would appoint her successor.

All of this reveals the city’s real mandate to the RPD: protect business interests by any means necessary. But this doesn’t apply only to the RPD—every layer of our municipal government is dedicated to this guiding principle. The police watch the purse, and City Hall watches their back. When they oppress—and eventually push out—the Black and the poor, Raleigh’s developers reap the economic benefit. The city then keeps the public’s calls for justice at bay and increases the police budget with the spoils.

We cannot in good conscience or logic call for the resignation of Deck-Brown and Mayor Baldwin without also calling for the resignation of Ruffin Hall. We must learn from the deadly miscarriage of justice that occurred in Minneapolis, and in our own city’s recent history.

The system has failed us. It is time to clean house. 2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

COURTNEY NAPIER is a Raleigh native, community activist, and co-host of the podcast Mothering on the Margins.

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

5

Q U IC KBA I T

North Carolina (2015–20)

Death by Cop

155

G

iven the wave of protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the widespread calls for police reform, we wanted to offer you a snapshot of police shootings in North Carolina in recent years, drawing on data from Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post’s police shootings database. W

North Carolina Police Shootings Per 1M Population (2013–18)

fatal shootings

97% 3%

4.4 4.1 1.9 1.6 1.4

male

female

North Carolina population:

10.49 71% 22% 3% 4%

million (2019)

White

Durham PD Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD Winston-Salem PD Greensboro PD: Raleigh PD

Black

Asian

Other*

Police Shootings in North Carolina by Race (2015–20) 35

Key Unknown 30

Other Hispanic Black White

25

Total

Total number

20

15

10

5

0

2015

2016

Sources: Mappingpoliceviolence.org, Washington Post Police Shootings Database

6

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

2017

Year

2018

2019

2020

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE

6/2 6/4

Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said she signed former President Barack Obama’s COMMIT TO ACTION PLEDGE, which calls on mayors to reevaluate their use-of-force policies.

JAMES PHARMACY in Hillsborough, which opened last year, announced that it would permanently close following the COVID shutdown.

Raleigh Police Chief CASSANDRA DECK-BROWN told protesters that “all lives matter.”

The Raleigh City Council held a special virtual forum about the previous weekend’s protests. Nearly every caller demanded DECK-BROWN’s resignation.

North Carolina bars SUED THE GOVERNOR over being excluded from phase 2 of reopening.

North Carolina passed 1,000 DEATHS from COVID-19.

6/5

Governor Cooper told Republican officials he would not commit to a Republican convention with no social distancing restrictions, which led PRESIDENT TRUMP to announce he was seeking a new location.

In a speech, state Supreme Court Chief Justice CHERI BEASLEY said that systemic racism is pervasive in the state’s court system.

ABC11 rejected an ad by the anti-Trump PAC THE LINCOLN PROJECT, deeming it inflammatory. It was the only station to do so.

6/3

(Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

THE N.C SUPREME COURT ruled that the Racial Justice Act could not be applied retroactively, giving a majority of Death Row inmates a chance to appeal their sentences on the grounds of racial bias.

d goo

But let’s take a longer view: Since we stopped executing people, the state’s murder and violent crime rates haven’t gone up, so we can surmise that the death penalty didn’t work as a deterrent. With the majority of people on Death Row being Black, we can also surmise that race is at least a factor in how people are sentenced. So what’s the point in even trying to keep this system going?

bad

ul

6/6 6/8

f aw Hundreds paid tribute to GEORGE FLOYD at his second funeral service in Hoke County, near where he grew up in Fayetteville.

Durham City Council member JILLIAN JOHNSON appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered to promote and explain the movement to defund the police.

North Carolina reported the most COVID-RELATED HOSPITALIZATIONS since the pandemic began.

A federal judge denied STRIP CLUBS a temporary restraining order that would have allowed them to open despite Governor Cooper’s phase 2 restrictions.

Mayor Baldwin lifted Raleigh’s CITYWIDE CURFEW, which had been in place for a week.

The N.C. Supreme Court It’s asinine that we’re still fighting over this, but here we are: Fourteen years after North Carolina last executed a person, the state Supreme Court dealt what should be a death blow to the antiquated notion of capital punishment in this state. In a pair of 6–1 decisions on Friday, the court ruled that the Racial Justice Act, which the General Assembly repealed in 2013, cannot be applied retroactively. In effect, this means that the majority of the 143 people on Death Row will get a chance to appeal their sentences on racial grounds; since we know North Carolina prosecutors were long taught how to circumvent U.S. Supreme Court strictures prohibiting racial discrimination in jury selection, there’s a good chance many of these appeals will prove fruitful. As Chief Justice Cheri Beasley admitted last week, systemic racism is infused into every part of the criminal justice system.

The Republican National Committee Yes, negotiations over the Republican National Convention in Charlotte were running smoothly until President Trump interjected himself on Twitter, accusing Governor Cooper of playing politics with the COVID-19 crisis to deny the president a rapturous packed house for his acceptance speech. And yes, once the president butted in, there was little they could do but follow. Still, the degree of bad faith the RNC has displayed over the last few weeks—leading to Cooper telling them he wouldn’t budget and the GOP saying they’d take their convention elsewhere last week—has been astounding. The party never submitted a safety plan for the state to review, never came up with viable alternatives short of “cram ’em in, see what happens, maybe we’ll have some hand sanitizer around.” And then they put on a world-class pout when Cooper said that wasn’t good enough.

Have fun in Jacksonville (or wherever).

The Capitol’s Consolation Prizes In the last week, as the George Floyd protests spread across the country, Jacksonville—the most conservative large city in the U.S.—removed a Confederate monument from a city park. Authorities removed Confederate monuments in Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama, too. Fredericksburg, Virginia, removed a 176-year-old slave auction block from its downtown. The United Daughters of the Confederacy had the good sense to remove their statue from Old Town in Alexandria. The state of Virginia was about to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, the home of the Confederacy, before a judge issued a temporary restraining order. That didn’t save a statue of another Confederate general; protesters toppled him themselves.

And yet, the Confederate monuments on North Carolina’s Capitol grounds remain, guarded against protesters by law enforcement, protected from removal by a state law enacted after a white supremacist gunned down nine people in a Black church and people elsewhere began to reevaluate the wisdom of honoring a Confederacy born in the blood of enslaved people.

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

7

Muffin speaks at the Byp100 Durham demonstration on June 1.

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

How many people have you worked with?

Since 2017, I’m going to say it’s 100 people. And out of the 100 people, 22 have been since March. We’ve bailed out more people since March than we have the whole year of 2019 because we didn’t have the funds in 2019. Once COVID hit, people felt an urgency to go ahead and donate.

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

15 MINUTES Andréa “Muffin” Hudson, 47 Director, North Carolina Community Bail Fund of Durham

The narrative should be that people may be accused of a crime, but their crimes don’t warrant a death sentence. They have said that people have gotten better from COVID, right? But people have also died from COVID. And the folks that are more likely to die from it are people incarcerated and in jails because they’re not going to get the proper medical attention that they need.

Speaking from experience from when I was in the Durham County jail, even though [Clarence] Birkhead wasn’t the sheriff at the time—my head got to hurting so bad and I was afraid that I was going to have a stroke, because my mother had a stroke and died from a stroke. I kept ringing the bell, but the detention officer cut the phone off so that they wouldn’t hear it. They never came over.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

You’ve had a personal experience with the cash bail system, right?

Yeah. I couldn’t afford my bail so I sat in jail for two months, and then my charges got dismissed. And in those two months, I lost my housing and I lost my job. And I couldn’t find a job because of the charges. And even though they were dismissed, they still showed up on my background.

What are the types of low-level offenses that people are typically incarcerated for?

INDYWEEK.COM 8

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

Normally it’s for breaking and entering. A lot—all—of the folks that I have seen, and bailed out for this charge, are homeless folks who have gone into a business and fell asleep under a table or under a chair. They didn’t steal anything, they were just in there sleeping. A lot of trespassing charges and some domestic charges, too, like simple assault. But because we’ve raised so much money, we’ve raised the amount from $2,000 to $5,000. So now we’re going to be able to get more people out, since the cap is higher.

How has COVID-19 increased the urgency of getting people out of prison?

It is very important to get people out of pretrial detention and out of prisons because they don’t have the means to practice social distancing. If we’re on the outside and we can’t find the cleaning supplies to keep our places sanitary, how are they going to get the supplies? They’re not. We can’t get them.

You’ve been doing rolling protests past the jail during the pandemic. How do those protests work?

People stay in the car; that way people won’t be afraid to come out worrying about whether or not they’re going to be in contact with too many people, because they stay in a car. The very first time, we had like 30 cars, and then the next week, we had 11 cars, then 5 cars, so it fluctuates. I had put my number out because there’s a number that people can call about bail, and it’s free for them. And people called. And they said that the rolling protests were the highlights of their week. That they can’t wait till they hear the horns because they know that those horns are out there for them and that they haven’t been forgotten. W

~~

SOA P BOXE R

The F Word Fascism might be too strong. But this doesn’t feel like a healthy democracy.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

D

espite the recent proliferation of memes, the early 20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis probably never said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

But he would have endorsed the sentiment.

Watching Hitler’s rise to power in Europe while the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin and the swaggering, dictatorial populist Louisiana Senator Huey “The Kingfish” Long ascended in the U.S., Lewis cobbled together a dystopian near-future for his novel It Can’t Happen Here, which envisioned a Kingfish-like politician winning the presidency on promises to lift up the Forgotten Men—the white working class—and installing a totalitarian regime wrapped in Americana, including a Gestapo-type force called the Minute Men. Before Lewis’s antagonist, Buzz Windrip, took office, liberals fretted about his autocratic tendencies, but their concerns were deemed alarmist—a fascist dictatorship couldn’t happen in America.

This was a pervading sensibility in the mid-thirties. In October 1935, the month Lewis’s novel was published, the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst brushed aside anxieties about creeping fascism.

That word, he argued, was merely a pejorative aimed at patriots: “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a ‘Fascist,’ you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.” It Can’t Happen Here, which quickly became a bestseller, was a warning about that complacency.

What Lewis understood was that there’s nothing magical about the Constitution.

The document itself has no power. It binds us only so long as we agree to its tenets: that there should be three separate but equal branches of government; that there

should be freedom of speech, religion, and press; that all people are guaranteed equal rights under the law; and so on. Our democracy is undergirded by norms more fragile than we’d like to think.

Eighty-one years and one month after its debut, It Can’t Happen Here became popular again, as Lewis’s warning resonated across time.

Within a week of Donald Trump’s election, the book sold out on Amazon. There were significant differences between the fictional Windrip and the stranger-than-fiction president-elect—Windrip was a quasi-socialist, for starters—but there were more than a few similarities, too: Windrip reveled in big rallies. He had a propaganda machine that invented its own reality. He made direct appeals to racial animus. And liberals fretted before the election about his illiberal tendencies, only to see their concerns dismissed as alarmist.

Upon taking office, Trump didn’t immediately imprison dissenters or dissolve states or label Congress advisory, as Windrip did.

But he’s blustered like an authoritarian.

He’s shown an affinity for autocrats. He’s expansively wielded executive power, like when he diverted military funds to a border wall under the guise of a national emergency.

And over the last three and a half years, the guardrails of democracy have been slowly eroded rather than eviscerated, like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

Amid the constant chaos of the Trump administration—the Mueller probe, the Twitter bellicosity, the impeachment—we became inured to these encroachments on the rule of law and numb to statements and deeds that would’ve generated weeks of outrage in any prior administration but barely register now.

Throughout history, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

have written, authoritarians try to do three things: capture the referees, sideline key players, and change the rules. Trump has done all three: He’s tried to capture the referees by purging his administration of the disloyal, most recently inspectors general who conducted unfavorable investigations. He’s sought to sideline key players by intimidating the media. And he’s tried to change the rules by claiming that efforts to expand voter access are fraudulent and having Attorney General William Barr game the justice system for his allies.

But two recent events have put this squarely into focus.

The first came on May 28, when Trump signed an executive order targeting social media platforms because one of them dared to (meekly) fact-check one of his false statements. (Sideline key players?

Check. Change the rules? Check.) Two days earlier, Twitter had appended a note to two tweets directing people to accurate information about voting by mail. The next day, the U.S. eclipsed 100,000 COVID deaths, an event the president marked by promising an executive order reining in Twitter for its offense.

The order, likely unconstitutional, seeks to treat social media platforms that regulate speech in any way as publishers rather than content hosts, making them liable for whatever their users post. (Ironically, under that standard, Twitter would likely ban the president.) This is, in short, the president using the federal government to coerce private companies into helping him spread propaganda and disinformation.

The second, of course, is when Barr had federal agents use pepper spray and rubber bullets to clear legally assembled peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. so that the president could stage a photo op with a Bible in front of a boarded-up church. This, just after he pledged to sic the U.S. military on unruly cities because he is “your president of law and order.”

It’s that last scene that brought out the Sinclair Lewis memes. Perhaps it’s too much to call it fascism, even cloaked in pseudo-patriotism and holding a Bible aloft.

But it doesn’t feel like a healthy democracy, either. W

Looking for Answers?

Follow @INDYWeek on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for breaking news.

SUPPORT LOCAL

businesses by purchasing gift cards, shopping online, donating, ordering takeout, and tipping more KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

9

N E WS

Durham Proportion of Race and Ethnicity Among Confirmed Cases

The Color of COVID At first, the coronavirus in Durham seemed like a whitepeople problem. It didn’t stay that way long.

80%

March

April

May

60%

BY JAKE SHERIDAN backtalk@indyweek.com

40%

Editor’s note: This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and The 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

20%

B

lack and Latinx people in Durham have tested positive for COVID-19 at rates that far outsize their populations, according to new data from the county health department.

Latinx people account for 14 percent of county residents and 34 percent of its COVID19 cases as of May 25. Black people, who make up 37 percent of the population, account for 42 percent of confirmed cases. White people, meanwhile, total 54 percent of residents but just 26 percent of cases.

The unequal infection rate is linked to where people work or are confined, the data show. Nursing care facilities, correctional facilities, and construction sites were the most common settings linked to positive diagnoses. In Durham, Black and Latinx people make up a majority of workers and residents who have tested positive in each of those settings.

Black people make up 67 percent of the cases associated with nursing care facilities and 53 percent of the cases associated with correctional facilities.

Some of Durham’s largest outbreaks have occurred in these facilities. At the Durham Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, at least 111 people were diagnosed with COVID-19, and at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex, which is partly located in Durham County, at least 424 inmates and staff have tested positive.

Latinx people make up 91 percent of the cases associated with construction work, according to the Department of Public Health. Outdoor construction has been exempted from Durham’s aggressive stay-at-home orders.

The over-representation of minorities among people diagnosed with the illness has emerged and increased since the novel coronavirus first reached the Bull City.

The fact that Durham’s racial minorities are disproportionately affected doesn’t surprise Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of NAATPN, a Durham-based organization that advocates for the health of Black people nationally.

“In Durham, just like other places across the country, and most of your service industry workers, those that are on the front line that have been deemed essential are people of color,” Jefferson says. “These are the folks that have to go into work every day. And so if they have to go into work every day, then that means they’re front-facing, and they’re exposed to this virus.”

Pilar Rocha-Goldberg, CEO and president of El Centro Hispano, sees the coronavirus exacerbating preexisting health disparities.

“We had gaps before,” Rocha-Goldberg says. “A lot of them don’t have a primary doctor to go to if they feel sick, or lack knowing how to navigate the system.”

El Centro Hispano, which supports the education, health, and economic well-being of Latinx communities in the Triangle, is sharing educational resources on COVID-19 with community members. But some people who might be sick are afraid to get treated.

“People always fear giving information because of their [immigration] status,” Rocha-Goldberg says. During this outbreak, they worry that using public services could lead to their deportation, she adds.

10

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

0

Asian

Black or African American

Reports during the early phase of the outbreak misled some people in the community into thinking they wouldn’t be affected because they are Latinx, Rocha-Goldberg says.

White people were overrepresented among positive tests in Durham at the onset of the virus—58 percent of the cases in March. As testing has become more available and the virus spread, however, white people accounted for an increasingly smaller share of cases: 27 percent in April, then 16 percent in May. Meanwhile, the rate of diagnosis among people of color skyrocketed.

In March, Latinx people accounted for 7 percent of cases, and Black people made up 25 percent. In April, Black people accounted for 57 percent of new cases. And in May, Latinx people accounted for 58 percent of new cases.

After obtaining data on COVID-19 diagnoses among racial and ethnic groups in Durham, The 9th Street Journal asked the county health department for additional data involving COVID-19 deaths and testing access as well as information about the origins of the disparity and what the county is doing to address it. The department did not respond.

Hispanic or Latinx

White

According to the state Department of Health and Human Services, Black people make up 34 percent percent of reported COVID deaths across the state but only 23 percent of the state’s population. Latinx people have been slightly underrepresented in deaths statewide.

(The state’s racial and ethnic fatality data are incomplete. Racial identification is missing in 5 percent of cases, and ethnic identification is missing in 16 percent.

Durham’s racial and ethnic data is similarly incomplete.)

Jefferson fears the broad impact of the coronavirus will haunt the health and economic well-being of communities of color for decades.

“We’re looking at at least 20 or 30 years before our communities can start to recover. It is going to devastate our communities,” he says.

He worries, too, that protests ignited by the police killing of George Floyd will amplify the damage COVID-19 causes in Black communities by increasing the spread of the disease.

“Yes, we’re mad. Yes, we’re hurt. Yes, we want justice,” Jefferson says. “But we really can’t be distracted. We’ve got to continue practicing social distancing.” W

N E WS

Raleigh

Intimidation Move The RPD’s push to arrest an activist in the dead of night draws calls for the police chief’s resignation.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD AND LEIGH TAUSS

backtalk@indyweek.com

R

evelations that the Raleigh Police Department facilitated the late-night arrest of a 27-year-old activist is fueling distrust of law enforcement and calls for the resignations of Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown and Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin.

As the INDY first reported last week, at 2:15 a.m. on Friday, Wake County sheriff’s deputies arrested Conrad James’s at his mother’s house in Willow Springs on charges of failing to return and damaging a rental car. The Sheriff’s Office made the late-night arrest at the request of the RPD, though the RPD had nothing to do with the alleged crime and had no jurisdiction over Willow Spring.

Instead, the RPD says it sought the Sheriff Office’s assistance following a background check on James and discovered active arrests warrants after he made a nuisance of himself on Wednesday afternoon, when he was caught on TV news cameras banging on windows at the department’s North District headquarters. In addition, hours before his arrest, he publicly threatened to lodge a class-action lawsuit against the city over the police department’s use of tear gas against protesters.

The question remains: Why was it necessary to haul James in the dead of night in his pajamas for a nonviolent offense?

From the start, law enforcement agencies have given contradictory accounts of how the arrest went down.

RPD spokeswoman Donna-maria Harris initially said the agency was not involved, then—after being told that the Sheriff’s Office had said that the RPD had asked deputies to pick up James—said she had given her initial statement without all the facts. Asked who first told her the RPD wasn’t involved, Harris said she had misheard.

She also said the agency did not ask the Sheriff’s Office to arrest James at a particular time.

From left: Haley Richards, Yazmin Williams, and Conrad James in front of RPD HQ on June 5, 2020.

But Eric Curry, a spokesman for the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, said the WCSO received the request at 12:30 a.m. Friday—about three hours after James announced his intent to sue—asking that James “be picked up shortly after we received the request,” Curry told the INDY on Sunday.

According to jail records, deputies arrested him at 2:15.

The charge of failing to return a rental car is a class H felony. The property damage charge is a misdemeanor.

The Fuquay-Varina Police Department had filed the charges two weeks ago, on May 22. The day before, a branch manager with Enterprise reported that James had not returned a 2020 Nissan Versa on April 21. According to a police report, after the manager made several attempts to reach James, James contacted Enterprise and said he had lost the keys in Alabama and could not return the car.

Susan Weis, a spokeswoman for the town of Fuquay-Varina, says the vehicle was found damaged in Cary.

On Monday, James told the INDY he had reported the car stolen in Alabama. He was unable to produce a police report. Asked to provide an incident report number, James said it was on another phone, which was dead. He had previously told the INDY the car was returned to an auto mall in Apex.

PHOTO BY THOMASI MCDONALD

A

t the RPD office last Wednesday, James “began creating a disturbance by banging on the doors and windows of the inner lobby and demanding to be let in, even though signage is clearly posted on the outer door that the district station is closed to the public due to COVID-19,” Harris says.

A desk officer informed James that the station was closed and he should leave. But he continued to cause a commotion, Harris says. He insisted on giving DeckBrown a list of demands. When an officer asked James for the list, he said he needed to write them out, Harris says.

According to Harris, James wrote the list and gave it to an officer, who then handed them to Deck-Brown.

She walked outside to meet him moments after he was pushed out the door. They spoke briefly; their exchange was captured by WRAL. Harris says police learned about the outstanding warrants for James during a debriefing late Wednesday night: “We wanted to know, who is this guy?”

The police did not charge him with disorderly conduct on Wednesday, she says, out of sensitivity to the ongoing protests.

Harris did not say when the RPD contacted the WCSO to request James’s arrest, only that the agency followed standard procedure.

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

11

Curry checked the office’s logs and found a phone call at 12:30 a.m. Friday, more than 24 hours after Harris says the RPD discovered the warrants.

“It appears the [RPD] request was made with some type of time parameter—we would not have had any interest in picking up Mr. James,” he says. “I can’t speak for the police department, but there was no reason for the WCSO to pick up this gentleman in an expeditious time frame.”

This wasn’t James’s first run-in with the law, though his criminal record does not contain anything that suggests he poses a threat: traffic, trespassing, drug paraphernalia, simple marijuana, and underage drinking convictions. (He was wounded by a bullet at a friend’s house in what police called a random drug dispute two years ago.)

Activist Kerwin Pittman believes the police came for James when they did to scare him.

“Their purpose was most definitely intimidation because the man was visible at rallies,” Pittman says. “The tactic they used, you can tell it’s intimidation tactics, which RPD and law enforcement use throughout the years against individuals who speak up. It’s a shame you have law enforcement deploying these kinds of tactics, especially at this time when there’s a spotlight on them and their misconduct.”

Baldwin says she has limited knowledge of the situation, though she admits “the optics on that were bad.” Addressing how James’s arrest was handled will require examining police policy, Baldwin says.

That’s a task for the city’s newly appointed police review board.

T

Your Week.

Every Wednesday.

12

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

he activists who for years have demanded a police oversight board are deeply unsatisfied with what they got.

The body is by and large toothless; it lacks investigatory, subpoena, and disciplinary powers, and is reduced to merely reviewing police procedures.

While the city points to a state law that it says limits what a civilian board can do, this has only furthered distrust.

Akiba Byrd, who co-founded Raleigh’s Police Accountability Task Force in 2015, points out that the officer who shot 24-year-old Akiel Denkins in 2016 is still working in that community. That, Byrd says, shows Deck-Brown’s insensitivity to the Brown and Black people living there.

PACT has shown up in force at city council meetings following other recent incidents of police violence: the 2019 killing of Soheil Mojarrad; the January viral

video of police beating a Raleigh man until his face was bloodied; the 2020 killings of Keith Dutree Collins and David Tylek Atkinson, the former carrying a BB gun, the latter after he allegedly robbed a gas station.

When police investigate themselves, residents tend not to trust the results.

The regularity of incidents involving the RPD serves as a routine reminder of how the department treats its Black citizens, Pittman says, adding that there’s not a Black man in Raleigh who doesn’t get nervous when a police car pulls up behind him.

“Raleigh PD, if they can find anything to kind of snag you on, they will, and they will do it, especially if you are somebody who is becoming active or has been active,” Pittman says.

Worse, Raleigh cops “have a tendency to escalate things,” Pittman says, pointing to a video that went viral this weekend of officers pulling guns on a man following a fender-bender.

PACT, along with Raleigh Demands Justice, has given a list of demands to the city council that, in addition to a list of reforms, includes the resignation of Deck-Brown, who opposed any kind of oversight board.

To PACT leader Rolanda Byrd, the mother of Akiel Denkins, this is a sign that Deck-Brown would rather keep her brothers in blue safe from accountability than protect the community.

“I think she needs to be fired,” Rolanda Byrd said. “She is a coward. She’s not looking for change or reform.”

“The first step is admitting you have a problem in order for you to fix that problem, and she won’t admit that RPD has a problem,” Pittman adds. “She can’t, and that is the reason she needs to go.”

The Raleigh City Council planned to appoint members to its police policy review board later this month.

Baldwin says that the council will be looking into implementing reforms outlined in the #8Can’tWait campaign, including banning police from using chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles.

The council will also consider a “three strikes rule” for officers with records of misconduct.

Baldwin has no plans to resign or call for Deck-Brown to step down. And, she adds, Deck-Brown still has the council’s support.

“We have said as a council that we support the chief,” Baldwin says. “She has 32 years of experience. She has always performed and acted very compassionately and professionally. She’s an African American woman who knows and understands what racism feels like. We support her, and we have her back.” W

n e Op FOR BUSINESS Sp e c i a

l Adv

Se c g n i s i ert

tion

These businesses are open and operating under current State recommendations.

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

13

A WORD THAT MUST NOT BE SPOKEN North Carolina’s racial wounds go unmentioned because we’d rather Black Tar Heels suffer than white folks feel bad about themselves.

BY GENE NICHOL

backtalk@indyweek.com

T

here’s been much in the news lately about the stunning racial disparities experienced in North Carolina as a result of the horrifying coronavirus. African American Tar Heels have seen dramatically disproportionate rates of exposure, severe illness, death, access to health care, unemployment, job and family benefits, allowances to work at home, food insecurity, income, wealth, and misery.

The discordant numbers chill. But they don’t surprise.

Racial disparity marks every component of economic, social, and political life in North Carolina. Twice as many Blacks live in poverty as whites do. Almost three times as many Black kids are poor. The disparity is even higher for children under five. Historically (even before the virus), 14

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

twice as many African Americans here are unemployed, much higher percentages are uninsured, and three times as many families report negative net worth.

Black families possess, on average, an astonishing 8 percent of the wealth held by white families. Black kids attend, very disproportionately, North Carolina’s highest-poverty schools. Nearly 60 percent of the state’s prison inmates are Black, though African Americans make up only 22 percent of the population. An unending cascade of irrefutable empirical studies also demonstrates massive and unexplainable racial disparities in policing, adjudication, employment, housing, and health care.

Poverty, race, and marginalization are constant and pervasive companions in the Tar Heel State. Ever has it been so, from our first day of existence until this morning.

Without doubt, unless the term is to be drained of all meaning, North Carolina today experiences an intense, debilitating, and systemic (“of, or relating to, the entire body of an organism”) regime of racial subordination. No thoughtful and fair-minded person familiar with our past undertakings and present circumstance could think we’re done with the challenges of equality, justice, and meaningful integration.

But we don’t talk much about this gaping and aspiration-negating chasm. Not in our politics, in our public discourse, in our Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce, on our campuses or in our pulpits.

I’m guessing if the racial roles were somehow reversed and white folks were disproportionately lodged at the bottom of our social and economic markers, we would regard it as a state emergency of the highest order. Special sessions of the legislature would be triggered with dispatch.

As it is, colossal disparities between the conditions, circumstance, opportunity, and life chances of Blacks and whites in North Carolina are accepted as natural, expected, and unworrisome—like daybreak in the eastern sky.

This silence, in the face of such wrenching and historic discrimination, is surely a principal reason for the powerful demonstrations sweeping North Carolina and the nation in the wake of the brutal police-inflicted murder of George Floyd.

There is unsurpassed outrage over the cold, ruthlessly administered killing, of course. Killing after barbarous killing.

But demonstrators also speak passionately of the world they see around them—the hardship, the cruelty, the denials of dignity and opportunity that torment their communities. Protesters in the streets are, in effect, crying out, “Our leaders may find this tolerable, but we

Your week.

Every Wednesday.

Wake up with us.

INDYWEEK.COM

Sign up for Primer, our daily email newsletter indyweek.com/newsletter-signup KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

15

reject and despise such a hypocritical vision of life—we’re not helpless, and we will confront you at every turn.”

Still, the exception, as they say, demonstrates the rule.

H

ere’s something we also don’t discuss much, somewhere the disparity is even starker: The Republican Party has controlled both houses of the General Assembly since 2011. It has often done so through very large majorities. From 2011 until January 2019, Republicans enjoyed veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers. Those margins were pared in the 2018 elections, but they remain large—10 seats in the House and eight in the smaller Senate.

More alarming, all Republican legislators, in both chambers, are white.

As the surprisingly candid Republican Representative Holly Grange of Wilmington put it in 2019: “On my side, there’s not a lot of diversity; it’s a middle-age white man’s club.”

In 2020, there are 26 African American representatives in the state House. There are 10 Black senators. One Native American and two Indian Americans serve in the General Assembly. No people of Latinx descent do.

The overall numbers, scant as they are, still mislead. In the House, the 26 African Americans and one Native American are all Democrats. All 65 Republicans are white.

In the Senate, the 10 African Americans and two Indian Americans are Democrats.

Every Republican (29) is white. (Similar Republican tallies appeared in the 2011– 12, 2013–14, 2015–16, and 2017–18 sessions.) So when the majority caucuses in each chamber retire to their private deliberations to craft the laws of North Carolina, only white people attend.

One hundred and fifty years after the adoption of the 14th Amendment, North Carolina is effectively ruled by a White People’s Caucus.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Over the last decade, what legacy has this White People’s Caucus delivered?

In a sentence, North Carolina Republican lawmakers have repeatedly, pervasively, intentionally, and invidiously used government power to diminish the electoral, representational, legal, educational, and dignitary rights of African Americans. The Republican caucuses of the North Carolina General Assembly not only look like white conclaves; they govern like them.

A brief listing will illustrate the point. (It’s impossible to explore the racialized Repub16

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

lican anti-equality work in detail in a 2,800word essay. I have, however, recently written a book on the subject, Indecent Assembly.)

First, to protect their electoral prospects, Republicans immediately redrew their own districts, as the federal courts later ruled, to deliver one of the “largest racial gerrymanders ever confronted by an [American] court.” It represented a “widespread, serious, longstanding constitutional violation”—denying an ample percentage of North Carolinians “a constitutionally adequate voice in the state legislature.”

The racial violation was so pronounced, the court said, it defeated the legislature’s legitimacy in subsequent sessions, violating the foundational notion of “popular sovereignty.” (I’ve been reading constitutional decisions for almost 45 years. I’ve rarely seen such strong words of condemnation by a court.)

They didn’t stop there. In 2013, they passed an array of voting restrictions, including a voter identification requirement aimed at limiting African American access to the ballot. The provision ended sameday voter registration, shortened the early voting period, ended out-of-precinct voting, and restricted various early-registration practices. Another federal court later concluded that Republican leaders had studied every mechanism that elevated Black turnout and then, with “almost surgical precision,” eliminated or restricted each practice.

The lawmakers’ talk about ballot integrity, the court said, was a lie. The restrictions were about race, not fairness. It was old-fashioned Jim Crow work. The judges noted that “neither this legislature, nor, as far as we can tell, any other legislature in the country has ever done so much, so fast, to restrict access to the franchise.”

Republican lawmakers were again called on the carpet in 2015 for trying to crush the representational and voting rights of Black candidates and voters. Unhappy with the outcome of Greensboro City Council elections, which produced a Democratic majority and four African American council members, the General Assembly used a “truncated process,” pushed by Republican Senator Trudy Wade, to simply overturn the unseemly results by creating new districts double-bunking incumbents. Wade claimed legislative immunity in the ensuing lawsuit to avoid having to explain, or answer for, her discriminatory motives. Judge Catherine Eagles saw through the ruse and held this to be yet another move by the General Assembly to disenfranchise Black Tar Heels.

The White People’s Caucus hasn’t limited its efforts to merely suppressing Black voter rights. After several Black defen-

dants, having received death sentences in their criminal trials, proved that their capital sentence had “been sought or obtained on the basis of race,” in violation of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, the General Assembly simply repealed the statute.

Rather than opting to fix the discriminatory practices pled and proven, lawmakers shot the messenger. They said, in effect, if prosecutors are seeking death sentences on racial grounds, we prefer not to know.

In North Carolina, that’s what we mean by “racial justice.”

The all-white Republican lawmakers also repaired to their closed meetings to significantly expand school charter and voucher programs in ways that would lead, as they did, to greater racial segregation in the schools. Unlike the rest of the country, they responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by making it harder to obtain police-camera video. And, famously, Republican lawmakers passed a new statute making it illegal for local authorities or state agencies to remove Confederate war memorials.

Governor Cooper tried to convince them to change course, saying, “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.”

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Tommy Tucker, responded by noting that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery: “It was caused by the North and their tariffs over Southern goods.”

It’s almost hard to believe they struggle to win Black votes.

Y

ou would think that an all-white Republican governing majority in the statehouse, regularly and demonstrably passing statutes to burden, handicap, and harass Black citizens, would be an intense and heatedly contested focus of our political and social lives. After all, this is not Mississippi or Alabama. It’s North Carolina.

But many Tar Heels, maybe most, seem to think little or nothing of it. As if someone here had quietly constructed a bridge to the 1950s.

And this “hear no evil, see no evil” approach apparently includes an odd “speak no evil” component as well. Not only is the heavily racialized agenda of the Republican General Assembly not to be witnessed or heard, but in a twisting of the aphorism, it is also not to be mentioned by critics of the crusade against people of color. Somehow it is thought to be too rude or uncivil to characterize a legislative program as race-based. That implies, the

theory seems to go, that the folks carrying out the schemes to use state power to burden and handicap racial minorities are vile and reprehensible characters. Even if their work is race-based, the label still shouldn’t be mentioned. It’s too barbaric, too unseemly.

It is the Voldemort of modern North Carolina politics.

I have at least a little experience on this front. I speak across North Carolina a good deal and write regularly for three of its major newspapers. For some years now, I’ve been sufficiently discourteous to mention, out loud and in print, the racial makeup of the Republican House and Senate caucuses as I described the elements of their potently racialized agenda. I’m also a law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. This has led more than one campus administrator to suggest to me that pointing out the all-white status of the Republican caucus infuriates state lawmakers—it is overtly playing of the race card—and it will lead, or has led, to retaliation.

It is vulgar to mention that our Republican lawmakers constitute a White People’s Caucus.

Apparently, it’s not vulgar to be a White People’s Caucus.

It’s just nasty to name it.

Governor Pat McCrory signed, as a first priority of his administration, a massive voter suppression law—later found, as I said earlier, to be directed specifically African Americans. Election law scholars called it the most oppressive in the nation, and the attorney general of the United States sued North Carolina, saying the voter ID requirement was designed to do the same job as poll taxes had in the Jim Crow South: diminish the Black vote.

I wrote that McCrory might be a backslapping glad-hander, but he was also “a 21st-century successor to Maddox, Wallace, and Faubus.”

A couple of days later, the leaders of the Pope Center and Civitas Institute published a joint article saying I’d launched such a “nasty and unhinged attack … so detached from reality [that] it’s hard to imagine a more vicious and false comparison for McCrory.” University administrators issued warnings that I might be fired. Civitas filed a series of public records requests demanding my correspondence, calendar entries, phone logs, text messages, and emails by the thousands. When I rebuffed legislators’ demands that I stop publishing in The News & Observer, the UNC Board of Governors closed the Poverty Center I ran. Some months later, lawmakers cut the budget of the law school where I work by a

half-million dollars by enacting what Democrats labeled “the Gene Nichol transfer amendment.”

When I wrote a subsequent newspaper article, in April 2019, outlining a long list of the General Assembly’s race-based constitutional violations and characterized the efforts as reflective of an agenda of “muscular racism,” Senator Vicki Sawyer published a response indicating that, “as a lifelong Republican and public servant,” she was “horrified to read Gene Nichol’s race-baiting diatribe.” I had purportedly carried out “a crusade to sully the reputations of decent people … with horrible labels.”

A few months earlier, in September 2018, I had participated in a debate sponsored by the N&O with conservative columnist J. Peder Zane, whom I like and enjoy reading. Zane made an analogous and more thoughtful point. “When you say Republicans are being racist,” he said, it is “like the worst thing that can be said about somebody, the worst name someone can be called, at least in modern culture.” You are saying “they are absolutely repugnant people, repugnant human beings.”

I suggested my goal was not to call names but to focus on what lawmakers do: “I say we’ve had this array of legisla-

tive enactments from Republicans in the statehouse with the decided purpose of making life more difficult and challenging for African Americans, and that is unacceptable.” And it’s not just me saying that, I added, it’s “court after court, state and federal.”

Zane responded: “If you’re saying they intentionally used the power of state government to harm Black people, because they’re Black, you’re saying they’re racist.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the rub. It’s not enough, apparently, to point out that our lawmakers purposefully harm Black Tar Heels. You have to show they do it with the darkest of hearts. For me, I don’t care much about their hearts one way or the other.

The disagreement modestly mirrors a point now made occasionally by the U.S. Supreme Court. As Justice Samuel Alito explained in his dissent in the 2017 case Cooper v. Harris: “Courts are obliged to exercise extraordinary caution in adjudicating claims that a state has drawn districts on the basis of race. The evidentiary burden is demanding. When a federal court says that race was a legislature’s predominant purpose in drawing a district, it accuses the legislature of offensive and

demeaning conduct. That is a grave accusation to level against a state.”

So, the theory goes, stay away from race.

Don’t name it.

If you can show that lawmakers are using racial determinations to burden their adversaries, don’t mention the R-word.

Keep mum because saying they are using the power of government to constrain or wound Black Tar Heels sounds like you’re saying they are racist. Civility demands that it goes unmentioned. It sounds too grizzly. It says something too dark.

After all, our lawmakers aren’t going around in white-robed lynching parties.

Black Tar Heels who try to vote aren’t being shot outside the polls. It’s not Wilmington in 1898. We’ve come far in North Carolina. Saying our lawmakers are carrying out a racialized agenda in the statehouse in 2020, with our apparent consent, would be announcing something about ourselves, collectively, that we couldn’t bear. It’s best to leave such odious landscapes unexplored.

But here’s what that means in North Carolina: All-white caucuses repair to closed-door meetings to decide our laws. No persons of color are present to object. The all-white assemblies routinely propose laws that disadvantage and

are strongly opposed by African Americans and other racial minorities, making it tougher for them to vote, to get effective representation, to hold on to elections already won, to get access to the courts, to be free from a racially imposed sanctions, to enjoy an equal education, to escape police brutality.

The lawmakers regularly enact statutes that are invalidated by both state and federal courts as clear examples of intentional race discrimination. They occasionally admit that they legislate to disadvantage Black people, but they claim they do so because the Black people are Democrats, not because they’re Black.

Despite all this, it is quite routine to say this portfolio cannot be characterized as “racialized” or “race-based” or reflective of “racism”—because that is too horrifying to the modern ear.

These wounds best go unmentioned. Better for Black Tar Heels to suffer than for white folks to feel bad about themselves. W Gene Nichol is the Boyd-Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC-Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Indecent Assembly: The North Carolina Legislature’s Blueprint for the War Against Democracy and Equality.

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

967-6159

(919) 967-6159

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

17

1,000 Words 18

June 10, 2020

Tall Grass Food Box PHOTOGRAPHY + WORDS BY JADE WILSON

When the coronavirus pandemic hit North Carolina, Gabrielle Eitienne, Derrick Beasley, and Gerald Harris birthed their idea for a platform to support and sustain Black farmers: Tall Grass Food Box. Consumers place their orders for fresh boxes of produce; every two weeks, Tall Grass sets up outside of NorthStar Church of the Arts so they can pick them up. W

INDYweek.com

p.m.

FOOD & DR I NK

Serving Hope Filmmaker Katina Parker is feeding thousands in Durham during COVID-19

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

O

n a breezy Friday morning in June, there’s enough chicken smoking in Katina Parker’s backyard to feed a crowd—enough, to be specific, to feed 1,750.

The scent hits you even before you spot the smokers and towers of aluminum foil pans, the industrial-sized bags of onions, or the vats of spices. Surveying the operation is one thing; biting into a leg of chicken—succulent, fragrant, barely clinging to the bone—is another. Katina Parker’s chicken tastes like the whole world in one piece of meat.

Parker—a filmmaker, photographer, and artist—is the organizer of Feed Durham, a “no-contact cook-off” initiative that she began in April when it became evident that the pandemic wasn’t going anywhere soon. The meals that the collective cooks go to local shelters and nonprofits. Durham, like other cities around the country, has seen a rise in food scarcity as unemployment numbers have spiked.

Cooking for people helps bridge the gaps that nonprofits are facing.

Parker’s commitment to nourishment, flavor, and low-waste cooking connects material needs, social change, and the kitchen. It’s a model for direct crisis activism, but it also feels like a glimpse of reimagined foodways.

“I think this is just beginning, in terms of the protests and COVID,” Parker says. “We already knew 2020 was going to be messy because of the election. There’s rumors of white supremacists trying to build a race war. Doing this feels good. Protesting and getting social change takes years. This is something we can get in the immediate that is also revolutionary because it’s feeding hungry people. When people are really hungry, it’s hard for them to think about their basic rights—education and safety,

all those sorts of things. It also gives us hope. We’re serving hope, but we’re also getting hope.”

Parker comes from a family that loves to cook, but her artistic background is in activist filmmaking. She coproduced and filmed the documentary Ferguson: A Report from Occupied Territory, and says that she has been moved by watching the way that people feed and take care of each other during crises.

In Ferguson, the person cooking was a woman named “Momma” Cat Daniels, who served heaping Sunday meals to demonstrators. When Parker went to Standing Rock to protest, it was Winona Kasto, a Lakota cook, who fed hundreds of demonstrators daily out of her community mess hall.

“When you do these protests and these encampments, you gotta eat,” Parker says.

“Food keeps people going in hard times.”

So far, Feed Durham has done two massive cook-offs, and Parker says she plans to continue them indefinitely. The next one will be in mid-July. At the first cook-off, in April, Parker and a crew of volunteers cooked 1,000 meals, delivering them to places like the Durham Rescue Mission, Helping Hand Mission, Food Not Bombs, and other community partners.

It might go without saying but cooking for 1,000 is no walk in the park. Parker had to raise several thousand dollars through GoFundMe, source the ingredients (initially from the restaurant depot; now, she’s working with local farms as she’s able), find enough volunteers to make it happen, and then organize them in a way that minimizes the risk of infection.

Fundraising has allowed her to pay some volunteers who are without work and provide the families she is feeding with extra shelf staples and meals between cook-

Katina Parker

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

offs. She also believes in minimizing waste: the wax cardboard from boxes of chicken becomes kindling, collard stems get grilled in butter, peels and husks are turned into cardboard.

Volunteers have responded in kind.

Stephanie Baker, who coordinated the last round of volunteer cooks, says that people are eager to be useful right now. She has a young child and elderly parents and has been isolating diligently. Coming out to sort spices and chop onions has been a way to use her isolation for good.

“Food is something so basic,” she says, as she refills containers of spices. “I can do that.”

Nearby in the yard, a volunteer named Joseph Naffan is rinsing out buckets. Naffan moved to Durham from Boston two months ago to take a cooking job at Duke University. But then Duke instituted a hiring freeze and Naffan’s background check got stuck in the system. His catering supplies were in storage until he saw Parker’s call on Facebook.

“Instead of sitting at home, I can do something and meet the community,” Naffan says. “Also, she’s a heck of a cook.”

Caleb Buchbinder, a volunteer with a knot of hair tucked beneath a baseball cap, discovered that he and Parker had

both protested at Standing Rock. He’s worked in kitchens before, he says, but this feels different.

“I find the restaurant industry distasteful,” Buchbinder says. “But I love the ritual.

This feels like an expression of what cooking can and should be.”

Parker started the cook-offs to meet the local food shortages caused by COVID-19, and in anticipation of the coming crises. This week’s cook-off, the weekend of June 6, came a week deep into the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the nation. The bedrock of institutions like policing is quaking.

The world feels like it’s on fire, and 2020 isn’t even halfway over.

But Parker’s menu, written on a whiteboard above a blazing cooker in her garage, offers some grounding elements: smoked chicken and chicken dogs, BBQ baked beans and brown beans, savory rice and citrus carrots.

“I definitely put love into this food,” Parker says. “Every time I cook and I’m not present, the food just doesn’t taste right. When I cook for people I want them to feel that love, that hope, that light, that energy, so they can keep going and keep fighting for the world we want to create for our kids.” W KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

19

M U SIC

A Vessel for Breath N.C. Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green’s new album, The River Speaks of Thirst, reclaims stolen breath A CONVERSATION WITH ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

music@indyweek.com

i. long distance breathing Usually I would come to Jaki’s porch in Mebane. I would give her a hug. She would invite me in for tea, but her husband, Abdul, would be the one to make it. I would admire one of the many treasures in her living room and get to hear about a trip to Morocco or what our beloved Michelle Lanier, folklorist and founder of the NC African American Heritage Commission, would call an Afro-Carolinian family story from back in the day.

But right now, nothing is usual. So, I am sitting in my own home with my head pressed to the window as North Carolina’s first Black Poet Laureate tells me over the phone how the dragonfly kissed her all over her body today.

The day of our phone conversation is exactly 11 years from the day Jaki said goodbye to her daughter, Imani. Determined not to leave this Earth on Abdul and Jaki’s anniversary, she told the angels to wait a little while and passed away at exactly 9:00 a.m. on June 5, 2009. I drink in the afternoon sun as Jaki starts the conversation by telling me how her daughter started visiting her and other family members in the delicate form of a dragonfly.

First, the day after Imani’s funeral, a lone dragonfly stood stock still on the car antenna for hours. Another time, on the 11th floor of a hotel on a snowy day in Chicago: I had been in this house for years and never seen a dragonfly, ever. Not in my yard, not on Jaki Shelton Green and Alexis Pauline Gumbs PHOTO BY SANGODARE AKINWALE my plants. All of a sudden they were coming. They come in a gang, a pack of dragonflies.

And from that point on dragonflies start showing up in our lives. People started sending life, to create the exact archive of breath- In the inseparability of the land and the me flowers to the house. They’d have these little, teeny, tiny dragonflies in them. One day ing we need. The first poem on the album, people, “where red clay becomes breathing a friend sent me this gorgeous silk-screen dragonfly scarf. And these people didn’t know “This I Know for Sure,” opens: face” (“The River Speaks of Thirst”). the story of the dragonfly. I’m telling you, it was eerie, Alexis. People would send me cards Jaki explains that poetry is a vessel for in the mail, there’d be a dragonfly.

We are the breath preserving and honoring breath: the skin And you better believe that as Jaki and her family got out of the car for her induc- the muscles Poetry is a container for breath. And I have tion as North Carolina Poet Laureate, there was a whole crowd of dragonflies there to the heart a container fetish. In my home, you know, greet them. the hands there are baskets, bowls, cups, hats, they “They were just dancing around the car,” Jaki says, “waiting for us to get out.” the unmeasurable bones are all vessels for air. The books on my And again today. A daughter returns on the air. Winged and insistent. whispering across the Atlantic Ocean bedside table, your books are there, those “She shows up all the time. A little while ago, standing out there, this dragonfly litwords, they hold air for me. I have the water Ancestral breath stays with us, woven vessels that my ancestors used to transport erally was all over my body like she was kissing me. Oh my God.” It is not time yet but by the end of this conversation Jaki will tell me, with detailed through the imagery of the entire album. water from the creek. Salt-glazed water In the intimacy of mothering and daugh- vessels. To shape those vessels and glaze wonder and a mother’s love, the story of her daughter’s last breath. tering, “I am breath that is caught in the them and then to use them over and over, fragrance of a mother’s hair” (“The Com- those vessels hold my ancestors’ breath. We ii. holding (our) breath What a time for breathing. A virus hungry for our lungs. A system kneeling on our munion of White Dresses”). In the rage of had them appraised by historians and they necks. The chokehold of police and vigilante violence. And our poet laureate has found responding to police violence, “I sing your go back to the 1800s. They have been on the time, as she says, “between breaths,” during the most intense year of travel of her name into the wind” (“Oh My Brother”). display once at UNC in the 1970s and they 20

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

wanted to buy them and yes of course they are of historical value, but I’m keeping them with me. I have to keep those containers.

Because they hold. iii. breathing together How appropriate then that Jaki would collaborate with neighbors and friends to record her actual breathing, invocations of poems from a forthcoming book (all but one have never been published before).

The collaborators are some of North Carolina’s finest poets and musicians: Shirlette Ammons, CJ Suitt, Jennifer Evans, and Nnenna Freelon.

When I asked Jaki what she learned about collaboration in this process she said: When I collaborate with someone, I offer them the poem. I have already woven the basket, and I trust it in their hands. I am not trying to control or manipulate the outcome. What I learned was that you let go.

And you trust the work. And you work with people you trust. I knew it was going to be wonderful, but it was not what I expected.

It was not about my expectation. I learned that collaboration is surrender. It can be a beautiful surrender.

On collaborating with world-renowned jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon in particular she said: In my mind I heard Nnenna Freelon singing on the album, but she was about to go on tour. I didn’t know if she would have time.

She said, you can have one hour, and we made it happen. I was so grateful. She just sang that poem. And when she sang, she really held it. She really lived through the poem. And she rolled with it. And sometimes she got emotional with it. And sometimes she would just turn to me and say, “Girl. I love this line.” iv. reclaiming stolen breath Not despite, but because of its beauty, this is a protest album. It comes out on Juneteenth. The poem “I Wanted to Ask the Trees” addresses the legacy of lynching in North Carolina, which is also part of Jaki’s family history: I wanted to ask the trees you? You? Is it you who knows the blood of my ancestors? Because my great uncle was hung.

My great grandfather and his brother my great uncle were Reconstruction-era sheriffs. They arrested a white woman for public drunkenness and that night a white mob dragged them out of their homes and strung them up. My great grandfather sur-

vived. The Black people in the community found him, they got to his body in time, they took the rope off his neck. He survived, but his brother died. And we know he survived because he testified against Klan activity.

He spoke out on Capitol Hill in the 1880s.

And so when I look at these trees—I live out here in the country and there are so many trees. And I want to ask them, what have they witnessed? Who have they held?

The River Speaks of Thirst offers another understanding of place, where life itself can write over the deadly story of racism. The poem “Letter from the Other Daughter of the Confederacy,” inspired by Jaki’s grandmother’s insightful reclamation of Confederate history as something that could never have been imagined without the physical and symbolic labor of enslaved women, is one place where Jaki refuses the narrative racism offers.

“They don’t like it when I go to the plantation museums and I touch all the cups and the plates, but it was my ancestors washing those dishes, filling those plates,” she says. “There is a sign on the velvet couch that says do not touch, but I crawl up on it. It was my ancestors brushing the crumbs from that couch and I can feel their breath when I touch the evidence of their work.”

And for Jaki the beautiful thing, the poetic possibility, is that we can remember our connection to the planet and each other: You know the planet, the Earth. I can hear her breathing. It’s so quiet. I keep looking up and the sky is so clear and I hear the occasional helicopter but I haven’t hardly heard an airplane. Where I live is usually part of the flight pattern so we always hear airplanes overhead, but now it’s quiet.

The earth is breathing. And it is not at all a coincidence that she had to threaten our breathing, the breathing of humans so that she could finally take a breath. Because of what we have been doing to this Earth. She said you all just sit down. I need a breath.

This album, and indeed everything Jaki Shelton Green does, is a sacred vessel for ancestral, cosmic, planetary breath. We give thanks. W Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. She is also co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust in Durham.

SUPPORT LOCAL businesses by purchasing gift cards, shopping online, donating, ordering takeout, and tipping more KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

21

22

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

M U SIC

DENIRO FARRAR: SOLE FOOD

HHHHH [Feb. 21; CULTRAP WORLDWIDE/BetterVibes]

Survival Music Deniro Farrar’s Sole Food is the hip-hop album the world needs now BY KYESHA JENNINGS music@indyweek.com

Stuck at home?

Quail Ridge Books is offering free shipping on books.

T

Mystery Boxes available, starting at $30!

R

eleased in February, Deniro Farrar’s Sole Food is the hiphop album the world needs now, as we navigate a global pandemic coupled with systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies.

Extending the legacy of Negro spirituals and blues music, hip-hop has functioned as survival music for Black people since its conception. Ferrar’s project is intentionally situated within these legacies when the opening track invites listeners to “get a taste” of the “music for the spirit.”

Without the support of a major label, the Charlotte-based rapper has built a global fan base. With an Instagram following of 52K, an impressive 100K YouTube subscribers, and 188K monthly listeners on Spotify, Farrar’s message is consistent: His goal is to liberate the culture. From offering fitness tips and promoting healthy eating habits to his #FreeGame and #SundayTestimony virtual conversations, he offers access to liberation in a manner that separates him from everybody else, placing him among the likes of Tupac and Nipsey Hussle.

The album’s title is a nod to Black American Southern cuisine, which is now, as Vanessa Hayford says, “associated with comfort and decadence, [but] was born out of struggle and survival.”

Deniro documents stories of struggle and survival in his music. On “Sins,” he outlines how poor choices made in low-income communities are often a direct reflection of systemic social, cultural, structural, and economic ills. “Poorly planned for, chaotically conceived / Born Black into this world made it hard for me to breathe,” he begins.

Survival balances out the struggle as Ferrar reveals that liberation is what freed him. In the first verse, he refers to himself as the “modern-day Huey, Mar-

ad

Please visit www.quailridgebooks.com and support your community bookstore! www.quailridgebooks.com • 919.828.1588 • Northadoption, Hills To advertise or feature a pet for 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh, NC 27609 OUT OUR advertising@indyweek.com PODCAST: BOOKIN’ w/Jason Jefferies pleaseCHECK contact

cus, and Malcolm X,” paying homage to Black revolutionaries.

One of the most inspiring tracks on the album is “Prison Systems,” infused with the sacred aesthetics of Negro spirituals and the West African call-and-response tradition.

Ferrar retells the familiar story of a Black man being gunned down by police. The lyrics offer alarming statistics: “Federal conviction rate 98 percent / Meaning they can take your life with none of the evidence.”

But without a doubt, the strength of Sole Food is Deniro Farrar’s storytelling ability. He vividly depicts what living in America while Black and poor is like and leaves us with #FreeGame that encourages folks to not only liberate but also decolonize their minds.

Despite its value, conscious or political rap has often been written off as boring or depressing music that is unmarketable.

Regardless of how serious or political the content is, each track creates space for listeners to catch a vibe, thus making Sole Food far from boring or depressing. Consider it a contemporary lyrical textbook that conjures healing. W

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

23

E TC.

Wonders of the World Saleem Reshamwala’s new TED podcast tells of global ingenuity, from midwife traffic cops in Thailand to Quechua rappers in Peru

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

A

fter a mid-interview break, Saleem Reshamwala returned to the studio to the sound of German laughter.

“I was like, ‘What’d I miss?’” the Durhambased filmmaker-turned-podcaster says.

“And the translator’s like, ‘Christian is amused by your studio.’ I was like, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m in my son’s closet.’ And the translator’s like, ‘Yes, he has guessed this.’”

Set-up, punchline, grace note—Reshamwala loves a good story. He’s best known for his work in hip-hop as KidEthnic, whether close to home (he directed G Yamazawa’s epochal “North Cack” video) or documenting Pierce Freelon’s Beat Making Lab around the world.

Now Reshamwala is trying on a new role as the host of Pindrop, a TED podcast that debuted May 27, which he describes in many different ways.

“It’s like a travel show but about ideas,” he says. “It’s definitely not about tourism.

It’s trying to capture the feel of being in a new place and being hit by a new idea—the kinds of stories that you might tell about a trip even if it was years in your past.”

Reshamwala didn’t expect to be launching a thinking person’s global-travel podcast during a pandemic that prevented global travel. That’s how he wound up in his son’s closet, the quietest place he could find, to interview the director of a 387-year-old Passion Play in the town of Oberammergau, Germany. It began—you couldn’t make this up—to stave off the bubonic plague, and in recent decades has been purging its anti-Semitic history.

Working with international journalists under the guidance of executive producers like Eric Nuzum, who launched NPR’s podcast network, Reshamwala infuses deeply local stories with gregarious enthusiasm, a well-traveled perspective, and Durham pride.

24

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

For the debut episode about adaptability in Bangkok, a traffic-snarled city where motorcycle cops are trained as midwives, Reshamwala interviews local journalist Pailin Wedel as well as his friend Raj Bunnag, a Thai-American Durhamite.

“So we ended up with this gradient: someone from Bangkok reporting a story; Raj, who’s spent lots of time there, a great, entertaining human being; and me, someone who’s never been there, asking questions,” Reshamwala says.

A later episode in season one will feature Peruvian MCs who rap in the indigenous Quechua language. Another finds dinosaur bones in New Jersey. But first, on Wednesday, June 10, we’ll meet Wanuri Kahiu, a filmmaker from Nairobi who tells joyous African stories in a media landscape obsessed with African misery.

True to form, Reshamwala called her in the wee hours of the morning, inside a pillow fort he’d built in his Peruvian hotel room to help with sound.

INDY: So, COVID. SALEEM RESHAMWALA: I came on to

Pindrop in January, when for most people COVID-19 was this international news story that seemed a little foreboding. I was filming another project in Peru in February, and we ended up getting pitched a [Pindrop] story on hip-hop in Peru while I was there.

It was a crazy coincidence. That turned out to be the last episode I was really able to travel for. But it’s kind of fascinating to get to call the entire world now.

So the name is like, drop a pin on the map, and also you can hear it—a pin dropping.

Out of the infinite stories in the world, what makes one a Pindrop story?

We’re looking for an idea that’s tied to the place it’s from. I’m interested in how sto-

Saleem Reshamwala

PHOTO BY JESSICA ARDEN PHOTOGRAPHY

ries of people figuring things out in certain places can be a useful metaphor for people all over. What I want people to feel after each episode is that the world is stranger and more interesting than they thought it was. But I don’t mean “stranger” in the othering sense. To me, in perfect travel, you yourself feel a little bit strange.

I grew up in North Carolina and my dad’s from India. My mom’s from Japan. It was a very different time to be a Muslim family here. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to find ways to flip that feeling into a positive thing.

KidEthnic, an online handle that became the name of my company, comes from always being the “ethnic” kid, having that phrase used and thinking, how can I flip this into something that makes me feel good?

A Pindrop episode should feel experiential. Every episode starts with a vibe of the place you’re going, and then we dive deep from there. Every time that I travel with a filmmaker, journalist, musician, I get a really interesting perspective on the place.

The idea is to take that ideal experience and then have a transferable idea you can take away. It doesn’t have to be direct, but something that’s rich enough that you can metaphorically apply it to your own life.

We’re working on a story on rappers in Peru who are rapping in Quechua, kind of looking at how evolving your traditions can help keep them alive. We’re working on a story on the world’s biggest Passion Play, in Oberammergau, Germany. It’s a 5,000-person town, and 2,500 people are in the play. It’s got a really dark past and we dive pretty deep into it. The New Jersey

episode is about the nature of deep time— there’s something fascinating about every place on Earth if you think not just in X and Y coordinates but in time.

And the episode we’re releasing this Wednesday is about Wanuri Kahiu, a filmmaker from Nairobi, and her movement, AFROBUBBLEGUM. She releases fun, fierce, joyous work, and she specifically speaks to how the world needs more African stories that aren’t forced into being about miserable people or overcoming poverty. Those are important stories, but she wants to also be able to be joyous no matter what the conditions are.

So you’re kind of starting from local truth and then refracting it outward through an international viewpoint and staff, and that’s where the story ends up.

Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it, and it is an evolving show. It’s funny, one of the first music videos I did, we shot super sequentially. It was a zombie music video and you could see it getting better as the makeup artist got better. I think about that a lot, how the making of the project makes the project better. This is my first time hosting a podcast, so it’s a very new process for me. I’ve spent a lot of my life traveling, and now, with a couple kids, a lot of this past seven years has been interesting, alternating between deep-diving into Durham and filming young beatmakers with Pierce Freelon all over the world. So it feels like a natural continuation of finding ways to work internationally and still be very present in Durham. W

STAGE

THE WORLD IS OUR STAGE

Monday, June 8–Monday, June 15 | American Dance Festival

PHOTO COURTESY OF ADF

With You in a Minute The American Dance Festival goes virtual, local, and grammable in The World Is Our Stage

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

L

ocal dance makers weren’t expecting to hear from the American Dance Festival after the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out its summer 2020 season in Durham.

But then, in mid-May, 20 of them received a challenge from the venerable modern dance festival, with the promise of payment and a fast-approaching deadline. The assignment? Make a new dance video—exactly 60 seconds long—over the next two weeks and follow social distancing guidelines while you do it.

We’ll see the results in the virtual mini-festival The World Is Our Stage. Monday, June 8–Friday, June 12, the festival will screen four videos each day on its website. On Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14, when the full collection of videos has been posted, viewers across the world will vote on their favorites.

The creators of the three most-popular videos will win honorariums from $250 to $1,000 and free studio time at ADF’s dance studios on Broad Street. (All partic-

ipants will receive a $200 stipend.) The winners will be announced Monday, June 15, three days before the festival was originally scheduled to start.

“We’re trying to find ways to continue to support local artists and stay in conversation with our audiences,” executive director Jodee Nimerichter says. “In a time when it’s difficult to know what to do, this gives artists an outlet to be creative, to have a voice, and be seen. It also lets our audience see artists they’ve never seen before.”

Durham choreographer Justin Tornow might have a slight edge on some of the other entrants. Since the start of the shelter-in-place restrictions, she’d already been making short dance films and posting them online. She made a piece called And Now, This with sound design by Ultrabillions, her collaborator in the dance-and-sound duo Beta Tests. The project helped fill the gap when her company lost its chance to perform at the festival this summer, and the form does have its advantages.

“In film we can disrupt space and time,” Tornow says. “Plus, 60 seconds is fun.

We’re all kind of used to that on Instagram already. Many artists struggle with editing; to be legible, clear, and interesting in that timeframe is a beautiful challenge.”

The festival, which is sponsored by the continuing-care retirement community The Forest at Duke, also features Megan Yankee, Anna Barker, Alyssa Noble, Kristin Taylor Duncan, Ronald West, and other local choreographers and dancers who are familiar to INDY readers.

For the lighthearted film Car Tunes, it took West and filmmaker Clark Ivers 12 hours to animate objects in every room of West’s house with stop-motion and other techniques.

“They find their voices. They’re singing popular songs and calling me as I wake up, go through the house, and dance with them,” West says. While some artists chafe at time constraints like these, he considers them a gift: “You can cross off all these things and then focus on what the opportunities are.” W

Your Week.

Every Wednesday. indyweek.com KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

25

C L AS S I F I E D S

PRESEN

HEALTH & WELL BEING

T

ED

HOUSING

BY Bolinwood Condominiums Affordability without compromise

919-416-0675

Convenient to UNC on N bus line 2 & 3 bedroom condominiums for lease

www.bolinwoodcondos.com • 919-942-7806

www.harmonygate.com HOLISTIC HEALTH Tai Chi Traditional art of meditative movement for health, energy, relaxation, self-defense. Classes/workshops throughout the Triangle. Magic Tortoise School - Since 1979. Call Jay or Kathleen, 919-360-6419 or www.magictortoise.com

Advertise in our Best of the Triangle Issue!

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

ISSUE DATE

June 24 Over the past few months hundreds of thousands of votes have been cast by our readers to determine the Best of the Best throughout the Triangle. Take this opportunity to thank all of your valued customers and patrons with our ’90S FLASHBACK PRICING!

EMAIL ADVERTISING@INDYWEEK.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION 26

June 10, 2020

INDYweek.com

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

P U Z Z L ES 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.

IT KEEPAL! LOC orders

b All wedirectly to ship ur door! yo

www.regulatorbookshop.com

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 6.10.20

solution to last week’s puzzle

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

KeepItINDY.com

June 10, 2020

27

TELEMED/ TELEHEALTH Medication Assisted Recovery Available Anywhere in North Carolina

ALL INSURANCE ACCEPTED including NC Medicaid

Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Suboxone During COVID–19 patients will be glad to know they don’t have to leave home to get treatment.

THERE IS A SOLUTION! Compassionate care with dignity You do not need to leave your home or place of work in order to get good recovery.

Medication assisted treatment and counseling provide highly effective opioid use disorder treatment We also transition patients on methadone maintenance to buprenorphine At Solas Health we have eight providers who are licensed to prescribe buprenorphine/Suboxone.

We have outstanding counselors available.

LOCATIONS IN RALEIGH (8001 CREEDMOOR ROAD), PINEHURST, FAYETTEVILLE, SANFORD, LUMBERTON CALL 919-460-7246 NOW FOR A VIRTUAL TELEMEDICINE VISIT WITHIN 24-48 HOURS.

www.telemednc.com