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Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 25

CONTENTS NEWS 7 School resources officers don't make students safe. BY AISSA DEARING 8 ICE weaponizes the pandemic against international students. BY COLE VILLENA 10 Graham protest restrictions spark controversy over policing practices at Elon University. BY ANTON L. DELGADO 12

COVID may be breeding a new generation of addicts.

BY MARY KING

FEATURE 13 What might reparations look like in Durham?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

MUSIC 17

Nineteen-year-old Charlotte rapper Reuben Vincent is wise beyond his years.

BY KYESHA JENNINGS

19 A chamber orchestra and a storytelling group walk into a cidery. BY DAN RUCCIA 20 M8alla and Treee City craft the jam of an anxious summer. BY BRIAN HOWE CULTURE 21

Coronavirus is bringing back the glory days of the drive-in.

BY BYRON WOODS

THE REGULARS 4 Voices 5 15 Minutes 6 A Week in the Life

Dinner and a movie the safe way, p. 21 PHOTO COURTESY OF FOOD TRUCK FLIX

COVER Design by Annie Maynard

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

EDITO R I AL

Editorial Assistant Cole Villena

Interim Editor in Chief Brian Howe Raleigh News Editor Leigh Tauss Deputy A+C Editor Sarah Edwards Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods Voices Columnists T. Greg Doucette, Chika Gujarathi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Courtney Napier, Barry Saunders, Jonathan Weiler

Contributors Jim Allen, Will Atkinson, 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 Venutolo-Mantovani, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu

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BACKTALK

The week began with Wake County DA Lorrin Freeman revealing charges would not be pressed against Saige Martin, who stepped down from the Raleigh City Council after allegations of sexual assault were brought to light by The News & Observer.

“While I understand their reticence to relive what must have been horrible actions, this seems a bit unfair,” STEPHEN KNILL wrote about Saige’s lack of charges on Facebook. “So just enough claims to make him lose his job but not enough to actually give him his day in court and defend himself.

Convicted and sentenced without trial? is this the new American way?”

In response, user ANDY LITTLE said justice isn’t always judicial: “This has always been the American way,” responded. “You do something inappropriate and you get fired from your job. Criminal charges aren’t necessary. And in a right to work state like North Carolina, you don’t even need a reason to fire someone. If you feel wronged, maybe ask Cheri Berry not to do anything. If he’s upset about getting tried in the court of public opinion, maybe he shouldn’t have taken a job working for the public.”

In other news, the listing of convicted murderer Michael Peterson’s Durham mansion featured in Netflix’s The Staircase had some balking over the asking price. “$1.9 million??” Facebook user Jennifer Lauren commented. “Nah... I’d buy it for $199,000 and only because I know his wife’s ghost and I would get along.”

“Owl be damned if I’m buying this house,” says Facebook user FRANKIE PALMER.

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voices

The Masked Avenger It’s just a little life-saving piece of cloth on your face, but some won’t wear it. What is wrong with people?

BY BARRY SAUNDERS backtalk@indyweek.com

I

t was a fall Saturday night in 1997, during the first Mack Brown era at UNC. The Tar Heels were hosting Florida State’s very good football team, and the once-raucous crowd calmed down considerably when it became obvious that the home team—despite a valiant effort—wasn’t going to win.

I whipped out a cigar and lit it, and the crowd seated around me at Kenan Stadium rose as one once again.

Only this time, they weren’t united in cheering the boys on the field. They were united in telling me—literally— where to stick that cigar.

Shouts of “YOU CAN’T SMOKE THAT IN HERE!” were accompanied by unprintable suggestions.

“In here?”

I looked around to make sure we were outside—we were—then dutifully mashed out the stogie. Chastened, my ears began to burn.

So did my thigh: turns out I hadn’t completely extinguished the cigar before stuffing it into my pocket.

As we filed out of the stadium, fans aghast that someone would so brazenly breach stadium etiquette were still giving me the fisheye and the business.

The same umbrage and dirty looks I inspired that night 23 years ago should be inspired by everyone who now runs around in the Age of Coronavirus without a face mask.

What is wrong with these people?

I was, in my defense, an ignorant country boy from Rockingham who, as the folks back home liked to say, “didn’t know no better.” What’s the excuse for people who refuse to mask up today, when public health officials tell us unequivocally that wearing masks can slow the spread of COVID-19?

It can’t be ignorance: We’ve all heard the exhortations to put on a mask when near others, and even the president—after five months of poo-pooing PPEs—was recently seen wearing one.

There are, sadly, people who care nothing about convention, even when it comes to the coronavirus.

Some, like the maskless musclebound mofo I saw shopping in Harris Teeter recently, think they are too cool to cover their mugs with a piece of potentially life-saving cloth. Do you think I like covering up

this luscious beard that makes me look like Frederick Douglass—if you look at me while squinting real hard through your bad eye after three Gin Rickeys?

No, but I do it for the common good.

But others don’t care about themselves, so you know they don’t care about you and me.

That was not the case with the unmasked muscle head in the Teeter. He was so conscientious about his own health that he was, I swear, minutely inspecting greens and squeezing avocados to make sure they were perfect for whatever healthy concoction he was fixing to go home and toss into the blender.

Yet, his lack of concern for the minimum-wage earning employees who’ve been declared essential workers was such that he refused to mask up for the few minutes he was shopping. This chump personifies the reason my cousin, instead of celebrating the fact that his teenage daughter recently got her first job, is instead lamenting the fact that it is in a grocery store.

Sir Elton John, in his underrated song “I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford),” sings “If looks could kill, then I’d be a dead man.”

So would that dude in Harris Teeter. He’d have keeled over right there in front of the kumquats.

While drinking coffee last week at Brier Creek shopping center with my friend Jeff—he sat at one end of the bench, I, at the other, both masked and staring straight ahead as we talked—told me of a recent encounter with a neighbor who claims to have been a Navy SEAL. Jeff: Where’s your mask?

Alleged SEAL: Oh, I don’t need one.

The man, Jeff said, has had several heart attacks and is of an age that makes him vulnerable.

Oy. As someone—I think it was Shakespeare—once wrote: Alas, don’t be a schnook Cover your face no matter how good you look.

Your ignorance society cannot brook If you can’t wear a mask stay home and read a book.

Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

BARRY SAUNDERS is a former columnist for The News & Observer. He now publishes thesaundersreport.com.

15 MINUTES Judy Dearlove, 71 Author of Play On!

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

What’s the Play On! elevator pitch?

It’s set in a retirement community. I wrote it to be a fast, fun read. I’ve read a lot of books about people of that age that were either mocking them or were very dark. I wanted the characters to work against that stereotype—they’re very inclusive, they have fierce friendships, they’re limited by restrictions of age, but they work together. Was that a good elevator, or do I need to go up another floor?

This is your first novel.

Ever since I was a little kid, writing a novel was the one thing I wanted to do. But I never did anything about it ‘til about 12 years ago. I signed up for a writer’s workshop up in the mountains. The first assignment was to interview one of your characters. After class, I went up to Lynn York, a wonderful teacher, and said, “I’ve got to admit, I haven’t started. I don’t have any characters.” She gave me one of those steely teacher glares and said, “You will.”

How have you been staying creative during the pandemic?

I’m trying to do fast writing—some people call them “morning pages”—which is kind of how the book evolved. I had outlined, in great detail, a mystery novel one time. And when I finished I was like, there’s no point in writing! For Play On! I just sat down every day and wrote whatever came to mind. And I just kept going and going, and I had so much fun. At some point, I had over 700 pages.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

What would you like to see when it comes to age representation?

I think folks who are aging are just the same as folks at every age, and we’ve treated them as a separate category. In terms of the big things—loves and disappointments and friendship and creativity—they’re the very same folks. Sometimes, in the reporting about COVID, I feel there’s a putting-in-a-box of people in retirement communities. They become a statistic as a result of that. I want to go back to seeing them as human beings. And when I say them, that’s silly, because I’m in the same age group.

What’s it been like to publish during this time?

It’s been very exciting. I’ve lived in Durham for over 40 years, and I got to do a reading at the Regulator. It had always been one of my desires to be one of the readers. I don’t know if you remember when they used to do the readings downstairs, and they used to have the author’s photos on the wall? I would sit there and imagine my photo on the wall. But the wall got pretty full, and it was like, oh my gosh, are they going to have room when I finally get around to writing?

Is your picture on the Regulator wall now?

Well, they don’t do the readings downstairs anymore. But I could sneak down and put it there. W

Your Week.

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July 15, 2020

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The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE

7/8 7/10

State senator Danny Britt, a Republican from Columbus, TESTS POSITIVE FOR COVID-19.

7/11

The Orange County Board of Commissioners institutes a 10 P.M. DINE-IN CURFEW for restaurants, breweries, and clubs.

North Carolina records its HIGHEST NUMBER OF DAILY CORONAVIRUS HOSPITALIZATIONS to date with 1,040 patients being hospitalized.

200 anti-racists MARCH THROUGH DOWNTOWN GRAHAM to call for the removal of a Confederate statue in the town square.

7/12

Gov. Cooper’s vetoes on bills that would have allowed businesses like gyms and bowling alleys to reopen are UPHELD AFTER FAILED OVERRIDE ATTEMPTS by state Republicans.

UNC announces that 37 MEMBERS OF ITS ATHLETICS PROGRAMS have tested positive for COVID-19.

The five finalists to represent Wake County’s District D participate in a VIRTUAL CANDIDATES FORUM.

7/13 6

The City of Raleigh announces that all festivals, parades, and road races are CANCELED THROUGH HALLOWEEN. The Raleigh City Council votes 6-1 to give residents the RIGHT TO BUILD ACCESSORY DWELLING UNITS, ending a complicated eight-year battle.

7/9

7/7

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

The Wake County DA announces that former Raleigh City Council member Saige Martin WON'T FACE CRIMINAL CHARGES for alleged sexual assault and misconduct.

Government officials REMOVE A CONFEDERATE STATUE from the Court of Appeals building in downtown Raleigh.

July 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

d goo

bad

ul

f aw

Pauli Murray Hall On Thursday, the UNC history department announced that its current home, Hamilton Hall, will be renamed after civil rights pioneer and lawyer Pauli Murray, who applied to the university almost a century ago and was turned down because she was Black. “Naming our building after Pauli Murray will serve as a reminder of what is lost, what could have been, and what can be as we move forward,” the statement announcing the change read. It’s a huge improvement over the building’s previous name—J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton was a white historian who credited the Ku Klux Klan with “restoring political power to the white race.” It’s also a positive development that came directly as a result of community activism. UNC ended its 16-year moratorium on renaming campus buildings after years of activism and a student-led petition that gained thousands of signatures.

McClatchy sale McClatchy, the newspaper chain that owns The News & Observer, The Herald Sun, The Charlotte Observer, and major regional papers from Sacramento to Miami, accepted a bid from New Jersey-based hedge fund Chatham Asset Management at a bankruptcy auction. Chatham already controls most magazine distribution channels throughout the country through its American News Company, and this latest acquisition means that roughly a third of all newspapers nationwide will be controlled by financial institutions. It’s not the worst-case scenario: Alden Global Capital, which Vanity Fair has described as the “grim reaper of American newspapers,” also expressed interest in buying the chain before Chatham’s bid won out. It still means that the largest newspapers in the state—and indeed, the second-largest newspaper chain in the country—are now owned by the same hedge fund that owns The National Enquirer.

SCOTUS Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, employers have been required to provide free contraception to those on employer-provided insurance plans. The Trump administration tried to circumvent that mandate by creating an exemption for employers with a “sincerely held religious or moral objection,” and the Supreme Court upheld that exemption in a 7-2 decision handed down last Wednesday. This new ruling could cause as many as 125,000 women to lose contraceptive coverage, according to figures presented by government officials during oral arguments.

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Learning the Hard Way

Curbside pick up available Offering free shipping on books

School resource officers aren’t the answer for keeping education safe and healthy

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BY AISSA DEARING backtalk@indyweek.com

B

arging into my sixth-grade science class at Lucas Middle School in Durham, my school’s police officer would warn students about the dangers of certain misbehaviors. I remember being intimidated by the threat of arrest, the weapons on his holster, and the menacing authority of his uniform.

What I don’t remember is having a guidance counselor, a nurse, or a social worker to support me through the horrendous transition that is being a teenager. Up until high school, I was treated more like a threat than a student.

School Resource Officers have a disproportionate effect on students of color.

According to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Racial Equity Report Card, 12 percent of cases sent to juvenile court in Durham County were school-based, and of those cases, 86 percent of the offenders were Black.

At Josephine Dobbs Clement Early College High School in Fayetteville, we didn’t have school resource officers. Our administrators and our one guidance counselor would handle any disciplinary issues we had. Though we were under-resourced, our environment felt safe.

Why can’t this same system of discipline be implemented at Riverside, Northern, Durham School of the Arts, Jordan, Southern, and Hillside to prevent student behaviors from being criminalized?

A common argument is that teachers and administrators don’t feel safe without their school resource officers. This is concerning because it implies that faculty are frightened of their students. That speaks more to a need for teacher-training and additional mental health support, not more school resource officers.

Mass school shootings are also a major concern, but school resource officers at my middle school didn’t have the training to prevent or protect me from one. The school shooter is most likely to be a stu-

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Aissa Dearing

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dent at that school, so if we took preventative measures like mental health intervention, we could stop a traumatic experience like this from happening altogether.

Durham County recently passed a budget that reflects misguided priorities, with $2.7 million allocated to funding school resource officers. This does not consider student needs, especially during a pandemic, which has had devastating effects on the Durham community. We’re going back to school in August, and what we need are therapists, nurses, psychologists, guidance counselors, substance abuse specialists, sexual health educators, and restorative practice centers, not an institution that reinforces the school-to-pris-

on-pipeline in a place where people are supposed to feel safe.

That’s why I’m organizing a Youth Summit on School Safety with the Durham Youth Climate Justice Initiative, to be held via Zoom on Monday, July 20 from 6:00–8:00 p.m. If you are a middle or high school student in Durham Public Schools, RSVP at bit.ly/dpsyouthsummit for more information and a $25 gift card.

In a recent statement, Chairman Mike Lee of the Durham Public School’s Board of Education stressed the need for a replacement plan if he were to vote for the removal of School Resource Officers. With input from students across Durham Public Schools, together we are going to create one. W

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North Carolina

School’s Out Thousands of international students in the Triangle worry federal restrictions on student visas could derail their studies

BY COLE VILLENA cvillena@indyweek.com

W

hen the pandemic descended relentlessly on American soil, Hana Khan, a rising junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, flew home to London after her classes shifted to online. Even then, she knew President Trump’s travel ban meant a struggle to return to her campus home in Chapel Hill.

Now she worries a new federal guideline requiring international students to take at least one in-person class to retain their visa could derail her studies entirely.

“As soon as I read it, I was shocked,” Khan said in a Zoom interview from London. “It makes an impossible situation even worse.”

Khan is one of nearly 9,000 international students at UNC, Duke, and NC State for whom going to class is the most basic requirement to stay in the United States.

Nonimmigrant students on F-1 and M-1 visas are required to take in-person credit hours with only a limited number of online hours allowed per semester. Failing to meet these guidelines means they could lose their visa status and face deportation.

The coronavirus pandemic meant a swift transition to online learning for the American college system in March to help stop the spread of the virus. The Student Exchange and Visitor Program—the ICE division responsible for issuing student visas—eliminated the cap on online credit hours per semester through the spring and summer. Though new travel into the United States from places like China, Iran, and most of Europe was later suspended through a White House order, international students already in the United States could continue their online semesters without fear of deportation.

Apparently, that was a limited time offer.

On July 6, ICE released new guidelines saying that students would lose their visa status if they didn’t take at least one in-person class during the fall 2020 semester, even if their university wasn’t offering any. Those 8

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who couldn’t attend in-person classes would face consequences “including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.”

UNC, Duke, and NC State all plan to offer some form of in-person classes in the fall, but students aren’t holding their breath—they’re opposing the new regulations through petitions, op-eds in student publications, and letters to administration pushing for campus-level policy change to ensure that international students can continue their education.

International students at UNC have an additional resource: a database of in-person classes they can sign up for once fall registration reopens on July 21.

The searchable database is available online alongside information about the ruling, links to petitions opposing the guidelines, and a form to submit new in-person classes to be listed.

“At certain times, I just wish I could do more, but there’s not a whole lot more I can do,” says Ankush Vij, who’s had to restore the database on his personal website after multiple crashes due to high traffic. “There’s a lot of support from the community, but I think there’s always that feeling that, ‘I don’t know if this is enough.’”

The database is maintained by three students from immigrant families. Vij describes himself as an “anchor baby” for his Indian immigrant parents. Marcella Pansini, who created the Google spreadsheet that powers Vij’s website, is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants. And Ruth Samuel, who started compiling the classes in the first place, was born in London to Nigerian parents.

“It’s frustrating that the onus is always on students, particularly students of color, to rectify these situations,” Samuel says.

“It’s the least we could do to stick up for our peers and to make sure that, for now, there are some options.”

The public was encouraged to edit the spreadsheet to add new classes as they became available. But just two days after it went live, someone used the public editing feature to delete the whole thing.

“We still do not know who it was, and it is unfortunate that someone really took the time out of their day to play with people’s lives like that,” Vij says. “They will never understand how it feels to fear being deported from the place you’ve worked all your life for.”

The students had expected and prepared for this exact situation. The spreadsheet was already backed in multiple forms, and the website was back online in a matter of hours.

“I’m Black, I was born in London, my parents are Nigerian, I’m a woman,” Samuel says. “I’ve been all of those things my entire life. I know what to expect from hateful people.”

“Coronavirus is being weaponized

by ICE.”

C

olleges and universities themselves aren’t all taking the new guidelines sitting down either. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have both gone fully online for the fall, said the guidelines threw “virtually all of higher education in the United States into chaos.” The two schools sued ICE on July 8, calling the new guidelines a thinly-veiled attempt to force campuses to reopen in the fall even as COVID-19 cases in the country continue to rise. The University of California at Berkeley sued the Trump administration over the guidelines a day later. Even the University of Southern California—headed by oft-maligned former

UNC chancellor Carol Folt—filed an amicus brief supporting the Harvard-MIT lawsuit in court.

That lawsuit had an initial hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts just after press time on Tuesday. Administrators from the two schools asked for an injunction to overturn the new guidelines.

Duke, NC State, and UNC each sent campus emails indicating support for their international students shortly after the new guidelines were announced. All three stated that the schools would do everything possible to keep their international students on campus. Only Duke signed onto the amicus brief for the Harvard-MIT lawsuit, and media officials from NC State and UNC declined to give specific details on how they’re opposing the ruling.

“Very few of these statements have actually said what they will be doing to help,” Pansini says. “Merely saying that you’re standing in solidarity doesn’t do anything to push the conversation forward and help the students as they need.”

The UNC students acknowledged that the school can only do so much to oppose a federal mandate. Even if the new guidelines are overturned, though, the fact that they were issued in the first place is just another example of how foreign-born people—even students here legally—are vulnerable.

“No matter how much we offer, no matter whether we follow the rules or don’t follow rules, we are always susceptible to being discriminated against,” Samuel says.

“This is inherently xenophobic and cruel, to commodify these children, turn their lives into pawns, and force them to choose between either getting coronavirus in class or being deported.”

“Coronavirus is being weaponized by ICE,” Khan adds. “It really does highlight xenophobic attitudes.” W

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Graham

Speak No Evil Graham protest restrictions spark controversy over policing practices at Elon University

BY ANTON L. DELGADO, NC NEWS INTERN CORPS

backtalk@indyweek.com

D

ozens of police vehicles poured into Graham, surrounding the Alamance County Historic Courthouse and its controversial Confederate statue during the last weekend in June.

Mixed in with local law enforcement were officers from Elon University’s Campus Security and Police. As part of a mutual aid agreement among neighboring departments, Campus Police had been called in to aid the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office in enforcing a contentious order.

The order banned protest gatherings and denied demonstration permits in Graham, which led to the American Civil Liberties Union filing both a lawsuit and a temporary restraining order against local officials. A federal judge granted the restraining order on Monday, July 6.

In response, student activists hosted a “Protest to Defend the Right to Peaceful Protest” on Thursday, July 9.

There were familiar cries of “no justice, no peace” as more than 30 people gathered in front of the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office.

The dozens of cars that drove by had a mix of responses during the three-hour protest. Some drivers were honking horns in support and shouting, “thank you,” while others were raising middle fingers and screaming, “blue lives matter.”

The sight of Campus Police enforcing the ban in June had sparked an outcry from Elon University alumni, faculty, staff, and students, who demanded an end to the institution’s participation in the mutual aid agreement with the Sheriff’s Office and the Graham Police Department.

“Seeing the badges and logos of our police in Graham made me feel the need to speak out against the institution and this policy,” says Kirstin Ringelberg, a professor of art history at Elon University, who has participated in several protests in Graham. “It indicated symbolic, if not literal support, for what was happening.”

Ringelberg’s email against the agreement, sent to all faculty and staff, received more than 40 replies of support.

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Elon University’s Campus Safety and Police Department has been a part of mutual aid agreements with local law enforcement agencies since the 1990s. PHOTO BY ANTON L. DELGADO

“I expected the issue of policing to be more divisive among faculty and staff,” Ringelberg says. “I’m a little bit surprised about how supported I felt.”

Elon University is not alone in being part of a mutual aid agreement with local law enforcement, and it is not the first to face criticism as a result.

Meredith College, N.C. State University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Greensboro, Wake Forest University, and Western Carolina University are among other universities in the state to have such agreements. N.C. State’s campus police department has also been fielding calls to withdraw from its mutual aid agreement with the Raleigh Police Department.

Sgt. Joel Thomas, the community liaison for Elon Campus Police, declined to comment about the controversy— only confirming the department’s involvement by stating “we do participate in a county-wide mutual aid agreement.”

E

lon has been in a series of mutual aid agreements since the 1990s, according to an email from Senior Vice President Gerald Whittington.

The current agreement in Alamance is in effect from January 1 to December 31, 2020, and encompasses police departments from Burlington, Elon, Mebane, Graham, Gibsonville, Haw River, Elon University, Alamance Community College, and the Sheriff’s Office.

“Mutual aid agreements are extremely common in North Carolina because we have a lot of smaller departments,” says Eric Tellefsen, a law enforcement expert who has led

trainings for seven of the nine departments in Alamance. “It allows you quick access to additional officers if you encounter a crisis. When you have these active agreements, you can immediately get those resources because the legality is already dealt with.”

The system in Alamance, which is written into state legislature, is one of five types of mutual aid agreements used in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, this specific type of agreement is made between “neighboring jurisdictions and involves a formal request for assistance. Mutual aid is activated less often than automatic mutual aid but covers a larger geographic area.”

“It allows a department to handle larger crises and events without having to come up with the funding to hire more officers,” Tellefsen says. “Without mutual aid agreements, you’re either going to have to do without the appropriate amount of security or with a huge bill.”

Kelly Blackwelder, chief of police at the town of Elon Police Department, manages 20 full-time employees, and only 12 of them are patrol officers.

“Not being in an agreement would negatively impact our ability to provide safety services to the Elon community,” Blackwelder says. “It would cripple us because then everything we would need to do would have to be done in house with our limited resources.”

Since taking over as chief in January 2019, Bleckwelder says she has issued two formal aid requests. Both involved Elon University’s Campus Police.

Universities and local departments regularly rely on assistance from one another when hosting large events, such as sports competitions and graduation ceremonies.

“It’s necessary to have additional manpower when events bring thousands of people to campus, because I don’t know any university departments that could deal with that on their own,” Tellefsen says.

In practice, this means any of the signatory agencies can issue a formal request for assistance and the other departments would be obligated to respond by lending officers, equipment, or supplies.

“Through the agreement, officers from other agencies have assisted Elon University Police at athletics events, visits by dignitaries, and emergencies,” Whittington says in the same email. “Though mutual aid has been helpful to our campus in the past, we will continue to critically assess the value and wisdom of each individual request from member agencies going forward.”

T

he event that brought Elon University’s mutual aid agreement into the limelight began on June 27 when Graham Police filed a request to Doug Dotson, interim director of Campus Police, regarding crowd control assistance.

“We anticipate a crowd size of 500–1000 people congregating primarily around the historic courthouse and the Graham Police Department,” the request stated. “We are expecting those with opposing views to show up as well.”

In accordance with the agreement, Campus Police dispatched eight officers, according to Whittington.

The Sheriff’s Office had announced its intention to enforce the ban on June 26, saying, “no permits to protest in the city of Graham, N.C., to include the Alamance County Courthouse have been granted, nor will be granted for the foreseeable future.

Any group(s) attempting to protest without a permit, will be in violation and subject to arrest.”

According to the ACLU, that ordinance is unconstitutional. In response, the group filed a lawsuit against local officials, including Alamance Sheriff Terry Johnson.

A letter from the ACLU to the Sheriff’s Office said, “Your threat to arrest people for protesting without a permit, as well as the indefinite blanket refusal to issue permits, violates the most fundamental constitutional rights to assembly, speech and to be free from unlawful seizures and use of excessive force without due process of law.”

Elon University community members were outraged to see Campus Police enforcing what they agree to be an unconstitu-

In response to the letter, senior staff invited Bocian and other alums to a conference call, during which Whittington says he hopes to have a more formal response and a status update by July 20.

E

mily Sledge, a junior at Elon University and a lifelong resident of Burlington, also began a petition demanding Johnson’s resignation. In a week, over 5,550 people had signed, including Ringelberg.

“I’m frustrated and clearly I’m not alone,” Sledge says. “As a community we need different leadership. I hope the petition shows people that while this is a small community, change needs to start somewhere. Questionable law enforcement affects people everywhere.”

Johnson’s nearly 20-year tenure as sheriff of Alamance has been wrought with controversy and accusations of racial profiling.

The Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit against Johnson in 2012, saying that deputies disproportionately targeted Latinos. Johnson was also accused of telling his deputies to “get me some of those taco-eaters.” A federal judge acknowledged the agency’s use of racial slurs, but ultimately dismissed the lawsuit.

Sledge says her goal is to raise support for Kirstin Ringelberg, a professor of art history at Elon University and a local activist, participates a candidate to run against Johnson in the in a “Gather to Demand Justice” protest in Graham on June 5. PHOTO BY ANTON L. DELGADO next election. In 2018, he ran unopposed.

According to Whittington, the goal of this tional order and protecting a monument She hopes a new sheriff will lead to a group will be to “more fully understand the reallocation of the county’s resources. they perceive as racist.

“I want Elon to be more aligned with our nature, benefits and requirements of agree“The U.S., as a whole, puts too much stated values,” Ringelberg says. “Saying we ments among law enforcement agencies and attention on punishment, rather than are anti-racist but then working with rac- consider how improvements might be made.” focusing on rehabilitation and education,” Owen Covington, director of the Elon Sledge says. “If we put more money into ists shows that anti-racism is clearly not University News Bureau, declined to com- education and rehabilitation, we’d be able our goal.”

Like the Campus Police, Blackwelder ment while the review is ongoing. to help more members of our community “I want to be optimistic that the institution instead of punishing them.” dispatched four of her officers to enforce is seeing things differently, and that means the order.

During the 2020–21 fiscal year, more “I understand the public concerns, but we will actually have real change this time,” than $38 million is being allocated to the the fact of the matter is that our job is Ringelberg says. “But institutions often use Sheriff’s Office and the jail, according to to protect the community,” Blackwelder committees, white papers, and task forces to Alamance’s Budget Ordinance. says. “If another agency doesn’t feel like delay to the point we don’t need to make any Sledge’s call for Johnson’s resignation is they can provide protection because they changes, or we forget the problem.” being made alongside ongoing demands to As the controversy over the mutual aid relocate the Confederate statue. don’t have adequate resources, it’s important for us to follow through on the agree- agreement spread, other demands regardProminent local figures, including Book, ing more transparent policing were made presented a call to action at a recent ment and help.

“We’re not political figures. We protect by Elon University alums. press conference.

Zach Bocian, a 2017 graduate, helped life and property, and keep the peace. When “This monument has long been a source we respond to those requests, we’re not co-write a letter to Elon University Presi- of conflict in our community and it stands supporting the political agenda behind the dent Connie Book and other senior staff as a symbol of racism for many,” Book scenes or choosing a side. We’re just pro- members requesting more public access to says. “We are recommending removal of Campus Police records. tecting the community.” this monument in a respectful manner to a “Elon can make a change within its small more appropriate location that places it in In response to the controversy, Whittington appointed the Academic Council bubble that can be used and repeated by proper historical context.” W to work alongside himself, Dotson, and other campus police departments,” Bocian the university’s legal counsel to review the says. “The accountability of transparency The NC News Intern Corps is a program of “existing mutual aid agreement as well as and a formalized public complaint system the NC Local News Workshop, funded by current best practices for campus police is imperative especially on a university cam- the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund departments when engaging with exter- pus, like Elon, that’s trying to diversify its and housed at Elon University’s School of student body.” nal agencies.”

Communications.

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North Carolina

The Other Epidemic The isolation and stress of the COVID-19 pandemic could be breeding the next generation of addicts

BY MARY KING backtalk@indyweek.com

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randon starts his days with 20 minutes of meditation and a cup of coffee. After work, the 23-year-old carpenter heads home for a shower, another round of meditation, and maybe some ice cream.

On a good day, he’ll work out. On a bad day—when he’s tempted to break his six months of sobriety—he’ll drive from his home in Chapel Hill to Freddy’s, where he’ll snag a large vanilla concrete with Oreos, Butterfinger, Heath Bar, and cheesecake.

Brandon (whose name has been changed to protect his privacy) credits his meditation regimen for allowing him to stay centered amid the pandemic and endlessly depressing news cycle. This is progress; for the first months of lockdown, he couldn’t read the news without becoming angry and overwhelmed. When he experiences these feelings, he wants to get away from them—and that’s risky territory.

“It’s too scary, and it’s too real, and I have no way of escaping that right now,” Brandon says. “And the way that my mind was, is sometimes I’m not at capacity to handle that information and stay sober.”

Brandon is one of many people struggling to cling to sobriety during this unprecedented global health crisis.

Compounding the existential dread for many are closer-tohome disasters—unemployment, police brutality, financial insecurity, domestic violence—which have left many carrying tremendous burdens in relative isolation.

“When you think about the close quarters people are being forced to adhere to and the ways that they need or choose to cope with it, it’s no surprise that we’re breeding basically the next generation of addicts,” says Michael Lewis, a financial planner in Raleigh who specializes in addiction cost planning and has a son in long-term recovery.

The Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina has reported a significant increase in calls related to mental health challenges, executive director Kurtis Taylor told the INDY. Isolation and stress of those stuck at home have heightened fear, anxiety, and domestic violence—and many people look to substances to deal with these tribulations.

“I think that the shelter-in-place aspect of COVID-19 has had devastating, long-term effects—effects that we possibly haven’t seen the results of yet,” Taylor says. “When things get back to some sense of—for lack of a better term—normalcy, I think that we’ll find that people will emerge with issues that are not easily shaken.”

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“It’s too scary, and it’s too real, and I have no way of escaping that right now.”

This unprecedented stress can induce grief, anger, terror, and the feeling of being trapped: deep-seated emotions from which people naturally want to escape, says Raleigh psychotherapist Paige Armstrong. Substance abuse, she says, is a way to “numb the underlying pain.”

Emotional strife also includes hunger, exhaustion, boredom, and loneliness, she says. And for those in recovery from addictions, these feelings raise the risk of relapse.

Suzanne Brown, an addiction specialist in Chapel Hill, says she’s noticed that COVID-related fears triggering past trauma in her clients.

“People began re-experiencing their trauma, having memories pop back up that they hadn’t had in a long time—even people who had successfully dealt with a lot of their trauma,” Brown says.

Although these fears might be topically unrelated to the trauma, she says, our bodies can’t tell the difference, so they perform the same “survivor mode” fear response that they did during the traumatic event. To numb the memories and the accompanying feelings, some people self-medicate.

Because the pandemic has uprooted constants and disrupted routines, it’s hit those in recovery particularly hard as many use routines to nurture their recovery programs, Taylor says.

For Brandon, that’s meant not being able to attend his recovery meetings, which he says keep him “in the right frame of mind for sobriety.” Meetings over Zoom have still proven helpful for him, but it’s not the same experience, and he’s found it harder to stay plugged into the recovery community.

The same goes for Ryan Morris, a Durham resident whose meetings with SMART Recovery have shifted online. The online resources still help, he says, but he misses the camaraderie and fellowship that come with being in the same

room. COVID-19 has also taken away the gym, which he used as an outlet for his anxiety in lieu of alcohol.

“The gym didn’t completely eliminate that urge to drink, but it definitely helped,” Morris says. “So not having the gym available to me has been a little bit difficult.”

The pandemic has posed a greater risk of developing addiction even to those without mental health conditions or substance use disorders. Brown says addiction is a progressive disease that often starts out with experimental, recreational, and social substance use.

“And then once you get into regular and habitual use and it becomes more consistent, there’s an increased risk of developing an addiction,” she told the INDY. Isolation and boredom can make it easy to slip into regular and habitual use. Taylor pointed out how quarantine allows for much less scrutiny and accountability, and, for many, much more free time. Casual drinkers might find themselves imbibing more than usual, as they’re already at home and don’t have to drive anywhere afterward.

While it’s been widely reported that alcohol sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic, it’s more difficult to quantify if COVID-19 has boosted addiction rates. For instance, Hendrée Jones, professor at UNC School of Medicine and executive director of UNC Horizons, has previously looked at NCDHHS’ Opioid Data Dashboard for data that could indicate a surge in opioid addiction within the state.

“But I have not been able to find any data in North Carolina documenting what I know so many of us are clinically observing, which is increases in relapses, increases in overdose and fatal overdoses,” Jones says. “Anecdotally, that’s what we’re seeing.”

Safety measures designed to protect people’s physical health have created barriers to maintaining their psychological health, particularly with addiction, Jones told the INDY. The key to combating addiction during COVID is connection, Brown says, because substance use increases when people feel isolated. People need to find ways to authentically connect, whether that means doing things together or asking deeper questions about well-being.

“I got a text the other day from my cousin,” Brandon says. “He said, congratulations on six months [of sobriety], and that’s nice, you know? It’s good to hear that people are thinking about me.” W

This Land Is Their Land A DUKE ECONOMIST’S NEW BOOK ADDS A VOICE TO THE RISING CHORUS CALLING AGAIN FOR REPARATIONS

By Thomasi McDonald | tmcdonald@indyweek.com

A

t the height of the civil rights protests during the 1960s, a question emerged among members of the white press who were attempting to understand Black anger and unrest: What does the Negro want?

In fact, the question had been answered 100 years before, at the end of the Civil War, when Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, and asked Rev. Garrison Frazier, a native of Granville County,

what he and other freedman would need to sustain themselves.

“Land,” Frazier replied. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn and till it by our own labor. … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”

This is chronicled by Duke University economist William A. Darity Jr. and coauthor A. Kirsten Mullen in the married couple’s recently published, exhaustively researched book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

Darity and Mullen present a compelling case on behalf of the nation’s enslaved ancestors “whose sale and whose forced labor drove the commerce of the United States from the earliest days of the nation and made possible the world we inhabit today.”

Published in March by UNC Press, the book begins with the legendary anti-lynching journalist, Ida B. Wells, who summed up the plight of the nation’s formerly enslaved in 1893, when she observed that emancipation “left us homeless, penniless, ignorant, nameless, and friendless. ... Russia’s liberated serf was given three acres of land and agricultural implements to begin his career of liberty and independence. But to us no foot of land nor implement was given.”

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William A. Darity Jr. and coauthor A. Kirsten Mullen

Darity and Mullen outline the systemic policies of racial hatred and violence that stripped Black Americans of the vote, allowed white terrorism to murder hundreds of leaders during Reconstruction, and turned routine imprisonment into slavery by another name.

“Slavery was a bad thing, and freedom, of the kind we got, with nothing to live on, was bad,” Raleigh’s Patsy Mitchner, a formerly enslaved woman, told an interviewer with the Federal Writers’ Project in 1937.

She called slavery and freedom “two snakes full of poison.

White hatred of Black people devastated prosperous communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Rosewood, Florida, and Wilmington. The authors argue that those inequities produced today’s yawning racial wealth gap.

After the violent end of Black business districts, so-called urban renewal efforts bulldozed even more Black business corridors for the construction of interstate highways. More aptly called Black removal projects, they included the Hayti district here in Durham, where hundreds of businesses and homes were destroyed in the shadow of downtown to make way for the 15-501 Expressway and NC-147.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF UNC PRESS

Henry McKoy, who is director of entrepreneurship at North Carolina Central University’s business school, says that the loss of Hayti, where commerce had a local flavor even in the increasingly global market of the city’s tobacco industry, is incalculable.

“We are talking about literally billions of dollars in lost economic value for the Hayti community that could have resulted from expanding as the macroeconomic landscape expanded,” McKoy says. “Black Durham was denied the economic standing that it had built over the course of the century before the highway came through.”

McKoy adds that wealth from Hayti would have had generational impacts on the broader Black community of Durham and beyond.

“Homes, businesses, capital, and wealth passed to the next generation would have had tremendous impact on the journey of Durham’s Black diaspora,” he says. “That would have had an impact on education, health, wealth, income, and opportunity for countless individuals and families.

Wealth can have multiplier effects, but poverty can, too.”

McKoy says that when he speaks with senior citizens who grew up in Hayti, they talk about the mental effect of coming of age thinking they could be anything

because they saw people around them doing everything.

“That creates internal and external confidence that Black people are societal contributors,” McKoy says. “It is the embodiment of Black Lives Matter.”

T

he roots of whites’ refusal to affirm—or propensity to destroy—Black empowerment dates back to Sherman’s conversation with Rev. Frazier near the end of the Civil War. The Union commander followed the recommendations of Radical Republicans Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and John C. Frémont and issued Special Field Orders No. 15 in 1865, three months before the end of the Civil War. It authorized land confiscated and abandoned by Confederates who had supported the South to be redistributed to the freedmen.

The promised land covered three states that stretched across the coast of South Carolina and extended through Georgia, down into the northern portions of Florida.

Radical Republicans, an abolitionist faction of the party, argued that in addition to giving up their lands, the Southern states that seceded and fought the Union should

be treated as traitors. Black citizenship, they reasoned, could not be fully achieved unless the secessionists were dealt with harshly. Land distribution, Stevens said, was critical in changing the fabric of Southern society.

Of course, the promise of forty acres and a mule became one of the earliest African American dreams that were deferred, to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes.

Following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President Andrew Johnson ordered the land allocated under Special Field Orders No. 15 to be restored to the former slaveholders. On Christmas Day in 1868, he gave universal pardons to Southern traitors who would destroy America to own fellow human beings as if they were little more than livestock.

What followed in the moral void was the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that made Jim Crow as the law of the land and the period from 1900–1920 that saw the construction of what Darity and Mullen call “dismemory projects.”

This included the erecting of Confederate monuments on courthouse grounds and naming streets, schools, and military bases after Confederate leaders. Darity and Muller say that by 2016, there were 1,500 Confederate monuments across the United States, including 140 in North Carolina.

Full citizenship remains an unfulfilled dream as Black Americans struggle with gentrification, mass incarceration, underlying health issues, voter suppression, and poverty. Darity and Mullen point to the racial wealth gap “as the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy in the United States.” The authors refer to a 2016 survey of consumer finances that reported a racial wealth gap of about $795,000 between Black and white households.

To eliminate the racial wealth gap, Darity and Mullen propose a range of payment options based on unpaid wages, the purchase prices of human property, and the land promised to the freedman. The scholars point to the words of Judah P. Benjamin, who was a member of Jefferson Davis’s Confederate cabinet, who in 1860 said “our slaves … directly or indirectly involve a value of four thousand million dollars.”

Darity and Mullen point out that, as of 2019, $4 billion compounds to $2 trillion at 4 percent interest, to $9.3 trillion at 5 percent, and to $42.3 trillion at 6 percent.

A reparations program based on the broken promise of forty acres and a mule could result in financial payments of $267,000 per person for 40 million Black descendants of American slavery.

tizenship, achieved ealt with ens said, fabric of

“

WEALTH CAN HAVE MULTIPLIER EFFECTS, BUT POVERTY CAN, TOO.

acres and st African ferred, to ughes. of Abra- Reparations advocates have long been Johnson relegated to the margins in calls for equalr Special ity for Black people in America, but perhaps ed to the their moment has come. These times are as Day in not unlike how Darity and Mullen describe to South- pre-Civil War politicians whose calls for merica to the abolition of slavery was tantamount to hey were political suicide.

However, by the start of the war, abod was the litionists were viewed as sages, and now me Court their words are being heard again across he law of the land.

00–1920 at Darity ne of the earliest advocates for reparations was Callie D. cts.”

Guy House, who was born in Confederslavery in 1861. She was a grounds widower with five children d military Darity and living in Tennessee before she became the ere 1,500 driving force behind a federal lawsuit in the Unit- 1915 that claimed the U.S. Treasury owed Carolina. the freedman $68 million for the sale of nfulfilled slave-grown and slave-harvested cotton ggle with that was confiscated by Confederates at n, under- the end of the Civil War. sion, and The claim was denied. In 1916, House nt to the and other reparations leaders were indictbust indi- ed on charges of obtaining money from effects of the freedman by circulating pamphlets ates.” The saying pensions and reparations were consum- forthcoming. House was convicted in 1917 al wealth and served nearly a year in prison.

Black and HR 40, a bill that calls for a commission for the study of reparations, was first gap, Dar- introduced by Michigan Democrat John e of pay- Conyers in 1989. After Conyers gave up ages, the his seat in 2017, Shelia Jackson Lee, a erty, and Democrat from Texas took up the cause. man. The But the bill has never reached the floor Judah P. of Congress for a vote. of Jeffer- In a New York Times story late last t, who in month, “Banks Should Face History and y or indi- Pay Reparations,” Angela Glover Blackthousand well and Michael McAfee argued that the financial industry can close the wealth hat, as of gap but say that a federal reparations pol$2 trillion icy is unlikely to come anytime soon. llion at 5 So what can private money, and even 6 percent. progressive cities like Durham, do for what he broken McKoy calls “preparation for reparations?” ule could During his state of the city address $267,000 this year, Durham Mayor Steve Schewk descen- el called on city council to support reparations in some form. But Darity and

O

Mullen say that no effective program can take place without federal intervention, because slavery, Jim Crow, and the ensuing social inequities have occurred under federal authority.

McKoy does not disagree with his fellow economic scholars’ assessment, but he says there is enough culpability to go around at the federal, state, local, and institutional levels.

“Overall, I believe that reparative justice is critical to any longtime goal of achieving racial wealth parity or even making substantial progress towards closing the gap for the Black community,” McKoy says. “It’s an extended effort that goes far and wide to address these past harms and addresses the economic hollowness of Black America in the 21st century.”

McKoy says a reparations program in Durham should include economic investment in Black communities along with state and federal resources.

Specifically, McKoy recommends that the city should focus on opening up the Black business pipeline. It should increase the diversity of places where Black businesses are established so that they can capture diverse dollars while also taking advantage of the redevelopment of historic Black commercial and residential corridors. It should increase access to the capital needed for the Black business ecosystem to grow.

In short, the city should remove as many barriers to success as possible for Black entrepreneurs, while also investing in education to expose more Black youth to innovative environments. This might entail committing public properties to create Black wealth, with a focus on community improvement without forced displacement. It might entail the creation of a real-estate bank for intentional, inclusive development. It might entail finding creative ways to get the private sector in Durham to invest at a large, long-term scale.

“While the fight for reparations is happening, can we prepare the infrastructure of Black businesses,” he says. “Perhaps if Durham can lead the way and get it right, then cities all across America will follow suit.” W

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M U SIC

The Prodigy Old-school styles meet Gen Z values in Reuben Vincent’s wise-beyond-his-years Boy Meets World

BY KYESHA JENNINGS music@indyweek.com

N

ineteen-year-old Charlotte native Reuben Vincent met Jamla Records CEO 9th Wonder through Twitter when Vincent was barely a teenager. An outlier among Gen Z hip-hop artists, Vincent was committed to the essence of ‘90s hip-hop: heavy drums, soulful production, impressive lyricism and cadence, and memorable storytelling. By age 16, he had landed a record deal with Jamla, which released his critically acclaimed debut mixtape, Myers Park, in 2017.

Three years later, he’s a rising sophomore at North Carolina A&T, and his new EP, Boy Meets World, follows the traditional hip-hop coming-of-age narrative.

The eight-track EP tells compelling stories about what it’s like to be a young college student chasing rap dreams. Despite Vincent’s personal anecdotes about self-doubt, his delivery is polished and confident, with a solid balance of braggadocious lines and intellectual gems that celebrate the beauty of Black women and address America’s racial pandemic.

The Soul Council’s production is equally balanced. Khrysis and Eric G stick to soulful R&B samples on tracks like “How it Feel?” and “If I Die,” but they also take impressive, textured risks on “Whatchu Say?” and “Expedition.”

The first thing we hear on Boy Meets World is Tupac speaking on the challenges of being young, which shows that Vincent is a hip-hop prodigy wise beyond his years.

We caught up by phone to discuss the influence of the greats, being a signed artist on a college campus, and learning the mysteries of love.

Reuben Vincent

PHOTO BY NUKU MUINGBEH

low-key had a fear of Pac. He was dead and like the only ghost I knew when I was younger. But I was so attracted to his voice and his message. In preschool, my pops had brought me a Tupac shirt, and my preschool teacher, she was like, what you know about that? I was like, that’s Pac, and I was saying all of these songs that I knew.

Some of the other beats that Khrysis made, I had already heard and had a vision for it. I would tell them, “I want some keys on this.” I feel like as an artist you’re supposed to be hands-on. You’re supposed to be there when the production is being made because it is your art. I have to give credit to them, though, because without them, there wouldn’t be no Boy Meets World.

What was the creative process of Boy Meets World like?

INDY: What is your earliest memory of Pac? REUBEN VINCENT: Tupac was an early influence in my

life. He was one of the first rappers I heard. I remember my pops used to pick me up from my mother’s house and he used to play Pac. It’s a funny story, but I remember I

I was very hands-on with everything. Like the joints that I did with Eric, especially “Expedition,” I played a major role in the production by sending him samples. I sent him the Paul Wall sample. I was like, “Yo, this is how I want it to be. I want it to be energetic. I want it to bounce.”

In comparison to Myers Park, how has your artistry improved in on this project?

I’m a little bit more mature and older now and I have more life experience than when I was 16. I feel like my angle was mostly just to be one of the best rappers and INDYweek.com

July 15, 2020

17

“ I’m not in love with anyone right now. I’m chilling.

I’m focused. But it teaches you how to grow as a person while you’re in a relationship.”

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show people that though I was young, I a pet for adoption, could rap. This time around there’s more please contact of a message that’s going to stand the test of advertising@indyweek.com time. I wanna give something to people where they can sit back and listen and be like, “Yo, I can relate to what he’s saying.”

I noticed there’s more talking about love and your experiences with girls and relationships. Thus far, at 19, what do you know about love?

It’s a tricky situation. You know, I haven’t been in a lot of relationships. I’ve been in two. What I understand from love is, it teaches you something. Obviously, being young, you’re not always going to be the best guy, but you learn from it like, “Alright, I did this wrong in this relationship. This is what I can do moving forward.”

Me and my friends, we have conversations about it all the time. You’re not just learning about the other person, but you’re learning about oryourself through the relaTo advertise feature a pet for adoption, tionship.

And I feel like a true relationship please contact advertising@indyweek.com is supposed to teach you to grow.

I’ve been reading this book called The Ways of the Superior Man [by David Deida]. It’s a book Rapsody recommended to me. Domani Harris [T.I.’s son] also recommended it to me, and it was also referenced in a Nipsey [Hussle] interview.

It’s teaching me about love and understanding how to really move when you’re in love with a person. I’m not in love with anyone right now. I’m chilling. I’m focused.

But it teaches you how to grow as a person while you’re in a relationship.

That’s super dope and wise of you to even be thinking of. You attend North Carolina A&T—pre-pandemic, what was your experience as a signed artist on campus?

It was really fun, especially being my first year. You get to experience being around a lot of people, especially people that look like you. Attending A&T and getting that HBCU experience of going to the parties, seeing how turnt up they can get—but then on Monday, you back in class and 18

July 15, 2020

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you focused! It teaches you a lot of endurance and persistence.

It was fun because people knew who I was. It would be weird, sometimes I’ll be in the cafe and somebody would be like, “Yo, you Reuben Vincent?” I’m like, “Whaaaat?

You know who I am.”

Or for example, since I have a record on [a Madden NFL football video game], sometimes I’ll walk past a dorm and they’ll be playing Madden and I’ll hear my song. And they probably didn’t even know because of the way I was moving my freshman year, trying to keep low-key.

Everybody ended up finding out. What am I supposed to do? I can’t even get mad at that. It’s been dope.

I’m mindful of how I pick and choose who are really my friends. You always gonna have the vultures who try to be your friend just because of who you are. I just tried to give love to everybody that I met, but also keep my distance and know who is real and who is fake.

What do you want to do with your degree? Why was it important for you to go to attend an HBCU even though you’re actively pursuing music?

First and foremost, it was because of my mother. She’s from Liberia and she came here when she was 16. One thing she wanted to do but couldn’t because she was working, was go to college. On top of that, I’m also studying business education, trying to figure out how to keep my artistry while also knowing the music business. So whenever these deals come on the table, I’m not getting played.

I’m also trying to pave the way for future youngins that’s gonna come when I’m a little bit older. Like, “This is me. I studied the business. This is how I move with the business.” I know college isn’t for everybody, but if they see how I handled my business maybe they’ll want to go down that same route. With my platform, I hope to inspire other young people to attend HBCUs and be great, highlight our community. W

M U SIC

THE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA OF THE TRIANGLE AND THE MONTI: UNLIKELY ALLIANCES

Thursday, July 16, 8:00 p.m. | $10 | Livestreaming from Bull City Ciderworks, Durham

Live to Tell the Tale A chamber orchestra and a storytelling group walk into a cidery

BY DAN RUCCIA music@indyweek.com

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ow can an orchestra perform in the age of COVID? Putting 80 to 100 people on stage in close proximity, with half of the instruments powered by the lungs, seems like the stuff of epidemiological nightmares, turning Mahler’s expansive symphonies with multiple choirs into horror stories. Even a more streamlined chamber orchestra seems impossible in the U.S. for the foreseeable future—and that’s before even thinking about what to do with the audience.

One solution is to go even smaller, to chamber music involving only a few players, streaming for an audience at home. As a stunt in Barcelona where a string quartet played for an audience of plants grabbed international headlines, ensembles here at home have been quietly experimenting with the possibilities of chamber music.

Some, like the North Carolina Symphony, have focused on videos, stitching together performances by their homebound members to create virtual ensembles. But on July 16, the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, in collaboration with The Monti and Bull City Ciderworks, is trying something a little different: physically gathering in a venue to blend music and storytelling you can watch at home or listen to on the venue’s porch.

The performance pairs the CoT’s penchant for lesser-known works, mostly by white male composers from the classical canon, with The Monti’s themed storytelling. It consists of three chapters, each surrounding a story with two loosely related musical works.

Some of the connections seem a little more tenuous than others. A chapter on “the family business” finds an arrangement of Mozart’s ubiquitous Rondo alla Turca for two trumpets and piano, played

The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle in 2019

by a married couple of trumpeters. A chapter on “cultural differences” bookends a story about living in a new part of the world with brief percussion works by Toru Takemitsu and Bob Becker (a composer who made his name playing percussion in Steve Reich’s ensemble). We’ll also hear more expansive works by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Bohuslav Martinu.

Unlike, say, Duke Performances’ lavish Music in Your Gardens Series, which features prerecorded concerts in front of a film crew, this show will be livestreamed, with a small audience allowed

PHOTO BY LAURA HUNTER

to listen from the porch outside of Bull City Ciderworks. The organizers are quick to point out the safety precautions they’ve taken: physical distancing guidelines for performers and visitors, mask requirements for everyone (except when a performer is speaking or playing a wind instrument), and so on. Until our leaders actually start doing the work on the national level to get this pandemic under control, it’s probably the most live classical music experience we’ll get for a while. Hopefully, there will be more like this to come. W

“ How can an orchestra perform in the age of COVID?”

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M U SIC M8alla PHOTO BY PAUL-MARIE BROU

Nervous Record M8alla and Treee City craft the jam of this anxious summer BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

I

f this were a normal summer in the Triangle, the cookout and the club would be ruled by “Mek Mi Anxious,” the new single M8alla dropped July 3. A jubilant slice of R&B full of ‘90s hip-hop footnotes and detailed production, it finds Mballa Mendouga getting butterflies about a crush at a party—the sort of anxiety most of us would gladly trade our present kind for.

But this only strengthens the song’s summer-jam status, which usually involves a heady quotient of nostalgia. “Mek Mi Anxious,” a bridge between Mendouga’s 2018 debut album and the record she’s working on now, does tell us where she’s been. But it also points to where one of the Triangle’s top rising artists is going.

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July 15, 2020

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Patrick Phelps-McKeown, who DJs and produces electronic music as Treee City, laid down the track that would become “Mek Mi Anxious” around 2013. He’d been making a lot of fast, aggressive techno, and he wanted to do something fun with major chords for a change. African and Latin sounds were having a moment in electronic music, from the tropical house craze to The xx and Justin freaking Bieber.

But the breezy marimba melody Phelps-McKeown built in Ableton insisted on feeling more like an instrumental than a song until Mendouga, whose music blends Afro-Caribbean influences into trap and throwback hiphop, came along.

“I kept adding layers, but none of them were really a top line,” he says. “When I saw Mballa’s tweet, it felt like the missing piece. I think we got lucky—that was the first thing I sent her.”

Mendouga has a knack for tweeting for beats and getting blessed by producers named Patrick. The first time she did so, the Raleigh hip-hop pro Pat Junior reached out, resulting in the single and video “Illegal.” The outlaw anthem anchored her 2018 debut album, Never Leave Quietly, and landed her on a big stage at the Hopscotch Music Festival.

The second time, her Twitter fishing reeled in Phelps-McKeown, who jokes that next time, maybe she’ll get a beat from 9th Wonder (birth name: Patrick Douthit).

Mendouga wrote “Mek Mi Anxious” off the track Phelps-McKeown sent, kicking off a much deeper collaboration than just buying a beat off the internet.

“I was super impressed by how rhythmic it was,” Mendouga says. “It just felt like me. I wanted to have something fun after ‘Illegal,’ a very heavy song that pushed an image of me as this anthemic songwriter for dark times. I’m like, ‘No, I’m so much more than that; I have fun, too.’ This is the lane I wanted to go in, so it was easy to write on it.”

“Illegal,” written while Mendouga was at UNC, was about being an undocumented immigrant for a few years. After her Cameroonian family was evacuated from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where her father was an ambassador, she was born in Paris in 1991, where she spent her toddler years. She grew up in Washington, D.C., before coming to Chapel Hill in 2009.

“Mek Mi Anxious” took shape in several long sessions at Durham’s Playground Studios with sound engineer Chaka Harley.

The first step was whittling it down from its original five-minute length for maximum pop punch, compressing a world’s worth of detail in three perfect minutes.

“There’s so much work we did to create the atmosphere around the song, the background noise, trying to give it kind of a story feel,” Mendouga says. “Little giggles, all the things that make it fun and summery on top of the production and songwriting.”

They started thinking about the song in cinematic terms, which resulted in the

musical equivalent of diegetic sounds in a film—not just singing about a party but taking you there. Before the last chorus, you can hear a door opening and a few footsteps, as if Mendouga were stepping out to collect herself.

“If I’m feeling anxious about a guy at a party, I’ll go grab a drink,” she says. “I’ll leave the party and go into a room and calm down, then come back. We were trying to recreate that feeling of moving around.”

They made this concrete-music touch in the soundstage at Playground. With a handheld recorder, Phelps-McKeown captured the click of Mendouga’s steps on the tile floor, the door of the studio opening, and even the security-system beep, then filtered it all in ProTools to make it sound like it was coming from another room.

The lyrics and melodies are just as allusive and detailed. Bad Boy is Mendouga’s favorite label ever, and her first concert was Ruff Ryders when she was nine years old. A couple of lines on “Mek Mi Anxious” riff on the iconic Diana Ross sample from Biggie’s hit “Mo Money Mo Problems.” Another cites DMX’s “Get It on the Floor,” while still another is a quote Lil’ Kim cribbed from dancehall legend Mad Cobra.

“There’s so much Mase and Diddy flavor in there. I like to dig in crates in general,” Mendouga says. “I also grew up on ‘90s dancehall, the Shabba Ranks era, where often they’ll have a woman doing a prominent part, and that’s a feel I wanted to bring in.”

“Mek Mi Anxious” also features Mendouga’s first rap verse on her own song, a path she may or may not explore on the new record she’s working on with Alec Lomami, which she hopes to drop next year. She’s all about pushing her frontiers and showing different sides of herself. She’s looking for beats she has room to put her personal stamp on, like with Treee, and she’s writing a song in French for the first time.

“I’m testing my abilities in completely different ways,” she says. “My quote-unquote brand is to continue to grow into a more authentic person, and music helps me remember all the things about me that are tucked away somewhere because I’m here in Raleigh.” W

SC R E E N

FOOD TRUCK FLIX

Fridays and Saturdays, 7:00 p.m. | $25 per car | Focus Church and Frontier RTP, Raleigh

Here in My Car I Feel Safest of All The coronavirus is bringing back the glory days of the drive-in theater

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

Food Truck Flix

I

PHOTO COURTESY OF FOOD TRUCK FLIX

t’s a little after 5:00 p.m. on a hot day in late June. Gus Megaloudis, the owner of Gussy’s Greek Street Food Truck, is sweating but serene. He’s gazing over a small, dedicated troop of food truck owners and friends who are scattering hundreds of orange traffic cones through a parking lot at the Frontier complex in Research Triangle Park. As they turn acres of broiling asphalt into a checkerboard of parking spaces, technicians unroll and slowly inflate what at first looks like a giant goth bounce house but turns out to be a four-story screen.

After hours of work, the result is Food Truck Flix. The new outdoor film and food truck rodeo series is ongoing through August, every Friday and Saturday night at 7:00 p.m., at either Frontier or Raleigh’s Focus Church (visit foodtruckflix.com for details). The cost is $25 per car, with those profits going to social justice causes.

“I figured I couldn’t do it by myself,” Megaloudis says of the plan, which he came up with to help shore up the region’s food truck community during its most challenging year, benefit worthy nonprofits like Emancipate NC, and give

locals a rare commodity—a fun, fairly safe night out.

But in this intriguing variation on the venerable institution of the drive-in, patrons get their munchies and drinks from local food trucks instead of a generic concession stand. They maintain social distance by ordering from the Street Food Finder mobile app while staying in (or sometimes, on) vehicles separated by empty spaces.

Masked carhops deliver their orders.

Drive-in theaters have been driven almost to extinction, but they’ve made an improbable comeback in North Carolina during the summer of COVID-19. Long-established venues like Raleigh Road Outdoor Theatre in Henderson are now running seven days a week, and new pop-up sites have opened over the last month in Charlotte, Fayetteville, and Wilmington, along with two in Winston-Salem.

Megaloudis drew in the owners of ChickN-Que, Chirba Chirba, Bulkogi, and Pie Pushers, and together, they’ve sold out every screening since they began in late June. Following the likes of Independence Day and Coco, this weekend brings Hidden Figures on Friday and The Sandlot on Saturday, both at Focus Church.

At that late-June screening of Grease, Ashley Serrone and her friends presided over an array of posh pillows, chairs, and coolers in the bed of the pickup truck they rented to tailgate the event in style.

“It’s a good throwback,” she says.

In other cars, Tracey Price misses the clip-on squawk boxes from the old days, while Kim Manturuk pines for the dancing snacks once featured in cheesy pre-show ads. Still, a buzz of anticipation fills the lot as the sun goes down and a cultural relic from the 1950s brings people together again in a time when that’s hard to do. W

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C L AS S I F I E D S EMPLOYMENT EMPLOYMENT Biostatistician II PPD Development, L.P. seeks a Biostatistician II in Morrisville, NC to perform management functions relating to the administrative and scientific activities of team members across multiple complex projects.

MS & 2 yrs or PhD & 0 yrs. To apply send resume to global.recruitmentSM@ ppdi.com & Reference Job ID: 171245

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IT Technical Specialist IT Technical Specialist sought by LabCorp in Durham, NC to help implmt Golden Gate comprehensive s/ware package for real-time data movement across the data fabric, specifically connecting legacy relational transactional databases, & transporting/ingesting data into new analytic framework on Hadoop. Position reqs Master’s deg or foreign equiv in IT, Comp Sci, or Comp Engg + 3 yrs of progressive exp as a D/ base/GoldenGate Admin.

Employer will also accept a Bach’s deg or foreign equiv in listed fields + 5 yrs of exp.

To apply, submit resume through jobs.labcorp.com, ref Requisition #20-83917.

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