INDY Week 8.4.21

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 38 NO. 29

M8alla's new EP, Don't Save Me for Later, comes out August 4, p. 20 PHOTO BY JOHNATHAN ROBERTSON

CONTENTS NEWS 4

Duke lawyers up with an anti-union firm to try to quash the DUP workers union. BY THOMASI MCDONALD Members of Durham's Racial Equity Task Force respond to distortions of its anti-racism report from Senate leader Phil Berger. BY THOMASI MCDONALD Residents of a Wake Forest mobile home park are fighting a rezoning that could render them unhoused. BY CARYL ESPINOZA JAEN A community activist group wants to recall Raleigh's mayor.

5 6 8

BY JANE PORTER

9

Across North Carolina, the COVID-19 Delta variant is surging.

BY LEIGH TAUSS

10 The state superintendent's emails document a concerted effort to influence K-12 curricula. BY GREG CHILDRESS

FEATURE 13 Durham's Black neighborhoods are hotter than its white communities.

BY ELLIE HEFFERNAN

ARTS & CULTURE 16 Is a more equitable salary system on the way for Triangle restaurant workers? BY LENA GELLER 18 Nine Days asks big questions about life on earth. BY GLENN MCDONALD 19 In Songs for a New World each song is a mini-play made for COVID-era downsizing. BY BYRON WOODS 20 M8alla follows the sun. BY BRIAN HOWE 21 Two recent albums explore the weird corners of electronica.

BY HARRIS WHELESS AND WILL ATKINSON

THE REGULARS 3 Op-ed

COVER Illustration by Jon Fuller

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER S Wake County

MaryAnn Kearns Durham/Orange/ Chatham Counties

Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Edwards Senior Writer Leigh Tauss

John Hurld

Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

EDITOR I AL

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

Editor in Chief Jane Porter

Copy Editor Abigail O'Neill

Managing Editor Geoff West

Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods

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August 4, 2021

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BACK TA L K

Last week, in a partnership with the Pulitzer Center, we included a photoseries from journalist Melissa Lyttle that captures where Confederate monuments once stood across North Carolina and the nation.

Reader GLENN MAUGHAN provided some context about the Confederate flag, which is mentioned in the story. “The “Confederate Flag” was never selected by legislators of the Confederate States of America to represent same,” Glenn wrote on Facebook. “Resources indicate the flag was of similar design but a square, not a rectangle. Moreover, the chosen flag was one of several designated to represent the CSA. Lastly, the most recognizable icon of “The South” is a Ku Klux Klan symbol.

White supremacy, racism and out-of-mind hatred follow the Confederate flag whenever, wherever it’s seen.”

Also last week, our intern Rebecca Schneid wrote about the City of Durham’s lack of spaces for disabled children to play. Our readers had some ideas about how the city’s playgrounds could be improved for children with various kinds of disabilities.

“Yes!! I would love to see a communication board at some of the local playgrounds,” wrote Facebook commenter NATALYA BUCKEL. “My daughter is nonspeaking and uses assistive technology to communicate but her device is too fragile to take on play structures.

Even typically developing kids can benefit from a communication board!”

Facebook commenter JENCY MARKHAM writes: “Now that they have snuffed out the Bantu Knot discrimination and hired a Poet Laureate in the city they can tackle real substantive issues such as this.”

Do we detect a note of sarcasm?

We’d like to thank our three summer interns, Rebecca, Ellie Heffernan, and Caryl Espinoza Jaen, for all the hard work they’ve done for us this summer. We are currently accepting applications for fall internship positions!

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

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OP - E D

Prosperity Over Party Forget Congress—the Supreme Court should uphold DACA for economic growth. BY JEREMY CARBALLO PINEDA backtalk@indyweek.com

“F

ederal Judge rules that DACA is illegal.” As I read that recent headline, survivor’s guilt washed over me. My case had been approved just three weeks before the judge’s ruling—among just 3 percent of first-time DACA applications approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services since President Biden reinstated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in January.

The judge’s DACA decision has far-reaching implications: thousands of families will lose hope and be used as political pawns, their lives and communities forever changed.

Yet Congress is not likely to save us Dreamers, since partisanship has poisoned its walls to the point of collapse.

Instead, DACA’s fate will most likely be decided by the Supreme Court. And when that day comes, the Court should uphold DACA for the sake of the nation’s future economic growth.

Economic prosperity should trump partisan values.

Moreover, the potential effects on the economy should cause sirens to go off in Republicans’ heads. If they are truly the party of business, now is the time to prove it.

First, eliminating DACA will create preventable wage competition against other American workers.

The undocumented immigrants who are eligible for DACA may no longer be allowed to receive a work permit, but they still need to work. And work they will.

Since they cannot participate in the labor market legally, they will compete for the so-called “low-skilled” jobs usually reserved for uneducated Americans. Additionally, employers who hire undocumented workers under the table don’t abide by minimum wage laws. Undocumented workers will accept wages lower than minimum wage or market wages—thereby forcing the overall market wage lower for all Americans who are competing for these jobs.

Upholding DACA would prevent unnecessary competition over low-skilled jobs and protect the overall wages of U.S. citizens.

It is accepted among policymakers that to remain competitive among advanced economies, the U.S. must train, retain, and attract as many workers as possible.

Allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to work legally in the U.S. will have a net positive effect on the economy: consumer confidence will go up, GDP will rise, and businesses will have higher profits, thus creating more investing and innovation opportunities.

The Supreme Court should allow DACA-eligible immigrants to pursue education and training and to partici-

“Upholding DACA would prevent unnecessary competition over low-skilled jobs and protect the overall wages for U.S. citizens.” pate in the labor market. This will all contribute to longterm economic stability for all Americans. After all, the Cato Institute has estimated that from 2018-2028, DACA recipients would contribute $90 billion in tax revenue and an extra $350 billion to the economy.

Most important, every DACA-eligible immigrant who is denied the opportunity to work is being systematically kept poor. This inhibits the chances of overall job creation.

If you’re not buying this logic, I ask you to consider one question raised to me by Marty Morris, chief of staff to the late Senator Richard Lugar: “Has a poor man ever given you a job?”

When undocumented workers who are granted DACA are given the chance to work, the likelihood that they’ll save money to invest or begin a business increases exponentially. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that these individuals may help create jobs for U.S. citizens.

As I mentioned: of eligible DACA applicants, just 3 percent were approved before a federal judge slammed the door on more applications. That means 97 of 100 potential workers cannot contribute legally to the U.S. economy.

This absurd scenario is what is happening with DACA. To provide the greatest benefit to the most Americans, DACA must be upheld by the Supreme Court. Until then, America is foregoing economic prosperity for the sake of partisan politics.

One would have to turn a blind eye to not see the opportunity at hand. W Jeremy Carballo Pineda is a rising senior at Duke University studying political science and public policy. He is currently a Research Fellow at Democracy NC. INDYweek.com

August 4, 2021

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Durham

Union Bashing Employees at Duke University Press want a union, so Duke University hired union-busting lawyers.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

D

uke University administrators this year hired a law firm with an anti-union reputation shortly after its academic publisher announced that it had created a workers union to collectively bargain for competitive salaries, paid leave, fairness, and transparency.

Employees of Duke University Press (DUP) in late March announced on Twitter their intention to form the Duke University Press Workers Union.

Founded in 1921, DUP has long been recognized as a national leader among academic presses with the publishing of books and journals that recognize the more marginalized sectors of society, with topics ranging from LGBTQ issues to critical ethnic studies.

One day after DUP employees made their announcement, Duke University hired Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart, a multinational law firm with a reputation for cracking unions apart.

Sandra Korn has worked as an assistant editor with DUP for a little over six years. She has a master’s degree and earns about $43,000 a year, an unconscionable salary from a private university that is ranked as one of the best in the world with an $8.5 billion-dollar endowment, she said.

“It’s the wealthiest [private] university in North Carolina, but there are people who have been with the press for decades who make less than what I do,” Korn told the INDY. “If there’s a precedent for employers to raise wages in Durham, Duke University should be that employer.”

Duke University officials were not immediately available for comment.

In June, about 96 percent of the DUP’s roughly 70 non-supervisory employees cast ballots for or against the union.

“It’s close right now,” Lee Willoughby-Harris, a DUP marketing manager, says about the results. “The actual result will depend on the adjudication of the challenged ballots.

Seven ballots have been challenged.”

On July 7, Ogletree Deakins filed an objection with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) about conduct that may have affected the union election.

The four-page affidavit claims there were “administrative failures in the mail ballot process.”

The university’s attorneys also objected to the momentary departure of an NLRB agent conducting the count.

Korn said Duke’s real motive is “to maintain power and 4

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Members of the DUP Workers Union

PHOTO COURTESY OF DUP WORKERS UNION

have the only voice of what Duke University Press should look like.”

“Duke is desperately trying to do anything to not have to listen to the vote,” she says. “Duke is desperately putting these legal barriers in the way.’

Ogletree Deakins is a formidable opponent. According to NLBR records, Ogletree Deakins has represented Duke University in dozens of labor cases since 2000. The company’s website touts the firm as “a pioneer in developing strategies and practices that create positive employee relations.”

Korn says Duke has a history of organizing against its employees’ efforts to create unions for greater bargaining power. She points to Karen Brodkin Sacks’ Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center, a 1988 book that chronicles the efforts of medical center workers to unionize during the 1970s and the university’s stiff resistance to unionization.

In 2016, Duke’s graduate students formed a union with the Service Workers International Union. Duke University officials responded by spending “millions to fight the union effort,” according to the Duke Graduate Student Union website.

Korn says the creation of a workers union at Duke University Press is “part of a wave of workers in the publishing and communications industry who want a greater say in what our workplace in the future looks like.”

She points to workers with Oxford University Press, the largest academic press in the country, who in late June announced they were forming a union. In early July, workers with the University of Washington Press, the largest academic press in the Pacific Northwest, also formed a union.

The push by DUP employees to create a workers union literally started with a bang: the deadly, early morning

downtown gas explosion on April 10, 2019. It was the Bull City’s 150th anniversary. The concussive blast shook the DUP offices. It also jarred the consciousness of the 75 to 80 DUP employees who streamed out of the building onto Main Street. They could see the smoke rising from the Kaffeinate coffee shop and soon saw the flames that killed Kong Lee and injured 25 others.

“We were getting different messages from the managers about what had happened,” says Willoughby-Harris, who explained that the gas leak explosion jump-started a series of conversations about the varying levels of information they had about the explosion. That led to other concerns about transparency, paid family leave, and unfair salaries.

“Living in Durham right now on academic publishing wages is tough,” says Willoughby-Harris, who has been with DUP for 35 years. “We’re looking for something that will allow us to keep our heads above water.”

Korn says DUP employees’ efforts to unionize have been met with “fierce opposition from management,” saying the workers have received press releases encouraging them to vote against a union.

The DUP editor says the opposition has been spearheaded by Dean Smith, director of the academic press.

“I can only assess that it was something he was told to do by the anti-union lawyers,” Korn says. “Right now there is intense pressure in our workplace. Despite the pressure, the majority of us are still holding on to form a union.”

Willoughby-Harris is convinced that she and her fellow workers should have a voice in their workplace.

“We deserve a place at the table and being part of the conversation,” she says.

NLRB is expected to render a decision about the union as soon as this month.W

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Durham

Bending the Truth Berger distorts findings in Durham’s Racial Equity Task Force Report to make his case for banning critical race theory, affirmative action.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

I

n an eight-page press release that reads like a truth-twisting campaign commercial, North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger wanted to make clear last month that he does not support teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools. In fact, he supports legislation that would ban teaching critical race theory, and also favors a constitutional amendment that would ban affirmative action, and he used a report from Durham’s Racial Equity Task Force, made public last summer, to prop up his case.

“They say conditions today, months after North Carolinians elected their first black lieutenant governor, ‘are not very different from those in 1925,’ a period when people of color were beaten, hanged and mutilated in the streets,” Berger’s press release says, in reference to the task force’s report. “‘Black people are still enslaved because they’re black,’ Durham’s task force reports,’” the press release continues.

That’s just not true.

July 23 marked the one-year anniversary of the 60-page report that was submitted to the Durham City Council by the 17member task force. What they actually stated about the “enslavement” of Black Americans in the report was in reference to the impact of mass incarceration: “The deep divisions that are seen today are not very different from those in 1925,” the report reads. “Most of the statistics for [Blacks, Indigenous, and People of Color], in any arena, lead to the realization that real change has not occurred. Black Americans are still enslaved, now in what is called prison, and slaves are now called inmates, felons, or defendants.”

Last week, members of Durham’s task force issued a statement condemning Berger’s statements. The members say the group stands strong in its commitment to create

[an] anti-racist society and condemns those who would thwart anti-racism efforts.

“We strongly rebuke the reaction to this work from some of the people who are supposed to be representing us in our democracy, but instead choose to use their power to condemn anti-racism during a pandemic where there is so much work to be done,” the members relayed in a one-page press release.

At the crux of the debate is the GOP-led House Bill 324, that seeks to prohibit public school teachers from teaching “that the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” or that the country “was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex.”

The bill passed the House in May by a 66-48 vote along party lines and has been referred to the Senate Education/Higher Education Committee.

As the INDY previously reported, members of Durham’s city council and school board each adopted resolutions opposing HB 324.

In the press release, the task force members said the purpose of their work “was not to berate or indoctrinate, but to demonstrate that neither the legal victories of the civil rights movement nor the election of a Black President ended racism; instead, racism continues to be steeped in our institutions. The actions of some of our leaders only prove our point.”

Sen. Democratic Whip Jay Chaudhuri of Wake County also criticized Berger’s statements.

“I have not heard any concrete evidence where students have been indoctrinated,” Chaudhuri said. “What I have heard is that it does away with critical thinking in the classroom.”

The task force’s statement echoed Chaud-

Durham Racial Equity Task Force co-chairs Kaaren Halderman and Elaine O’Neal PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA huri’s criticism, and suggested there is a dangerous precedent with the establishment of what has been called “memory laws,” and “government actions designed to guide public interpretation of the past.”

“We can easily see there is no substance to their dogma, but we can’t ignore the danger of their inflammatory political maneuvers,” the task force members said.

“In fact, the efforts to dismantle equity in the classroom go against the very principles of democratic schooling they purport to represent.”

House Bill 324, according to Berger’s press office, would not permit public schools to compel students “to affirm or profess belief in several discriminatory concepts.”

Berger, in his statement, says the intent of the legislation is the passage of a law that prohibits “indoctrinating students while preserving the inviolable principle of freedom of thought.”

“Children must learn about our state’s racial past and all of its ugliness, including the cruelty of slavery to the 1898 Wilmington massacre to Jim Crow,” he adds. “But students must not be forced to adopt an ideology that is separate and distinct from history; an ideology that attacks the ‘very foundations of the liberal order,’ and promotes ‘present discrimination’—so long as it’s against the right people—as ‘anti-racist.’”

Task force co-chair Elaine O’Neal, a pioneering superior court judge and N.C. Central law school dean, derided Berger’s desire to not indoctrinate students.

“I can tell you about indoctrination,” O’Neal, who is running for mayor of

Durham, told the INDY. “When I was in the third grade—and I wasn’t the only one— we were taught the song, ‘jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton.’ I still know the words to that song, and the dance steps.

It’s a prison work song that was created by Black men. Why were you teaching a prison work song to Black children in the third grade? That’s indoctrination.”

Co-chair Kaaren Halderman told the INDY that Berger’s attack on public education is nothing new. Yet he offers no solutions and continues to harm students and families.

“We call on the leadership in Raleigh to stop the dog-whistle politicking and act immediately to address the continued suffering of North Carolinians.

During a period where America has reached a nadir in conversations about race, the task force members highlight the ongoing toll of a global pandemic that continues “to bring immense suffering, and has further exposed the deep racial inequities in our society.”

Moreover, they point to the irony of a “national moral panic over whether white people are being discriminated against or indoctrinated by anti-racist efforts.”

“What is wrong with working toward an antiracist society where everyone thrives?” the task force members ask. “We will continue to be an advocate on behalf of many who are suffering and we are clear that all of us need to stand up for our communities, especially when they are under attack ... We believe in a future where racial disparities are not inevitable, but we are not there yet—and we must listen to our community to get there.” W INDYweek.com

August 4, 2021

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Wake County

In the Balance Wake Forest residents are organizing to fight eviction after park owner seeks to sell property.

BY CARYL ESPINOZA JAEN backtalk@indyweek.com

F

or residents of Wellington Park, a mobile home community in Wake Forest, the next few months could mean the end of their homes and community.

Residents organized a press conference late last month to oppose a proposed rezoning and redevelopment of Wellington Park. More than 230 people showed up to rally against the rezoning, calling for both George Mackie Jr.— the park’s owner and former Wake Forest mayor—and the Wake Forest Board of Commissioners to stop the rezoning and sale of the property.

Mackie is said to be making plans to sell Wellington Park to Middleburg Communities, a real estate group that has “acquired or built over 20,000 apartments and executed over $2.5 billion in transactions’’ in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic regions, according to its website.

Wake Forest commissioners are set to vote on the rezoning later this summer.

If the rezoning is approved, Middleburg Communities would be greenlit to redevelop the neighborhood, making it unaffordable for those currently living in the mobile home park, residents fear. And even if the rezoning is not approved, Mackie still has the ability to evict the residents, said Katia Roebuck, an organizer at ONE Wake, a multiethnic coalition of faith-based and civic organizations working on behalf of Wellington residents.

The INDY’s attempts to reach Mackie last week were unsuccessful.

If the property is sold, residents say it could not only render dozens of North Carolinians homeless with possibl job insecurity, but also eliminate one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in Wake County.

Carol Ornett, a Wellington Park resident, said that even with the affordable cost of living in the mobile home park, he cannot afford to move out on a fixed income.

“I live on about $1,000 Social Security, and you know what rent goes for if you’re finding a new space,” Ornett said. “I couldn’t possibly afford to get an apartment, move out, and have money to afford whatever place to live in. I will be 6

August 4, 2021

INDYweek.com

Wellington Park press conference

PHOTO CARYL ESPINOZA JAEN

homeless, and I don’t see any way of solving this problem.”

Ornett, a Vietnam War veteran, is not the only resident who spoke up about potentially facing homelessness if the property is successfully sold and rezoned.

Erica and Eduardo Sevilla, two siblings and residents of Wellington Park, said that having to move poses challenges for them as well.

“As the oldest daughter and first-generation American, the burden of finding a new home would fall on me,” Erica Sevilla said at the July 17 press conference. “I do not have the knowledge, experience, or have established enough credit to help find a new and better home for my family.”

Sofia Miro, another resident of Wellington Park, said that a possible solution would be for Mackie to sell the property to ROC USA, a nonprofit that assists mobile park residents in forming cooperatives to purchase their own parks. (ROC stands for “resident-owned community.”)

“We are gathering today not just to ask the commissioners to vote no,” Miro said, “but also to ask the commissioners to meet with this organization in August to better understand the alternative solution.”

Roebuck, the ONE Wake organizer, said that residents and community groups, such as her organization and the NC Congress of Latino Organizations, are in constant contact with the Wake Forest Board of Commissioners and Wellington Park’s owner to negotiate the future of the mobile home park.

Roebuck said that selling the property to ROC USA would be the best compromise between residents and Mackie.

She added that ROC USA has enough funds to likely rival the deal between Mackie and Middleburg Communities.

“We don’t see Mr. Mackie as the enemy,” Roebuck said.

“We just want Mr. Mackie to think hard about where these people are going.”

Bridget Wall-Lennon, a Wake Forest commissioner, was the only commissioner to make a public appearance at the press conference. While Wall-Lennon said she could not disclose her stance on the rezoning ahead of time, she said she did want residents to know that she and the other Wake Forest commissioners were listening to their demands.

“I don’t really want to say anything formally, but I just wanted to let you all know that I was present,” Wall-Lennon said.

In the meantime, things are unclear for residents of Wellington Park. Roebuck said that with the final decision of the mobile home park’s rezoning not coming until late summer, residents are anxiously waiting to learn whether they really will have to face homelessness.

“What we want from the commissioners obviously is to vote no on this project, rezoning, and for Mr. Mackie to be open to selling his park to ROC USA,” Roebuck told the INDY. Meanwhile, stakeholders are working on contingency plans.

Last Thursday, Roebuck and other organizers met with representatives of Middleburg Communities, who appeared open to providing residents with enough compensation to successfully relocate should the development move forward, Roebuck told the INDY. “They’re losing a lot of money if the rezoning doesn’t pass, so everybody has an interest here: the commissioners, the developers, and the park residents,” she said. “We’re just helping the park residents to not be homeless.”W

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August 4, 2021

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Raleigh

Recall Politics Community activists want to recall Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin. They’re facing an uphill fight.

BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com

I

f you’re going to buy yourself another year in public office, it’s best not to do it in secret.

In June, Raleigh’s city council learned this the hard way, earning rebukes from Governor Roy Cooper, Wake County’s delegation in the state Senate, and plenty of pissed-off residents. But while it takes two (or in this case, seven city council members) to tango in a literal backroom deal, only one on the council is facing the consequences: Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin, who’s the target of a recall effort led by the community activist group Livable Raleigh.

“We weighed all of it and decided we could not wait, we had to do it,” says Susan Maruyama, Livable Raleigh’s chair.

“The decision to delay the election, some people interpreted it immediately as voter suppression. We felt we cannot sit by and let it happen. This will not go away.”

The group faces an uphill battle. By the end of October, a recall petition will have to receive 14,000 notarized signatures, or 25 percent of the total number of voters who turned out in the last municipal election in 2019, according to rules laid out in the city’s charter. A potential recall election would take place in January, after the holidays, according to Maruyama.

That’s not the only challenge. The charter has not been updated since the 1950s, so Livable Raleigh can’t use any digital tools to help it collect the signatures more quickly. A special election will be expensive— Wake County Board of Elections director Gary Sims says he couldn’t float a number since it’s all still hypothetical, but if an election were to happen this fall, it would cost between $700,000 to a million dollars—and there also could be issues with the recall election timeline, plus any runoff election that may need to happen, says 8

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Gerry Cohen, an elections expert and member of the Wake elections board. “[The city charter] worked in 1957, when Raleigh did not have absentee or early voting,” Cohen says. “Now, you need 30 days for absentee, and 17 of early voting. Some of it doesn’t work.”

Maruyama acknowledges these challenges and adds that candidate filing, voting by mail, and absentee voting, not addressed in the charter, will also have to be dealt with.

“The overall logistics are complicated,” she says, but adds that a coalition of organizations, including the Wake County Housing Justice Coalition, is interested in assisting with collecting signatures for the recall effort, and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice will work to amend and modernize Raleigh’s charter rules. Maruyama says she is optimistic that enough signatures will come in and a recall election will happen.

But, historically in the Triangle, attempts to recall local leaders have not been successful.

An effort by conservatives to recall Durham Mayor Wib Gulley in 1986, after he issued a proclamation designating an anti-discrimination week and endorsed the Triangle gay and lesbian pride march, failed to rack up enough signatures and Gulley won re-election the next year.

Another botched effort by conservatives came after Charles Meeker was elected mayor of Raleigh in 2001. Led by ousted mayor Paul Coble, the recall effort targeted Meeker based on a claim that he reneged on a promise to complete Raleigh’s Outer Loop. It’s unclear if there was ever a formal petition process. Meeker served as mayor until 2011.

Unlike with these attempts, though, there is a more diverse group working to recall Baldwin, including former coun-

Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin

PHOTO ALEX BOERNER

cil members and Livable Raleigh but also members of the city’s economically disadvantaged communities concerned about displacement and gentrification.

Then, there’s the question of who would run against Baldwin if a recall election were held. Maruyama mentions Terrance Ruth— an N.C. State lecturer and social justice advocate who is, so far, the only candidate who has committed to challenging Baldwin for the mayoral seat—but Maruyama says she has not spoken to Ruth about running in any special election.

Ruth declined to say whether he supports the recall effort, or whether he would run against Baldwin in a potential recall election.

“We’re ready for change,” Ruth wrote in an email to the INDY. “We’re ready for new leadership. I trust that our city will make the right choice regarding a recall. I am a candidate for Mayor because our city deserves a better leader. A more committed leader. And, a leader who puts our city’s interests first.”

All told, given the challenges in collecting signatures, working within the confines of the city’s charter, and potential interventions by the county and state elections boards, it’s hard not to see Livable Raleigh’s recall effort as a means of playing the long game, an attempt to tarnish Baldwin’s reputation, and the job she’s done as mayor, in the lead-up to November 2022.

The group, described by its critics as anti-development, has never been a fan of Baldwin and her pro-growth, developer-friendly agenda. But why not take the energy and resources involved in coordinating a special recall election and go hard after Baldwin next year, in a midterm election in which voter turnout could be as much as five times higher than in odd-year municipal races?

Maruyama says her group didn’t feel like it could wait.

“I am very concerned about protecting the vision for the city and I don’t think this council or mayor has a vision other than to approve development that she is connected to,” Maruyama says. “People see it and feel it and are affected by these decisions. There are a lot of angry neighborhoods.”

Baldwin herself doesn’t seem fazed.

Recent financial reports for her reelection campaign show she’s banked nearly $300,000 since January. Last month, she told the INDY she’s in good company with mayors facing recalls, citing Meeker. And she emphasized the city’s No. 2 spot on the U.S. News & World Report’s list of best places to live in the country.

“Obviously,” she said, “we’re doing something right.”

When the INDY reached her for comment last week, she said she didn’t have anything else to add. W

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North Carolina

The Fourth Wave The Delta variant is surging through North Carolina and 40 percent of residents remain unvaccinated.

Will restrictions return?

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

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hose watching the numbers knew it was going to be a bad week.

After months of keeping the spread of COVID-19 mostly at bay through an aggressive vaccination campaign, restrictions eased this summer just as a new threat emerged: an even more contagious strain of the virus known as the Delta variant.

New cases of the virus and hospitalizations—nearly all among the 40 percent of North Carolinians who remain unvaccinated—began to uptick, at first moving slowly from the low hundreds to just over a thousand by mid-July. Then, just from Monday to Tuesday last week, the number of cases doubled—to more than 3,000.

By Friday, 10 percent of COVID-19 tests were coming back positive, the worst rate since February.

Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist at Duke Hospital, expects the number of cases to only increase more in the coming weeks.

“It is baked into the system that that number is going to go up for at least a couple of weeks … all of those people who were exposed yesterday for example are not likely to get sick for a couple of days,” Wolfe said during a media briefing last week. “With the Delta variant, the timeline is condensed a little bit. You’re in fact more infectious more quickly with this, so we’re seeing a hospitalization impact more quickly.”

What we can’t know yet is how bad things could get, or how quickly. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance last week to urge even the vaccinated to wear masks indoors to prevent the spread of the virus, Governor Roy Cooper has yet to reinstate any restrictions locally. Cooper did announce Thursday that state employ-

ees would be required to receive the vaccine and urged other employers to follow suit. And some local governments, such as Wake County and the Cities of Raleigh and Durham, have required masks in public buildings once again. But with no current mask mandate at the state level, and all gathering restrictions lifted, counties throughout North Carolina have seen a surge in cases.

Schewel said he will meet this week with public health officials and scientists at Duke Health to discuss Durham’s response to the variant.

“Just a month ago, we had less than five cases per day,” Schewel wrote in a text message. “Now we are up to 40 cases a day. This is a very serious increase, and we have to respond accordingly.”

Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, echoed Schewel’s concerns more broadly.

“Our trends are accelerating at an alarmingly fast rate and the highest rates of viral spread are happening in areas with low vaccination rates and among those who are not fully vaccinated,” Cohen said.

The state has administered almost 10 million doses of the vaccine and as of Friday, 57 percent of adults are fully vaccinated and 61 percent have received their first dose. The problem has been convincing the remaining population to get the shot.

According to Wolfe, oftentimes the state’s anti-vaxxers don’t change their minds until they end up on a hospital gurney.

“It does change people’s opinion. There’s no question about that,” Wolfe said. “There’s nothing fun about being hypoxic in a hospital. It’s an awful situation to face.”

A series of million-dollar government-sponsored lottery drawings barely moved the needle. While vaccinations

Students at N.C. State’s campus

PHOTO JADE WILSON

surged in April after becoming available to the general population, the rate began to bottom out in late May and has continued to decline. Fewer than 100,000 new doses are now being administered per week.

As evidenced by the uptick in cases, the current vaccination rate isn’t fast enough to curb the spread of the Delta variant, which is not only more contagious but also has been shown to make people sicker faster, and sometimes more severely, Wolfe says.

Part of the reason is that viruses mutate each time they are transmitted from person to person, says Duke Professor David Montefiori, who leads the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development. This means the longer the pandemic rages on, the more new strains are likely to emerge.

“The more we can shut this pandemic down and slow down the spread of the virus, the less opportunities it’s going to have to mutate and change and become more contagious,” Montefiori said. “The mutation rate is dependent on the transmission rate, how many times the virus has transmitted from one person to another [and] how long it’s been continuing to replicate in the human population. That’s what drives mutations and allows the accumulation of multiple mutations to occur.”

Although the Delta variant is evolving quickly, vaccines are still effective against it. Booster shots will likely be necessary for the future to strengthen immunity to new and emerging variants.

If vaccination rates don’t increase, the Triangle, especially, could be in for a surge next month when students from Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University return from summer vacation. Last year, in-person classes were abruptly canceled and moved online after outbreaks were reported within days of students’ return to campus. While Duke is requiring all staff, students, and faculty members to be vaccinated, the UNC System schools will not, instead relying on once-a-week testing and students’ self-reporting their vaccination status.

The endgame is simple: either increase the rate of vaccination or wait for herd immunity—which won’t occur without significant fatalities. For Cohen, the latter is not an option.

“There is only one way out of this pandemic and that is vaccination,” Cohen said.

“If you are already vaccinated, I call on you to urge your unvaccinated family and friends to get their shot now. It is not an understatement to say that you will save lives by doing so.” W INDYweek.com

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Education Last The state superintendent’s email documents the political right’s concerted effort to influence K-12 curricula.

BY GREG CHILDRESS backtalk@indyweek.com

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f culturally responsive teaching is allowed in North Carolina’s public schools, students will learn that math is racist.

Students who are Black, LGBTQ, or of minority ethnic backgrounds will be taught that teachers are bigots.

And educators will be allowed to engage in “age-inappropriate promotion” of homosexuality.

That’s what some alarmists wrote in email messages to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt earlier this year as part of a concerted effort by conservatives to influence public school curricula and combat critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines how racism has shaped American law and public policy. It is also the Republican Party’s wedge issue du jour.

House Bill 324, for example, is a bill supported by Truitt and inspired by the antiCRT movement that seeks to limit what can be taught in North Carolina’s public schools about America’s racial past.

The measure has been approved by the House and has the support of Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County. Berger has vowed to keep critical race theory out of schools, though most educators say it is not a part of K-12 curricula in North Carolina.

Turning up the pressure Policy Watch obtained Truitt’s messages as part of a public records request which sought the emails the superintendent received containing the phrase “critical race theory” between January 1 and June 1.

The Department of Public Instruction turned over 157 messages in which writ10

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ers mentioned the subject.

Truitt’s emails show just how effective state Republicans and other actors such as Education First Alliance, a conservative nonprofit that crusades against critical race theory, have been at whipping the party’s base into a frenzy over a onceobscure academic subject.

“Curriculum based on critical race theory is inherently racist and discriminatory with its focus on race alone as the only way to categorize and analyze people and their behavior,” one message said.

The emails also show the enormous pressure Truitt faced before canceling a contract with ISKME (the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). The Department of Public Instruction had hired the independent education nonprofit to train educators in culturally responsive teaching. The teaching practice recognizes the importance of including students’ cultural references in all forms of learning.

Sloan Rachmuth, president of Education First Alliance, has chided Truitt about supporting the group’s training, contending that it contradicts the GOP’s policy position against critical race theory. Rachmuth and other critics contend that culturally responsive teaching is rooted in critical race theory.

Messages between Rachmuth and Truitt on a Sunday afternoon in late March show that even after the superintendent shared that DPI had dropped the program, Rachmuth demanded that Truitt make the news public.

“I am not sure that you grasp the interest that the NC public has in stopping the spread of CRT [critical race theory] in schools,” Rachmuth wrote. “Besides election integrity, it’s the #1 issue GOP voters

N.C. Superintendent Catherine Truitt

PHOTO FROM N.C. DPI

care about and it is an issue that unites the right and left. If you do actually “hate critical race theory,” then why are you hiding the fact that you’ve canceled this common core-style critical race theory training? You are raising more questions than you are answering.”

Rachmuth’s message was sent after Truitt explained how the cancellation came about.

“This was an internal decision. We do not make announcements for something as basic as removing an inappropriate training,” Truitt said. “I know many of your followers know it was removed because I got email to this effect.”

The messages warning Truitt about the dangers of culturally responsive teaching mention North Carolina educator Christina Spears and education consultant Jemelleh Coes. The two co-led online training in the discipline as part of the contract between DPI and ISKME.

Spears, a special assistant in the Wake County Public School System’s Office of Equity Affairs, said DPI dropped the contract soon after the Truitt administration took office.

Spears agreed to discuss the contract in her role as a consultant with ISKME. “In January, we got some pushback about culturally relevant teaching, and folks from DPI wanted to be in on the webinars and to see everything beforehand,” Spears said.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to finish that contract.”

Rachmuth urged the superintendent to ensure that Spears was fired.

“I meant what I said – we are not dropping this issue with NCDPI. We want transparency and we want those complicit in spreading CRT in schools fired, and that includes Pam Bachelor [a digital learning systems consultant with DPI], Christina Spears, and others,” Rachmuth wrote.

In a March 21 message, Rachmuth urged

Truitt to “come clean about this teacher training” and to “confirm that this dangerous program has been stopped.”

“Parents are not going away and we want answers!” Rachmuth warned.

The message got Truitt’s attention. The superintendent moved quickly to arrange an “in-person” meeting with Rachmuth.

Two days later, Marj Santoro, the superintendent’s executive assistant, contacted Rachmuth to schedule a meeting.

Santoro offered three possible meeting dates in late March.

Subsequent messages show that a scheduled meeting was canceled. Truitt and Rachmuth attempted to reschedule it, but it is unclear whether the two ultimately met.

A concerted effort to target critical race theory The messages about the unfounded fear of culturally responsive teaching appear to be a form letter signed and emailed to Truitt on March 20 by dozens of people who also shared concerns about critical race theory.

Other messages in early February, just ahead of the State Board of Education’s vote on new social studies standards, urged Truitt to vote against the standards, which writers argued are based on critical race theory.

The emails Truitt received might explain why the superintendent fought vigorously to have the phrases “systemic racism,” “systemic discrimination,” and “gender identity” removed from the standards. The phrases were replaced with “racism,” “discrimination,” and “identity” to make them more inclusive, Truitt said.

Although critical race theory was not widely discussed—at least publicly—by state education leaders in February, messages sent to Truitt and the state board show that the topic weighed heavily on the minds of those opposed to the new state social studies standards.

Before the State Board of Education met in February to vote on the social studies standards, a critic of critical race theory named Kyle Wyckoff sent a typical comment: “I am a concerned citizen who is very disturbed about the thought that you are considering passing education legislation promoting critical race theory in our North Carolina public schools. Critical race theory divides students and makes them victims. We need leaders who will stand up against these theories that have longlasting repercussions in the years to come that, if promoted and passed, will further divide our country instead of bringing unity

based on shared values.”

Another writer claimed to stand with Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson in opposition to the new standards. Robinson, a Republican from Greensboro and the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, voted against the new standards after declaring that there is no systemic racism in America.

The writer said any curriculum based on critical race theory is inherently racist and discriminatory.

“Curriculum must strive to truthfully explain our history, reflecting the unparalleled success of the US when compared to any other country in the world, now or in the past,” the writer said.

The board approved the standards in a contentious vote, in which conservatives opposed the standards and progressives supported them.

AUG 25 – SEPT 5

Lt. Governor joins the fray After the new social studies standards were adopted, Robinson created a task force that he dubbed “Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students” (F.A.C.T.S.). Its purpose, he said, is to give students, teachers and parents a “voice to speak out about cases of bias, inappropriate material, or indoctrination they see or experience in public schools.”

Robinson has received more than 500 messages as part of the effort—many from people attempting to provide examples of teachers indoctrinating students with cultural and political biases.

The lieutenant governor is expected to soon share his findings from the initiative, but news organizations and private citizens have already obtained and examined them after filing public records requests.

One unidentified writer complained about a teacher in Orange County who wore a Black Lives Matter shirt on her bitmoji while providing remote learning. The writer also complained that the female teacher often talked about her “wife at home.”

“I pulled my children to homeschool this year after getting nowhere with the principal and then hearing through the grapevine he talked with district and they hired a lawyer and then immediately approved that BLM [Black Lives Matter] could be worn by teachers,” the writer said.

Several other commenters, however, took Robinson to task for launching an initiative that they derided as partisan.

One wrote: “You represent ALL of North Carolina…not just the red voters.” W This story originally published online at N.C. Policy Watch

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 INDYweek.com

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FE AT U RE

Hot Zones The hottest neighborhoods in Durham, and other urban areas, are not distributed equally.

BY ELLIE HEFFERNAN backtalk@indyweek.com

Office recommended pursuing this project after analyzing health risks posed by extreme heat.

But community organizers in hotter neighborhoods say these efforts fall short, and see the heat mapping campaign as a performative effort to make privileged Durhamites feel good about fighting climate change. Local scientists have already provided detailed visualizations of variations in Durham’s surface temperatures, and new satellitederived data is provided frequently by entities like the United States Geological Survey.

Urban Heat Islands: The science behind temperature variation

V

annessa Mason Evans has lived in Bragtown her entire life. She says she loves the culturally rich, historically Black Durham neighborhood where she has known many of her neighbors since childhood. But it’s always been hot in Bragtown.

Evans’ monthly utility bill typically ranges from $200 to $300 in the summer, a common issue in Bragtown, which Evans suspects is due to the neighborhood’s lack of tree canopy. Many homes also lack proper insulation.

“Some of the landlords don’t care,” says Evans, who serves as chair of the Bragtown Community Association and is descended from enslaved people. “As long as they’re getting their rent, they’re not concerned about that person being in the house getting hot. It may be a person that’s on oxygen ... in the squaloring heat, trying to breathe. That makes it worse.”

Many Durham neighborhoods experience extreme heat like Bragtown, but high temperatures aren’t distributed equally throughout the county.

If you walked in Haven Hill this June, you likely enjoyed some cool weather, but may not have considered its causes.

About three-quarters of this neighborhood’s census tract, Census Tract 16.04, is covered by tree canopy, and barely two percent of surfaces are constructed from impervious materials like concrete, according to the Durham Neighborhood Compass. Late June night-time surface temperatures in this census tract likely range from 55 to 62 degrees.

If you visited Census Tract 11 in East Durham on the exact same day and time, most streets would feature surface temperatures between 68 and 91 degrees. That’s potentially close to 1.7 times hotter than a neighborhood less than a half-hour away.

Why do land uses differ so drastically within the same county?

Haven Hill lies in a census tract that’s over threequarters white, while the same proportion of residents in Census Tract 11 are people of color, according to the 2019 American Community Survey.

Cities as a whole are typically hotter than surrounding suburbs, says Elizabeth Doran, a professor at the University of Vermont who earned her doctoral degree at Duke University. Doran’s dissertation focused on the relationship This stark divide is directly rooted in urban planning. between urban form, urban heat islands, and urban sysCensus Tract 11’s percentage of impervious surface is over tems in the Triangle.

22 times higher than Census Tract 16.04’s, and the preUrban heat island (UHI) refers to an area where high dominantly Black census tract’s percentage of tree canopy concentrations of man-made, impervious surfaces increase is about one-fifth the size of its much whiter neighbor. surface temperatures. Man-made materials absorb heat Nighttime temperatures above 80 degrees are hot differently than natural environments, disrupting the sun’s enough to challenge the body’s ability to cool down, daily process of radiating heat to the Earth—which is then according to the 2020 Durham County Community Health radiated back to the atmosphere.

Assessment (CHA). Excessive heat, a period of at least two “They absorb more energy than the natural materials so days with temperatures above 90 degrees, is even worse. that exacerbates the amount of heat that gets stored in This means a 91-degree night-time surface temperature that local environment, and then changes the way that it’s poses serious threats. radiated back to space or the way that it cools off, basiPredominantly white neighborhoods contain surface cally,” Doran says. temperatures comparable to the highest measurements For her dissertation, Doran took a snapshot of the surin predominantly Black neighborhoods, but they feature face temperature in Durham just after 11 p.m. on June 29, a much lower concentration of the county’s 2015. (The INDY used her visualization for hottest surface temperatures at any given this story, since more recent, high-resolution time (see maps). depictions of Durham’s surface temperatures Durham’s Blackest neighborhoods will are hard to create without formal scientific bear the brunt of global warming, and not training.) The built environment likely hasn’t just because their streets are hotter. Heat changed enough since then to significantworsens mental illness, asthma, diabetes, ly alter the distribution of Durham's heat lupus, cancer, and cardiovascular disease— islands, but their impact has likely been exacafflictions that are more prevalent in preerbated by an increase in heat waves, says dominantly Black neighborhoods.

Doran.

Using data from the 2019 ACS, the INDY Surface temperature UHI data can overfound that residents in Durham’s Blackest Vannessa Mason Evans estimate temperature differences, providing PHOTO COURTESY OF THE neighborhoods are twice as likely to have an inaccurate measurement of how humans SUBJECT diabetes, compared to residents in its whitexperience heat. Doran used additional techest neighborhoods. They are also three times as likely to niques to measure the temperature of the air between roofs lack health insurance, creating a potentially fatal barrier to and the ground, where people’s bodies directly interact with receiving treatment for heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and the heat. She found that this measurement of UHI wasn’t aggravated pre-existing conditions. substantially lower than the surface temperature differencThese disparities aren’t new or unique to Durham, and es observed from space. local government officials and nonprofits have moved to UHI is also exacerbated by the absence of trees—not address the problem. Scientists and community volunteers just the presence of concrete, says Will Wilson, a biology recently participated in the 2021 Raleigh and Durham professor at Duke University.

Urban Heat Island Temperature Mapping Campaign, using A large tree draws several hundred gallons of water up sensors to collect data on ambient air temperature, humid- through its roots daily while performing photosynthesis. ity, and GPS location. The Durham County Sustainability Trees transform this water from a liquid to a gas, which INDYweek.com

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Durham County Heat Map

Durham County Black Population Land Surface Temperature

Distribution of Black residents in Durham County (%)

91.4°F

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

55.04°F Areas with the highest Black population Areas with the highest white population Bragtown

Disclaimer: This map has been repurposed by the INDY using visualizations from Dr. Elizabeth Doran, Census Reporter, and Google Maps. It may not be completely to scale.

Source: 2019 American Community Survey, “Theory and Practice in Sustainability Science: Influence of Urban Form on the Urban Heat Island and Implications for Urban Systems,” by Elizabeth M. B. Doran, The Durham Neighborhood Compass

requires heat, Wilson explains.

“It’s just like when you’re boiling water on the stove,” Wilson says. “You have to turn the heat on to get it to boil. You add that heat to evaporate the water that’s on your stove.

The same process is going on in the atmosphere in the city. That evaporating water coming out of the leaves of the tree is essentially sucking up heat from the environment and effectively cooling the environment.”

Although UHI is relatively understudied in smaller cities, it is likely no less of a problem, says Doran, and municipalities will face severe consequences if they ignore it. Heat has already been the number one weather-related cause of death in the U.S. for the past 30 years, and heat-related deaths are rising worldwide.

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their urban planning calculus for projects like the now-defunct Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit Project and the consideration of new zoning designations.

“It didn’t quite get to that level because, and this is often the case with research like this, the people in the planning office, this issue wasn’t even on their radar,” Doran says. “So, it became a matter of educating them that this was potentially an issue that they should care about.”

The legacy of redlining Between 1934 and 1968, eight Durham census tracts were deemed too risky to lend in by the United States’ Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. These tracts encompass more than a dozen neighborhoods including Hayti, East Durham, Old North Durham, and the Fayetteville Street Commercial District.

Residents from other Durham census tracts say they have also been—and still are—redlined. When the INDY visited Merrick Moore residents who expressed these concerns, we saw some large trees on private properties. But residents say this is thanks to their ancestors, many of whom strategically built the houses that stand today to increase shade access.

In Merrick Moore, many major streets lack not just trees but also sidewalks; people walk on narrow, grassy buffers as traffic zips by. Most communities’ right-of-way includes roads flanked by grassy buffers that feature trees, sidewalks, and pipes— for which governments are responsible. But with the city’s disinvestment, redlined communities were denied adequate infrastructure, including sewers, street lights, sidewalks, and the trees lining them.

A minor bureaucratic detail ensured that the legacy of these infrastructural choices

long outlived redlining’s official demise via the Fair Housing Act of 1968, says Tobin Fried, sustainability manager for Durham County and, until 2019, the city of Durham.

For decades after, the city’s procedure was to only replace trees after they died.

“If there was never a tree there, then they weren’t going to replace it, even until very recently with a very well-meaning Urban Forestry division (UFD),” Fried says. “It was not intentional. It was just these were the procedures that were in place. And so, the city then had to take a really hard look at this and say, ‘Oh my goodness, what are we doing here?’ They had to work with the neighborhoods to plant street trees in places where there historically were none.”

Black neighborhoods are also home to fewer trees because they contain more apartments and houses with smaller lot sizes, says Wilson, who wrote about Durham’s UHI in his 2011 book Constructed Climates:

A Primer on Urban Environments. Apartments also typically feature many parking spaces, increasing the concentration of impervious surfaces in a single lot. Some landlords dislike planting trees since they are more difficult and expensive to maintain than a simple lawn.

Governments and nonprofits have reached out to formerly redlined neighborhoods, offering to plant trees, and in some cases doing so. Some neighborhoods still don’t have trees because residents don’t want them.

Planting trees in Merrick Moore could dominate the grassy buffers lining the road so that residents will be forced to walk in the street. Further complications could ensue if the city eventually adds sidewalks, as many residents want. Residents also worried the city may not pay to fix damages if nonprofits plant trees whose roots grow and break pipes.

How governments responded and what we can expect These inequities have been on officials’ radars, thanks in part to researchers like Doran. Fried in particular has led the charge to address extreme heat, which research determined would impact the Triangle more than any other climate change-related extreme weather. Heat is annual, whereas big storms may come bi-annually, says Fried.

Localized flooding will occur, but Durham lacks large rivers and is too far inland to be severely impacted by sea-level rise.

Fried and other officials added for the first time a chapter on the health impacts of climate change in Durham’s 2020 CHA—including a section focused purely on extreme heat. Durham is one of a few cities in the Southeast to add such a section to its CHA, says Fried, which spurred the recommendation to engage in the citizen heat mapping campaign.

The CHA analyzed the disproportionate impact that UHI will have on Durham’s redlined census tracts, where structural inequities prevent heat avoidance. Many residents of these neighborhoods lack air conditioning or the means to run it. They are often those who are low-income, currently unhoused, or forced to bear the heat while waiting for public transit, as residents like Evans can confirm.

“I have air conditioning in my house,” Fried says. “I have a car, and I can get from my air-conditioned house into my air-conditioned car. It might be inconvenient. It might be hot if I am outside, but I can escape it. But there are a lot of people in Durham who can’t escape it for a lot of different reasons.”

In response to Durham’s unequal distri-

bution of canopy cover, Fried started, in 2013, the Trees Across Durham initiative, which is no longer fully active, but spurred the spin-off creation of Trees Durham, a nonprofit advocating for the protection and expansion of Durham’s tree canopy, specifically in historically redlined neighborhoods.

Trees Durham has worked with residents in both Bragtown and Merrick Moore.

Fried’s initiative, a joint effort among the city, Duke University, the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association, the Durham County Center of N.C. Cooperative Extension, and Durham Parks and Recreation, increased the number of trees planted annually in Durham. The program planted over 2,000 trees at public schools and also established the Water into Trees initiative, which enables Durham city residents to help the UFD purchase additional trees for city streets, parks, and green spaces via a round-up on their water bill.

The UFD has established an annual planting goal of 1,500 new trees in city rights of way through 2025. At minimum, 85 percent of these trees are slated for placement in eight neighborhoods most in need of canopy coverage. The county also allocates $5,000 yearly toward urban trees, says Fried.

Unfortunately, many UHI mitigation strategies are accessible only to richer communities and others may take a while to bear fruit—like the thinner trees commonly planted by local nonprofits, due to their low cost (often one-hundredth the price of larger trees that provide more immediate shade).

While residents wait for these trees to grow, gentrification may further concentrate them into Durham’s hottest neighborhoods. As wealth inequality rises, the most marginalized residents will struggle to access health care, keep their air conditioning running, or afford a car.

Meanwhile, the heat’s frequency will only increase. Durham County is projected to experience around two months’ worth of extreme heat days by 2030, and two-anda-half months by 2080.

It’s painful to imagine the toll that this escalating crisis will take on communities like Evans’ where inadequate infrastructure has already made the heat unbearable.

“I’ve seen people so hot, they’ll be laying down on the ground, with a towel or a jacket, covering their head, waiting for the bus to come,” Evans says. “I’ve seen people sitting on the trashcans near the bus stop, just to have somewhere to sit when they’re standing in the hot sun. I’ve seen spaces where the woods are not close to the bus stop, but people are actually standing back in the woods, waiting for the bus to come.” W INDYweek.com

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FO O D & D R I N K

Tipping Point Several prominent Triangle restaurants are shifting away from tipping. Is a fairer system on the way?

BY LENA GELLER food@indyweek.com

I

work at a restaurant with counter service. This means that, within a few minutes of a customer’s walking through the doorway, I must ask whether or not they want to leave me a tip.

Well, technically, I have to take their order and turn over the iPad, and the iPad asks them for tips. During this part of the transaction, I usually look at the floor.

At least once a day, after I flip the tip screen, some guy asks me why he should tip when he’s barely experienced any service. Sometimes he’s genuinely confused or annoyed; sometimes, this question is relayed with a wink.

If I could, I’d tell him that tipping isn’t actually in place to reward good service, it’s an entrenched cultural custom that allows employers to cut down on labor costs, and forces servers like me to justify our value to customers who may not understand the system. During the height of the pandemic, this dynamic became especially uncomfortable when I needed to ask unmasked customers to cover up, before they’d chosen whether or not to tip.

But as frustrating as these encounters are, at the end of the day, customers aren’t the root of the problem. The root, of course, is the institution.

Over the past year, the pandemic heightened public awareness of working conditions in the service industry.

As structural fragilities of the traditional model came to light, the discourse around tipping grew more critical, and some Triangle restaurant owners saw an opportunity to start chipping away at the industry’s cast-iron conventions.

Aaron Vandemark, chef-owner of Panciuto in Hillsborough, says he’s wanted to eliminate tipping for years. The pandemic gave him time to devise an alternative.

“Tipping creates this arbitrary wage with unwritten rules that are different from one restaurant and one culture to the next,” he says. “And it’s unequal pay for equal work, which is potentially a constitutional issue.”

And after COVID restrictions forced Durham’s COPA to shut down indoor dining and shift to a takeout-only model, co-owner Elizabeth Turnbull realized she could no longer rely on voluntary gratuities to fund a living wage for her employees.

“People are notoriously low tippers on takeout, and we knew without those tips we couldn’t keep our team members employed,” Turnbull says. “But we were also taking a hit on income, so to keep our kitchen staff at a living wage 16

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ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

as well, we needed to be able to use some of that for them.”

In April 2020, Turnbull abandoned traditional tipping, and in its place, implemented an automatic 20 percent gratuity, also known as a fair wage charge. Beyond ensuring a living wage, Turnbull says, she saw the charge as a way to eliminate the skewed power dynamic that tipping creates between workers and patrons, and as a way to channel more money to back-of-house employees. Unlike tips, which tend to belong exclusively to servers, automatic gratuities belong to the employer, and can therefore be distributed among both front- and back-of-house employees.

Vandemark instituted a 4 percent service charge at Panciuto shortly before the pandemic started, funneling the charge’s revenue to kitchen staff in efforts to distribute tip money more equitably among employees. Mid-COVID, he increased the charge to 18 percent and dispensed with tipping. About a month ago, Andrea Reusing, chef-owner at Lantern in Chapel Hill, followed suit, as did Gray Brooks, Cara Stacy, and Jay Owens, who co-own Pizzeria Toro in Durham.

In Orange and Durham counties, employers that pay workers a livable wage—that is, a wage that meets or exceeds the county’s established amount of income needed for an individual to meet their basic needs without government assistance—can become Living Wage Certified.

Though there has been confusion over whether or not a restaurant can get certified if they’re achieving the living wage through tips or service fees, Carl Rist, a co-founder and board member of the Durham Living Wage Project,

confirmed with the INDY that that is possible, and that this provision is what allowed COPA, Panciuto, and Lantern to become certified years ago.

But since implementing the fair wage charge, these three restaurants no longer have to rely on said sanction to remain certified, because they’re using revenue from the charge to fund a fixed living wage of at least $15, in Durham, and $15.40, in Orange County, for all hourly workers. This means that employees’ earnings no longer reflect week-to-week fluctuations in business, which can be a risky commitment for owners to make.

If they set the charge percentage too low and the hourly rate too high, they won’t be able to follow through on the wages they’ve promised, and they’ll have to shut down.

“It is a big step, and I think this is why it’s hard for restaurants to get their mind around it, because you’re committing to a wage that you’re paying,” Reusing says. “If we miscalculate, it could be very bad.”

I

n the United States, tipping is a relic of the post-Reconstruction era. The practice has been around for centuries and is generally thought to have been imported from European aristocratic conventions. By the 1930s, it had become standardized in the United States as a way for employers in the hospitality industry to avoid fully compensating workers—many of them formerly enslaved people and people of color—for their work, relying instead on voluntary gratuities

from customers.

The tip model gained traction as business owners jumped on the opportunity to cut labor costs, and when the “tip credit” was introduced in 1966—a provision under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allowing employers to pay tipped workers half the minimum wage, so long as tips made up the other half—the practice became firmly ingrained in the American restaurant model. In 1996, the FLSA was modified so that the minimum wage for tipped workers would no longer increase alongside the federal minimum wage.

While most European restaurants have shifted to a tipless model that builds labor costs into the menu or tacks a small, mandatory service charge onto the bill, in the United States, the tipping wage floor has been stuck at $2.13 for more than a decade, and it doesn’t seem to be rising anytime soon. This, for many restaurant owners, is what makes the tip credit too lucrative not to take.

Although modern tipping isn’t as overtly discriminatory as it was in the 30s, it quietly perpetuates the culture that birthed it. Mounds of research demonstrate that people with lighter skin who are able-bodied and conventionally attractive are tipped more generously. While biting my tongue around unmasked customers was unpleasant, it was something I controlled; for servers who aren’t young and white, there may be little to nothing they can do to ensure a tip, given some customers’ implicit biases.

And while pooling tips can help correct for this sort of discrimination, that practice doesn’t change the sexualized culture that encourages servers, more than 60 percent of whom are women, to objectify themselves. Tip pooling also doesn’t resolve the larger pay disparity that tipping creates between front- and back-of-house workers. Historically, the FLSA has prohibited kitchen staff from participating in tip pools.

This is a worker protection under the tip credit law; to ensure servers make enough tips to achieve the minimum wage, back-of-house isn’t allowed a piece of the pie.

But because tips can enable servers to make more than the minimum wage, the law has resulted in front-of-house workers, who are usually white, consistently earning more than kitchen staff, who are more often people of color.

A 2018 amendment to the FLSA now allows restaurants that don’t take the tip credit to include back-of-house employees in tip pools, but this practice was prohibited for so long that many owners aren’t interested in reworking their models to accommodate it. For restaurateurs hoping to pay employees more equitably, pooling tips across all hourly employees can be a good start; at the restaurant where I work, tips are split evenly among servers and kitchen staff, which levels the playing field.

But for those hoping to move away from tipping altogether, the amendment is a band-aid on a bullet hole.

Customer backlash has not made changes any easier.

While there was a movement during COVID to support restaurant workers, once lockdowns eased and restaurants were challenged in attracting workers back, public sentiment seemed to shift. When Pizzeria Toro announced, for instance, that they had implemented a Fair Wage charge, dozens of people pushed back on Facebook, writing that they would take their business elsewhere.

“We won’t be supporting you. I leave a gratuity based on the service not politics,” commenter David Brown wrote, while Mike Nowak commented, “20% living wage fee?

Pizzeria Toro

PHOTO JADE WILSON

Hahah yeah eat it yourself. You chose to be a server so earn your tip, don’t force customers to tip when sometimes the server deserves nothing.”

A

t Lantern, Andrea Reusing says it’s too soon to know if she’s landed on the right numbers, but she’s open to tweaking the model as needed. Vandemark agrees that only time will tell.

“The question that we’ll all have to figure out long term is, say you get 12 months in and a thousand dollars extra came in above wages that you distributed,” Vandemark says. “What is that thousand bucks?”

Excess revenue could potentially be saved to pad paychecks during slower months, Vandemark says, but if he’s consistently making more money than he’s paying people, he’ll increase wages.

At Pizzeria Toro, the fair wage charge works a little bit differently. Revenue from the charge is put into its own pot and distributed on a weekly basis, like a traditional tip pool. Both front- and back-of-house workers receive a cut of the charge, which varies, depending on position. Kitchen staff are paid a higher base rate but get a smaller cut of the charge, and the front-of-house receives a lower rate and a larger cut.

While Toro’s wages are being distributed more equitably, they’re still bound to fluctuate, because the owners aren’t using the charge to fund a guaranteed living wage. This could suggest that Toro hasn’t been quite as steadfast in its shift away from tipping, but Brooks says the unfixed rate leaves room to grow.

“As we continue to get busier, that 20 percent that goes entirely to staff will grow as well,” Brooks says. “If we simply raised our prices and gave everyone raises, they wouldn’t see their pay increase as our business increased.”

Jason Calixto, a part-time bartender and manager at Toro, says he and his co-workers generally approve of the new model, though it does seem a bit “murky.”

“It honestly feels as if the owners are having to pay less out of pocket, and getting to rely more on the fee that they’re charging,” Calixto says.

Calixto’s sentiment echoes a question many people seem to be asking: Why not just eliminate service charges,

increase menu prices, and pay your staff a living wage?

Brooks says this feels like a “Bizarro World argument.”

“I don’t have the greatest business acumen in the world, but I know the basics are that you have a revenue stream, and you pay your costs with that,” he says. “So this weird idea of, ‘why should customers have to pay for your wages,’ it’s like, well, customers pay for everything.”

But when I ask Brooks if he fears raising menu prices would scare people away, he says yes.

Turnbull, Reusing, and Vandemark all say the same thing: even though customers would ultimately be paying the same total cost with higher menu prices as they would with lower prices plus a tip, it’s too hard for them to stomach the price without the smoke and mirrors of the service fee.

“It’s kind of like Three-card Monte,” Reusing says. “It’s all about what you’re calling it.”

By basing its model on worker exploitation, the industry has left customers with such a warped perception of labor costs that restaurants looking to topple the system are quickly outpriced by competitors, losing too much business to stay afloat. It’s capitalism at its finest.

At least one Durham restaurant has weathered the shift to a model without service charges. In May, Monuts Donuts raised its menu prices by 18%, eliminated all service fees, and committed to paying employees a fixed living wage.

So far, it’s working.

For more expensive restaurants like COPA and Panciuto, though, where increased menu costs might be more off-putting to customers, owners see the fair wage charge as the rational first step toward reshaping industry standards.

“We have not been taught by our culture to understand the price breakdown and think about the labor,” Turnbull says. “If you see a $20 sandwich on the menu, you’re going to be like, what is going on. But when you see it as a living wage fee, it puts it in perspective, and I have found that our guests are tremendously generous about it.”

As Aaron Vandermark sees it, there is no turning back.

“The origins are disgusting, and the modernization of tipping today still has all these problems,” Vandemark says.

“For me it was either you’re going to be a part of this system, or you’re gonna blow it up.” W INDYweek.com

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SC R E E N

NINE DAYS | HHH1/2

Opens Friday, Aug. 6

The Great Before Nine Days is an ambitious existential head trip about life on earth

BY GLENN MCDONALD arts@indyweek.com

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s screenplay premises go, the one we’re presented with in Nine Days is pretty sweet: Never mind the afterlife, what about the beforelife? What if there were a kind of metaphysical vetting process for earning the right to live a life on Earth? What would be the criteria in a situation like that? Who would the applicants be? Who’s in charge of it all?

In this existential drama-slash-head-trip from first-time director Edson Oda, the answers are complicated. Winston Duke (Black Panther, Us) plays the lead character, a numbed-out bureaucratic entity by the name of Will. Good name, that, for a movie like this. Will is not currently a person, but he used to be. Now he’s a selector, tasked with interviewing five potential souls for a new vacancy on Earth.

Will lives in an odd limbo, a ranch house on an endless desert where potential souls wander about. The house is filled with 1980s-era analog equipment, including a bank of old television monitors through which Will monitors his current earthly charges. These are the humans whom Will has previously sent to Earth, and when one of them takes her own life, it sends Will into an existential crisis of his own.

Enter the applicants. Each stumbles in from the cosmic desert in a sort of daze, vaguely aware that they’ve been given a grand opportunity.

The preborn hopefuls register as types more than characters: The damaged victim, the cynical pragmatist, the goodtime Charlie. Will interviews each of them, posing frightening hypothetical situations as they watch the EarthCam feed

A still from Nine Days

PHOTO COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES CLASSIC

in the living room.

The most promising applicant, by far, is the free-spirited Emma (Zazie Beetz), who shows up late for her first appointment and refuses to answer the scary hypotheticals. Instead, she writes out long lists of the stuff she likes, from what she’s seen, about life on Earth.

The film essentially chronicles the next nine days as the candidates learn about life. Will is the final arbiter of their fate, but he makes it clear that he is not God. (“More like a cog in the wheel,” he says.)

The film makes space for lots of philosophical conjecture, and director Oda assembles some lovely visual set pieces.

The relationship between Will and Emma is the heart of the movie. Beetz brings her usual effortless charisma, layered atop a gentle, childlike curiosity.

She’s inherently kind, destined to be one of those strange and admirable people we come across in life who naturally think of others before themselves.

Emma’s relationship with Will is intriguing—a liberated pre-person schooling a damaged post-person on the secret to

happy personhood.

Oh, it’s a trip, man. Nine Days is a bold piece of filmmaking, and Oda is clearly a new talent to watch, but the film never really clicks as it should.

The pacing is uneven, and too many sequences play like the most interesting student short you’ve ever seen. The final scene doesn’t quite land, despite—or perhaps because of—some famous Walt Whitman poetry.

Nevertheless, adventurous film lovers will want to put this one in the queue, just to watch how Oda successfully breaks the traditional rules of narrative feature filmmaking. There are technically no people in this story, which opens up all kinds of interesting avenues for the script and the performers.

I also liked the rather grim implications of that infinite desert. It suggests that, except for Earth, existence on the metaphysical plane is the same as it is in the observable cosmos—utterly empty and devoid of light or warmth.

It’s a good reminder: we’re lucky just to be here. W

STAGE

SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD

North Carolina Theatre | Raleigh Memorial Auditorium | Closed Aug. 1 | nctheatre.com

Christine Sherrill in Songs For a New World PHOTO BY YEVGENY SHLAPKO

New Songs In a North Carolina Theatre concert production, each song is a mini-play made for COVID-era downsizing

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

C

aution clearly was advisable as North Carolina Theatre tried to finalize plans for its new season early in 2021. It takes nothing for a professionallevel production of a big Broadway musical—the Raleigh company’s longtime raison d’etre—to reach six figures and just keep climbing.

Plus, NCT had already taken severe financial hitpoints when the pandemic forced it to go dark two weeks before the scheduled opening of their production of Memphis in March, 2020, after paying out for all pre-production costs without a chance to recoup from ticket sales. A second loss that catastrophic couldn’t be in the cards.

So the company opted to start their new season small, as artistic director Eric Woodall divulged in Saturday night’s curtain speech, with a trial balloon production of Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World, a chamber musical that could be put entirely online with little headache if COVID rates started heading north again (and they have, which is an ill omen for upcoming scheduled live shows here).

Brown’s work checks all the boxes for pandemic-inspired theatrical downsizing.

Its cast could fill out a quartet for bridge or doubles tennis, with a band similar in size. Without a conventional plot or locale, the set design’s been jettisoned for a no-frills concert stage. Costuming?

Keep Brown’s characters present-day and urban. Then keep your fingers crossed that everyone stays healthy.

Songs for a New World is far from theatrically threadbare, however. Lighting designer Samuel Rushen’s flashy rockshow choices brings the oohs and ahhs before deferring to Joshua Reaves’ atmospheric video backdrops that fill the screen with the communities invoked in Brown’s production—most memorably, an historic cavalcade of immigrants during the evening’s second number, “On the Deck of A Spanish Sailing Ship, 1492”— before returning to a metaphorical ocean panorama at morning, noon, and night.

Still, Songs’ discursive, all but centerless structure stretches the definition of musical theater nearly to breaking point.

True, in most numbers in this 16-song cycle, vivid characters articulate a chal-

lenge or a change. Two are historic; in the number cited above, a warm Kyle Taylor Parker portrays a captain whose faith has been sorely tried, while Christine Sherrill’s Betsy Ross-inspired character acidly criticizes the human cost of wars in “The Flagmaker, 1775.”

Elsewhere, contemporary souls confront differing interpersonal crises. In “I’m Not Afraid,” Krystina Alabado’s confident narrator discloses the high price of her fearlessness—an impersonal, interpersonal defense system that will never let anyone in. Parker’s affecting take (with Reaves’ riveting, original film work in the background) gives true hunger to a young Black man, driven to basketball success in “The Steam Train.” And Adam Jacobs and Alabado’s poignant duet in “The World Was Dancing” bears witness to the outcome when love does not conquer fear.

These are leavened by Alabado’s optimism in “Christmas Lullaby,” in which a pregnant woman muses on the potential impact her child could have upon the world. Sherrill provides comic relief in “Surbaya-Santa,” a campy, Marlene Dietrich-styled rave-up that gives “The Night Before Christmas” the Kurt Weill treatment.

Less successful, however, were “She Cries,” which seemed little more than a men’s movement diatribe, and a too-chummy, near-Vegas take on “The River Won’t Flow,” which ignored the song’s subtext of systemic discrimination.

Both came before director Woodall’s vision of “Flying Home,” whose vaguebook lyrics were refashioned into what appeared to be a jingoist armed services recruitment video, abetted by Reaves’s single-sided publicity-grade videography of smiling service people never inconvenienced by wounds, bad weather, or the moral ambiguities of modern warfare.

The artless emotional manipulation in that number made it hard to trust the soulful, and potentially healing closing anthem, “Hear My Song.” These days, any number of people do need a song to “help (them) believe in tomorrow.” For those words to land, however, we have to believe in the ones that came before. Unfortunately, that belief is not fully achieved from an uneven script and production. W INDYweek.com

August 4, 2021

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M U SIC

M8ALLA: DON’T SAVE ME FOR LATER

[Self-released; Aug. 4 on Bandcamp | Aug. 18 across all major streaming platforms]

Follow the Sun Big Aries energy carried M8alla to Los Angeles and the brash new sound of Don’t Save Me for Later

BY BRIAN HOWE

music@indyweek.com

T

he hip-hop strut and far-out sounds of Don’t Save Me for Later might startle fans who think of M8alla strictly as a pop R&B artist, but her collaboration with Jerm Scorsese was written in the stars.

“I’ve never met someone—no, I’ve never met a man who’s as into astrology as I am,” the singer and songwriter Mballa Mendouga says, laughing, on a Zoom call from her new apartment in Los Angeles. “He was going into my charts in the first session, and I was like, I know what you’re saying; I’m just amazed that you know what you’re saying.”

Jerm Scorsese, a Raleigh-based producer in the big-eared tradition of The Neptunes and Timbaland, furnished beats for the Durham rapper Kelly Kale’s breakout album, Give ‘Em Hell, last summer. Mendouga, who knew Jerm socially, was especially stunned by “Hot (If You Nasty),” which begins with a stereo-panned swirl of synths and a sinister laugh.

“Jerm does this thing I love where you hear the first sound and it’s like, whoa, where is this going? What am I listening to, and why do I kind of like it?” says Mendouga, who moved to Chapel Hill in 2009 after being born in Paris and growing up in Washington, D.C., the child of Cameroonian diplomats. “People see or hear me and think, she’s R&B, she’s African. But he gets a side of me that I don’t know a lot of people have brought out.”

That summer, Mendouga and Kale started working on a song together, and Jerm sent Kale a beat that he said Mendouga could have. When she received it, she was with Shermar Davis—the Triad-area singer-songwriter that had a single, “So Far Gone,” on the chic Parisian electronic label Maison Kitsuné last year—who was helping her work on the follow-up, produced by Alec Lomami, of her 2017 debut album, Never Leave Quietly.

“Alec is a very calm guy who lets you do you; he’s incredibly patient,” Mendouga says. “He had given me all the beats to write on, but I just didn’t believe in myself anymore.”

Davis became Mendouga’s musical lifeline when she was struggling with writer’s block and self-doubt, afflictions that parted long enough to reveal the ray of sunshine that was last summer’s “Mek Mi Anxious.” But that was a collaboration with Durham’s Treee City, separate from the album, and she’d written the song years before.

“I owe Shermar the world, because I was so discouraged after ‘Mek Mi Anxious,’ from both the state of the world and the fact that we couldn’t go out and support one of my 20

August 4, 2021

INDYweek.com

M8alla

PHOTO BY CHRIS CHARLES

best songs,” Mendouga says. Davis had often reached out to ask if she needed help with her music, and finally, she said yes. They started getting together in her home studio every couple of weeks, and with his encouragement, the music started to flow. When she got that first beat from Jerm, Davis urged her to get on it right away. She added a verse she had written but never used and sent it back.

When she got together with Jerm, she wrote the song we hear on the spot.

“I wrote a song in 45 minutes, and it felt really good,” Mendouga says. That song is “Gimme Racks,” a raunchy future-trap workout that opens with a weird, mooing bassline. Mendouga was a fan of the Durham rapper Ducee’ DropTop’s song “Zaza,” so she got him on the track and shaped her flow to his.

“He has this nice rasp, a low, whispery tone to his voice,” she says. “So I was like, yeah, I think I’m just going to float on this; I’m not going to do the most.”

The three-song EP, a distinct project from the album it helped to revitalize, was mastered with the clarity its baroque style demands by the Greensboro-based engineer Laphelle Taylor. On the ego check “What Happened?” another woozy bass mingles with Asian strings, while lead single and video “Lady with a Choppa” is a laid back but tightly wound duet with Kale.

In a way, it’s the flipside of “Mek Mi Anxious”: Instead of being about “anxiety over how a relationship was playing out, it’s like, OK, this person is playing,” Mendouga says.

That no-bullshit energy was cultivated by Jerm; Mendouga vividly remembers his first reaction to the tracks she’d been working on for the album: “He was like, ‘I can see that you’re in your Cancer moon,’ because I was talking about love. ‘That’s cool, but I want to balance you out. I want you

to come into your sun sign, your Aries vibe.’ I was like, OK, OK, I remember her. I also very much believe in the power of the tongue. I was singing a lot of heartbreak songs, and that’s not who I want to be. I wanted something boastful where I could assert myself but also speak prosperity into my future.”

The partial move to LA—Mendouga still rents an apartment in Durham—was a part of that vision. She’d been traveling there periodically to work on music and make connections, finding a network of fellow North Carolina expats. In June, the move unfolded as if ordained by fate.

“All the places I found on websites were too expensive,” she says. “But I walked into a nice building in my budget in Koreatown, run by a woman from the South, so I’m getting Southern hospitality in a family-owned apartment complex in LA.” Jerm moved to the city around the same time.

With this fresh start on fertile ground, the second M8alla album may be with us sooner than later.

But as for whether it portends a bright future as a recording artist or as a songwriter, a collaborator, and who knows what else—well, Mendouga has gained enough momentum as an artist to know the cost, and the self-trust to let the stars say if it’s worth it.

“I cater my time to authentic individual relationships, so the demand for content creation and access to me as a person, if I’m being honest, can be very taxing,” she says, spoken like a true Cancer. “But now I’m writing songs not just for me, but submitting them to bigger artists here, because ultimately, what I love is the writing and the studio. I want this project to do whatever it’s supposed to do: If that means catapulting me into the songwriter space, I want that, because I love that. If that means catapulting me into the artist space, I’ll take that, because I am that.” W

M U SIC

Synth City Recent local albums by Permanent and 6WX_O seek out the weird, meditative corners of electronic music

BY WILL ATKINSON AND HARRIS WHELESS music@indyweek.com

PERMANENT: SOCIAL DISEASE | HHH1/2

6WX_O: 6WX_O | HHHH

[Modern Tapes; June 25]

[Self-released; August 6]

In the 1980s, a generation of underground artists married the DIY ethos of punk with the then-novel tools of electronic dance music, releasing records that brought to life a darker, harsher vision of synth-pop, almost playful in its deadpan austerity.

Some of these groups, like Germany’s D.A.F., went on to have surprisingly successful careers on major labels; most, though, languished in obscurity, their releases surviving the decades through vinyl and cassette enthusiasts and, eventually, the endless archive of the internet.

It’s fitting that, recording under the name Permanent, Durham’s Mimi Luse would make a home here: for the last couple of years, Luse has made a habit of seeking out the weirder corners of pop music, from the yé-yé-inspired post-punk of 2019’s Cochonne EP to the sound collages of last year’s Manhole project.

Permanent’s Social Disease, released June 25 by Brooklyn-based cassette label Modern Tapes, is Luse’s latest stylistic turn.

Almost entirely self-produced on vintage samplers and synthesizers—save for a collaboration with Durham’s Yung Target on “Exterminer le Mystère”—Social Disease is a celebration of these early experiments in industrial and techno. The record is open about its influences (Luse cites D.A.F., the Australian group Spk, and Throbbing Gristle spin-off Chris & Cosey as some of her main touchpoints), but alternately deconstructs and builds upon the basic formula of mechanized bass lines and distorted drum machines.

Opener “Psychotic Crush,” for instance, sounds like an engine haltingly sputtering to life, teasing a four-on-the-floor pulse that never arrives.

From there, the album moves deftly between body and atmosphere; even the most dancefloor-ready highlights, like “Big White Hearse” and “Digital Bride,” are coated with ambient dissonance around the edges, recalling the found-sound techniques of Luse’s work as Manhole.

Whether this direction is as enduring as the project’s name suggests—or, if Luse’s previous projects are any indication, Permanent is just a temporary detour—remains to be seen. But for now, it’s an invigorating study into a pivotal moment in the underground.

—Will Atkinson

This self-titled cassette is Will Brooks’ second project as 6wx_o, a moniker he adopted just before moving home to his native NC, after jaunts up and across both coasts.

Brooks initially made a mark in the LA rave scene, releasing leftfield house as Eli Cash before switching gears with two digital compilations, VOL. I and VOL. II, which served as his 6wx_o debut.

On this new release, he makes a turn away from beat-oriented music towards immersive, synth-heavy ambient pieces.

Following the lead of Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, Brooks merges artistic process with natural creation, constructing a symbiotic audio ecosystem between his natural surroundings (via field recordings) and the listener’s headspace.

This is achieved, on tracks like “Waving,” by the distant rustle of animals, running water, and slow-moving ambient washes, as warm synth leads and bass drift into the foreground. As on Duke Ellington’s Queen’s Suite—where instruments court comparison with natural elements—sounds can be imagined as natural song: skittering bass for the croak of a bullfrog, or ambient padding as a soft blanket of crickets.

On other tracks, like “Immunity Loop” and “Driftwood,” electronica fills the landscape with descending synth chords, à la Terry Riley’s dervishes, and bright marimba-toned pulses; later, reverberating synth and ambient swirls.

As in binaural recording—sound recorded with two microphones, in order to map a three-dimensional aural experience—new-age music often renders the sonic experience of a space in your head. It is not simply a physical space, but rather a state of meditation, hyper-consciousness of one’s surroundings, and mediation of inner noise in pursuit of relaxation or deep thought.

6wx_o’s last track, “Night Sweats,” reaches a kind of epiphany in sound. Stretches of dense, distorted synth leads, almost approaching white noise, gradually fade into the sound of twittering birds and heavy footsteps which seem to come towards you up a mossy garden path.

—Harris Wheless W INDYweek.com

August 4, 2021

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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.

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