To change the future of work for the better, let’s prioritize people-first, not tech-first, businesses.
By Sherrell Dorsey

In my hometown of Seattle, at the age of 14, I stepped onto the Microsoft campus for my first internship feeling like a big shot. My experience within this epicenter of tech innovation was a significant step in my career journey, but it was not the launching pad for my future in the workforce.

Before I built my chops on Bill Gates’ turf, I’d learned the world of work through Monica McAffee. “Auntie Monica,” as we called her, had been my mom’s nail technician since I was five years old. By the time I’d become a teenager, I’d mastered the art of styling my own hair in between visits to the salon. One day, observing my technical talent for tresses, Auntie Monica invited me onto her team to assist her with styling clients in the shop a few hours a week.

The shop was a masterclass in business and developing a supportive workplace culture. Auntie Monica was precise. She’d run her business for over 25 years, with clients who grew up with her. She served church folk, regular people, Black women of all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, and styles. Some were grandmothers. Moms. Wives. Sisters. Cousins. All were like family to her.

Auntie Monica saw them grow up. She nurtured them, and often fed them when Uncle Kev, her husband and business partner, would fry chicken after a long week and serve up guests when appointments would seep into the late evening.

Auntie Monica represented fullness in entrepreneurship. She ran a business that enabled her own personal wealth journey, which consisted of a hefty real estate portfolio and a well-traveled life—on her terms. For me, she set a standard for hard work, relationship development, company culture, customer service and financial intelligence. This valuable incubation, which was skipped over by leaders who downplayed the genius on our side of town, is at the core of my audacious dream for the future of work.

Imagine for a second if startups were understood to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room, kitchen table, or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be. Consider what would happen if we didn’t only focus our attention and investment in what is high growth and high tech, but also paid attention to the microcosms of communities that are people-first versus tech-first: the daycares, coffee shops, bakeries, plumbing services, and more. What would our cities look like in that case?

I’ll tell you.

We would see widespread development. Inner cities and lower-income or disadvantaged communities, for the first time in history, would be deemed hubs for innovation instead of urban problems. The creators and trailblazers who live in these underserved hotspots would no longer be neglected.

Imagine for a second if startups were seen to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be.

Black women entrepreneurs who, like Auntie Monica, are skilled in effectively incubating young Black entrepreneurs would be recognized as the training institutions that they are for the future of work. Thus, the nature of the service and vocational industries become centers of empowerment, job training, economic mobility and community stability during a time where the sector at large is experiencing high turnover.

This would hold especially true in the service industry, where Black women are overrepresented. In 2021, 25% of Black women workers worked in service occupations, compared with just 18% of white women workers and 12% of white men. As a result, if nothing else, we must direct our focus in that direction.

I imagine a city concerned with inclusive innovation and job growth as one that undoubtedly intends to provide Black women-owned service businesses with the utmost support they deserve. At the surface, this support means funding them to become accelerators to small business growth and providing resources for them to offer paid internship programs for locals.

A 2021 census report found that businesses owned and operated by people of color tend to employ people within their own communities. And yet, these aren’t the business owners often considered to be launching pads for educating and training the future of the workforce. Reshaping a city to be conscious of this would yield a significant impact on the local service industry.

When Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital.

Now, the urge to argue that service occupations are a source of automation risk, particularly for the African-American workforce, is understandable. But I would counter that notion by presenting this as an opportunity to invest in training. Progressive cities must consider taking steps toward up-skilling and retraining Black-owned service-sector businesses for positions that can’t yet be claimed by automation.

According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute analysis, Black service-industry workers have access to fewer economic resources to address their potential displacement on their own, so it will take collaboration across the private, public and social sectors to promote retraining opportunities for African Americans. I’d like to see us do it, changing our approach and making an effort to build forward-thinking communities, even in the inner cities. By dismissing opportunities like this all around us, we have consistently squandered possibilities to be revolutionary in our communities.

Take a snapshot of any city in the United States today, and please, zoom in. You’ll notice that much more can be done to drastically improve the livability for Black women and to prioritize them in the work landscape of the future. From the west coast to the east, I’ve spent years living and working across the country, and the root of the disappointment is the same: a lack of support and accessibility.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, I worked alongside Black women who fought tooth and nail to no avail for their voices to be heard, the value of their work understood, and adequate resources put in their reach.

Illustrated by Steffi Walthall for Bloomberg Magazine

It’s obvious that when Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital. So why not reshape a city designed to work for them rather than against them in every way possible? For the workforce that extends beyond the workplace, let us also rethink how we structure coworking spaces.

My best friend and business partner of over 10 years, Enovia Bedford, enrolled her son in a school with a coworking space on campus. She is able to run her remote business in close proximity to her son during work and school hours. What a lovely sight! He is taken care of, while she handles what she needs to in order to provide for their family.

Consider reshaping a city with more setups like this. Rather than jumping through hurdles of discrimination and facing the psychological warfare of male-centered corporate systems, Black mothers who want to focus on growing businesses and creating their own income can do so without jeopardizing their availability for their children.

The worth of Black women’s contributions to building communities is not exclusively measured in terms of their output. With education and careers being the focus for many policymakers, it can be easy to forget about the minds and bodies behind those institutions. Wellness amenities, as of now, are a luxury for many, mainly located in places where white folks raise their families.

I would like to reimagine such environments and centers as a requirement for health and productivity in spaces where Black women live. Dare to provide neighborhoods populated by Black families with top-tier therapeutic services, a comprehensive spectrum of maternal care, nutrition and exercise, and fill every corner with green space. Through the collaborative effort of public and private partnerships, we can create safe, culturally rich environments that prioritize services for physical and mental health.

This future I speak of may take time and directed investments to realize, but it is not out of reach if we can agree on where the movement must begin—at the top. The lack of representation at higher levels of business and government pervades our cities, resulting in the disproportionate work landscape we see locally.

Through it all, the Black woman has been an underrated pioneer, an overlooked incubator, an interrupted power, and—far too often—a missed opportunity for investment. It is past time to reevaluate our priorities and reimagine the destinies of our cities to say no more.

This excerpt was originally published by Bloomberg Magazine with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us. by Sherrell Dorsey. Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. All rights reserved. Dorsey is also the founder and chief executive officer of The Plug-a news platform covering the Black innovation economy and available on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Editors: Brentin Mock, Jennifer Sondag
With assistance from Kelsey Butler and Jordyn Holman

“This is what was bequeathed to us”
By Gregory Orr and Taian Lu

I’m Making Real Change in My City
By Allen Alderman*

*Note to Readers: If you ever wanted to REALLY make a change in your town, instead of just starting a fight, consider this your manifesto. It was submitted by a Strong Towns member who represents their community in local government. The author, who wanted to write freely, requested we publish this column under a pseudonym.

I’m making real change in my city, with more exciting things to come. Do you want your city to be a resilient place built for people? Here’s what is working for me:

1. Get involved in local politics.

Your local government is run by hard-working nerds who show up to meetings. You can be one of them. But if that’s definitely not for you, you should at least be emailing your representatives every few months. You would be amazed at how much weight is placed on correspondence from constituents who speak up. You can do what I did and run for your City Council. But you don’t have to. Find out when your Planning and Zoning, Adjustment Board, and City Council meets. Email your representatives your perspective about specific items on the agenda. Volunteer to be part of a citizen review process. Volunteer to be on your town’s tree commission or whatever so that you start making connections and have a longer resume when there’s an opening on a Planning Board or neighborhood steering committee to apply for. Changing the place you live is incredibly rewarding. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with a hobby. People in your town are going to accumulate power and then shape the way it looks in 25 years. Why not you? And your chances will be better if you…

2. Get informed.

Read books about development and the looming fiscal and infrastructure disaster car-oriented cities are headed toward. Learn what your city spends taxpayer money on (“What does it say about our values that we spend $4.7 million on roads and only $27,000 on sidewalks?”). Learn the extent to which quick-moving traffic and ubiquitous free parking make everything worse for people. The more you learn, the more equipped you’ll be to…

3. Learn to make your case.

If your goal is to get angrier and angrier alongside people who think exactly like you without ever improving things, then you can skip this part and stick to posting memes on social media. But for most of us, it is important to learn to persuade conventional thinkers. A radical is easily dismissed. It’s harder to dismiss someone who can appeal to perspectives everyone shares. When I try to persuade my progressive friends, I talk about pedestrian access for the people who can’t drive and the disproportionate burdens parking minimums place on the poor. Oh, and climate change. When I talk to my Trump-loving family, I say I’m trying to bring back the fiscally responsible, traditional building patterns that our forefathers understood. I’m bringing back the front porch and kids playing outside and knowing your neighbors and supporting local businesses. “Of course if someone wants a big house and a big acreage and to drive and park everywhere, that’s their right. I just don’t think they should expect other people to subsidize it, which is how things work out now.”

Remember that people don’t usually change their minds if you engage them in an argument. If your interlocutor says something stupid, ask them why they think that’s true. If they say, “why should we build bike lanes when hardly anybody bikes,” then you say, “That’s a good question, but in my opinion that’s like asking why we should build bridges when hardly anybody swims across the river?” The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at bringing people along, which means you’re starting to…

4. Build a coalition.

Asking most people you know to change their minds about auto-oriented infrastructure is like asking a fish to change its mind about water. So you have to meet them where they are. But if you can convince one person every three months that things need to change in your city, and then over the next three months you each convince a person and so on, then in 3 years you will have a coalition 2000+ strong. Unless your city is enormous, that is far more than you need to effect real change. Especially if the people you influence are involved in local politics (see Step 1). And while you’re building your coalition, you need to…

5. Patiently persist.

Stupid developments with too much off-street parking will be built and you won’t be able to stop them. Ask questions. Suggest alternatives. But don’t be the angry person everyone ignores. Be patient. Persist. Local government moves slowly. Even if the city staff agrees with you, that doesn’t mean they assign the same priority to things you do. So learn to send an email every six weeks: “Hey, where are we at on looking at parking minimums?” It’s satisfying to finally get something to completion, but it’s not like a race. It’s like professional kitten herding. And even when you get things done, it probably won’t be all you want, so you have to learn to…

6. Be content with incremental progress.

I’m on a city council with six other people and three of them are starting to come along. We just hired a Strong Towns-friendly city manager. Our engineer cares about pedestrian access and is open to learning. And in spite of all that, I still know that things won’t be completely different next year. I wish I could snap my fingers and pedestrianize our main street. I wish I could fund a pilot project running a frequent bus back and forth on a fixed route through our transit-free midsize town. I wish I could eliminate parking minimums everywhere tomorrow. But the hurdles to those achievements are high and if I attempted to do all of that at once there’s a decent chance someone who ran against me in the next election would win. What I can do (and have done) is help get our streets blocked off for evenings and weekends in the summer. Two years ago, we had a few restaurants do outdoor dining on city property where a parking spot used to be. It was highly contentious at the time, but now we have a lot more and they’re widely embraced! Local change happens incrementally and experimentally. And the obstacles and barriers will tempt you to cynicism and despair, but change does happen steadily. You can accomplish almost nothing in a year. But you’ll be amazed at how different things can be in five years.

It’s worth it. You have no idea how gratifying it feels for me to walk with my children along a sidewalk in our town that is there because I helped make it happen, protected from traffic by a boulevard that used to have an unnecessary lane of travel, on the way to an outdoor patio at our favorite restaurant that would not exist if I hadn’t gotten involved. And good design is contagious. I get that it’s not possible for everyone, but if you’ve ever thought about getting more involved in local politics, I strongly encourage you to do it. Somebody else is thinking about the same, and they’re probably wrong about how to build the urban environment. So why not you?

This article was originally published by StrongTowns.

Each of our pandemic experiences are unique. Camilo is a 16 year old who lives in New York City with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. May his account of personal reconciliation and resilience be an inspiration.

Camilo R. (Illustration by João Fazenda for the New Yorker)

As Told To: An Unhoused High Schooler’s New Nest
By Zach Helfand

A year ago, we talked with a fifteen-year-old named Camilo, who lived with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. The family shared one unreliable laptop and one cell phone. When they spent a night at the home of friends, to use their Wi-Fi, the shelter kicked them out. Last week, Camilo brought us up to date.

We still don’t have Wi-Fi, but I have a school iPad that has service. Last spring, we moved to a shelter on the Lower East Side. I didn’t like it because I had to share a room, and I need my own space. But I liked the vibe. It was a good neighborhood, next to East River Park. I had a place to jog. I had a place to feed the birds.

In July, I hadn’t seen anybody in so long, so I took the Staten Island Ferry with one of my old friends from the Bronx. In Battery Park, a squirrel kept following me. I could tell it was hungry. It was, like, reaching toward me. Then I remembered: I had peanuts in my bag! Next thing you know, a ton of pigeons come, a ton of squirrels. I even fed the squirrel by hand. They were really friendly animals. I don’t know if it was because of my aura—I had a crystal on my neck. That was the happiest I’d been in a while.

After that, I would go to East River Park almost every day. There was nothing else to do, because of quarantine. I didn’t have any friends because I’d moved to a new neighborhood—nobody’s going to get near you with this virus. But the birds would see me from afar, and they’d come flying. There would be ten birds on my lap, on my shoulder, on my head, too. I was like a male Snow White! I really wish I had a friend to record it—I’m pretty sure that would’ve gone viral.

One bird was white with two bracelets on its feet, an escaped racing pigeon. I’d been feeding him for months, but I didn’t know that they’re not supposed to be in the streets, that they could get killed by a hawk, that they don’t have the instincts. The white pigeon was always alone. He wouldn’t fly with the other birds. I brought him to the shelter. Another day, I went to Union Square. I saw a bird with a broken leg. He was trying to get the food that I was throwing, but he couldn’t. He was just hopping around on one foot. I caught him, too. His name’s Rocky. The white one is Zen.

Zen never really liked me. Rocky is different, because I rescued him. I bought a first-aid kit, looked up a bunch of YouTube videos, and made a cast until the foot was healed. I got some vitamins, pills, and pain-relief cream. He loves me. When I call his name and snap my fingers, he’ll fly to my hand. He’ll make a happy noise when he sees me. When I pet him, he’ll close his eyes and purr.

We’ve been in shelters since 2019. We’ve been on the nycha waiting list for, like, ten years. Until I bought a cage, the birds lived in a crib. I taped a blanket around the bars. I had a ritual to hide them from the maintenance men. It wasn’t difficult until my mom snitched. I had to talk with the social worker, who made me leave them at my grandma’s house. It was hard to let them go.

Maybe this quarantine changed me for the better. I’m starting my first business right now, selling crystals. It’s called Faith in Stones. I became a vegan, too. My mom doesn’t really support it, so I buy my own stuff. Right now, I’ve got celery, blueberries, strawberries, bananas, kale, spinach, broccoli, and asparagus.

I got jumped last year, so they transferred me to a new school. They put me in twelfth grade—I skipped eleventh. I thought it was an accident, but the counsellors said I’ve got enough credits. I’m gonna be sixteen in college! As soon as I could, I went in person to school. I stopped after a few days. It was whack. I wanted to go meet new people, but there were only three others in the room. All we’d do is sit down and do Zoom. What’s the point?

In December, they told us that they’d found an apartment for us. They gave us the address and everything. I missed school so we could pack. Then they told us it’s not ready.

We finally moved two weeks ago. The place is small, there’s no furniture—I’m used to sleeping on the floor anyway—and bringing back the pigeons was a lot of work. But I felt free. I had my own room. And I had my own key! Now if I ever get some friends I can bring them here. I talk to this spiritual girl, she’s into crystals and all that. I still have the pigeons only because I want to show her. After that, I’m gonna find a new home for Zen, and I’m gonna set Rocky free. ♦

This interview was originally published for the New Yorker magazine.

‘I feel what women feel’
By Southern Exposure

Donna Bazemore, a former poultry slaughterhouse worker and an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives in North Carolina, talks on the phone in the offices of the CWEA. (Photo from the Southern Exposure archives)

 In meetings, Donna Bazemore is usually silent — until someone asks her to explain what life is like for a worker in a poultry processing plant. Softly, steadily, and with growing intensity, she tells why people take the jobs, what happens to them inside, and what they can do to get out.

Bazemore should know. She is the first person ever to win a workers’ compensation claim against Perdue for carpal tunnel syndrome, the crippling hand disease. She got a little over $1200 — not much for a single mother of three children. But in the process, she learned a lot about herself, about fear and freedom, stress and self-esteem, and “serving the cause of low-income women.”

Donna Bazemore is now an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, based in Ahoskie, North Carolina, not far from her home where this interview was conducted.

* * *

My mother was real strong, and she projected all that on us. She didn’t have a lot, and her self-esteem sometimes was really lousy. And it still is. She believes you have to work hard to survive; she expects it to be bad. She will take whatever the system dishes out and say, “Well, it was meant to be this way.”

I think I was the black sheep of the family. I was the one that got into mischief. I was loud. And I always got out of the hard work. My grandparents farmed, and tobacco used to break my skin out.

My uncles and grandparents had big farms in Bertie County, lots of land, tobacco, peanuts, corn. Later on, they got into soybeans. My grandfather died, and my uncle took over the farm. But like many Black farmers there, they had to stop because it was costing them more than they were actually bringing in.

My uncle is now working at a poultry plant. The farm went under, and now he’s on the saw, cutting chicken breasts. He was the first one I ever heard use the phrase “like a closed-in field” to describe the plant. I call it “a closed-in slave camp.”

Once you walk in Perdue, once you go through the door, everything changes. Your whole attitude. When you come out, you’re like two separate people. It has to do with the stress and pressure they put you under. The treatment. People like my mother have been working in the plant for 15, 20 years. And they bring in kids fresh out of college or high school, white kids, and they make these young white men the foremen who tell her what to do. And here she’s been in that plant, and knows everything a chicken ever had to offer you.

I didn’t see making a career out of Perdue. When I was in high school, I said, “As soon as I get out, I’m going into the Army.” And I’m going to do this, this, and this. I had all these dreams. Then I had this baby when I’m 17.

Hard balls was coming at me, one obstacle after another — things I brought upon myself by not being obedient. You feel trapped into doing what you think is best. So since I had this baby, I thought I should marry her father. And that was like jumping out of the pot into the fire.

I left my mom’s house and went to my husband’s house, and I had not yet found my identity. And I also had this total attitude that I didn’t grow up with my father, so I’m going to make damn sure that my daughter grows up in a house with her father so she can have all the things that I never, never had.

So I stayed in an abusive relationship for a lot of years, a lot of years. Mental and physical and verbal. He would come home and take out his anger on me. I always felt it was something I had done, that I was doing.

Finally, I asked myself, “Did God really put me here to be miserable?” When I was going through all this, I had no self esteem, no sense of being motivated to do anything. I was like his possession. So I sat down one day and wrote out on a paper, “How Do I Build My Self Esteem?” It was like a memo to myself. I got the idea from watching a motivator on TV.

You have to constantly tell yourself, “You are somebody.” Look in the mirror and say something positive about yourself. I’d look and say, “Gee, you got a big nose, but it’s cute!” And I began to make sure that I’d say something positive to myself and my daughters, every day, two or three times a day. I also read a lot of articles in Essence and Ebony about women who have done this or that, and it’s very motivating to me.

When I got out of that marriage, I thought I could do anything. Because it took a lot for me to leave. My mom thought I should stick it out with him. I think she was afraid I couldn’t raise the kids on my own. And neither did I, so she wasn’t far off. But she told me it was totally up to me. She taught us, “If you make a mistake and fall on your face, I’ll be there to assist you to get up, but I will not get you up.” And that makes sense to me.

My mom also left it up to me if I wanted to work at Perdue, but she never wanted me to work there to begin with.

She’s really glad that I came out.

* * *

I went to Perdue to buy a dress. I was still married then, in ’83, and I went to get one paycheck to buy this dress. My daughter had a play she was in, and I needed a new dress to go see her. After that paycheck came in, I said, “Wow, I got money! This could be real useful.” And so I stayed on. And then I just got settled back into working.
I liked the money, but I hated the job. My first job was at the rehanging table. The chickens fell on the table and I said, “OH MY GOD!” I could not believe all those chickens! My eyes went together. I got dizzy. And I got sick. I threw up.

The man told me, you pick up the chickens at the back and flip them over so the feet slap against the shackles and they catch. You use both hands, just hang them on the line. Well, the blood was gushing all over my face as I hung them up, and I was trying to wipe it off. He says, “We don’t have time to be cute, Miss Bazemore.” And I was spitting all over the table. Finally, he says, “I don’t think this job is for you.” And I said, “You got that right.”

But I stayed on that job for about six weeks. Both hands are just going constantly — it’s a rhythm you get into — 72 birds a minute. You can actually do it with your eyes closed after a couple of weeks. I actually would sleep doing it, it’s so boring and so hot. You’re right after scalding, and all that heat is coming at you. It’s at least 95 to 100 degrees.

I did everything on the eviscerating line. I began to open chickens. I had to stick my finger in that chicken butt hole and cut down the sides. And I was cutting my fingers because you have to work so fast. I got this scar from opening. And this one from cutting hearts and livers.

I kept complaining and they moved me to trimming. I did that for about a year. And I really liked that. I worked with a good inspector, a young white guy named Cliff. He’d point to the bad part of the bird, and my job was to cut it off. Tumors, bruises, skin diseases, sometimes the chicken head would still be on. He was sympathetic and basically helped me do my work.

I was depressed. I had tried to go to college at nights. But that was just too much on me, so I had to quit. I wanted to go back, so I asked personnel if I could work nights so I could go to college during the day. When I transferred to nights, my grandmother kept my baby daughter and my oldest was in school. And my mother kept them at night.
I went to school from 8 to 12 noon, some days ’til 2. And I worked nights from 10 ’til 6:30 or 7 the next morning. I’d come home, shower, and go to school. Some days, I couldn’t even shower. I had to be in school at eight o’clock. Things were tight here, with so little money, and I had not yet learned to budget. So I began to go back out to Perdue at one o’clock and work ’til 4 or 5. And then I would come back home, and go to sleep, get back up at 9, and go back to the plant.

I did that a couple of months. In the day, I was working with Cliff. At night, the inspector’s name was Harold. This was during the time when I was having serious problems with my hands. So I couldn’t keep up, and that really aggravated this man — to keep stopping the line for me. I couldn’t trim the birds fast enough, and I would have to run around the line to get them. And when he would say something to me, I would say something back.

Every time I’d say, “My hand hurts,” they’d give me three or four pills. I knew what an Advil was. But these other ones had no name on them. And it got to the point that I was happy to go to the nurse’s station to get piped up so I could do this work and totally disregard the pain. I didn’t know what I was taking.

I couldn’t squeeze my hand. I couldn’t zip up my pants. And this was before the disease had really affected me. I couldn’t work the lock on this screen door, using my two fingers. I felt like cutting through chicken bone should have made me stronger, so why am I having problems zipping up my pants?

I went to the doctor’s office and I started to read up on carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis. I learned you could actually lose the use of your hand. And if I lost the use of my hand, I’d be left to sit around waiting for a welfare check. I couldn’t see that. And I can’t raise my kids on that kind of money. I just kept thinking of that and focusing on what I had to do. I had to raise hell about my hands. I had to overtalk management, because they would try to talk you into thinking that you don’t even hurt, that you’re just imagining.

It got worse when I went to night shift. I couldn’t open my car door or turn on the ignition with my right hand. Sometimes it was so bad, I would get up, shower, and get out of here and my hands would still be asleep. I’d hold this right hand up on the steering wheel and shift the gears with my left hand.

When I got to work, I’d get my hand bandaged. You almost had to stand in line and wait to get into the nurse’s station to wrap your hands with Ace bandages. Some women would take big bundles home and wrap their hands on the way to work. Some would buy them from stores. There are very, very few people that I know on the eviscerating line that don’t have a problem with their hands.

The nurse at this time was a man. And he gave me a hard time. And I gave it right back. He told me one night, “Why don’t you just quit?” And I said, “Why don’t you just marry me and take care of me.” He said, “You think you’re so smart and cute.” And I said, “Man, you don’t know horseshit about me.”

Well, he reported that to personnel. He said I was rude and obnoxious. And they called me into Bill Copeland’s office, plant manager, and they had three or four plant supervisors there. And they told me what they were going to do, and what I had to do. It was like they thought they were the sperm that I came from. They actually feel like they own you. It just made me remember, I’m living in the days of slavery all over again. They just took me out of the field and put me in a building.

* * *

The next morning, Cindy Arnold and Beulah Sharpe came knocking at my door. I saw this white woman and Black woman, and I thought they’re selling insurance. I didn’t want to listen to them, but I wasn’t rude so I invited them in. Cindy told me about the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, and talked about my rights. They had heard about what I said to the nurse — it got around real fast, everybody in the plant knew about it!

Cindy said that I had the right to file for workers’ compensation and the right to go to my family doctor. So I went back to Perdue and I said, “I need a workers’ compensation claim to take to my doctor.” Bill Copeland said, “We have to make an appointment for the doctor. You don’t need to do anything but get your body over there.” I said, “Wow, this white woman must know some stuff.” He had totally changed. Later that night — at 3 a.m. — he told me I had an appointment to see a doctor in Greenville the next day. So I knew things had changed.

I went to that doctor, he checked my hands, and I went back two days later for nerve tests. He diagnosed me with carpal tunnel syndrome. He put a splint on my hand and told me to wear it for six weeks and it should strengthen my hand. I was still working on the line and the metal in the splint kept pinching my hand. Bill Copeland wouldn’t listen to me, so I went back to the doctor. He wrote a letter saying I should be put on light duty. I was put on the salvage department, and I worked there until it was time to report back to the doctor.

He referred me to another doctor, in Little Washington, and he told me I needed surgery on my hand. I thought it would help but it actually worsened. Now I suffer from a different set of problems — severe muscle cramps, bad throbbing pain in the muscle by my thumb, numbness in my fingers, pain shooting up my arm.

When I went back for my last visit, the doctor said, “You have equal strength in both hands.” I said, “But I had more strength in my right hand.” He says, “They told me you were a troublemaker.” I said, “Doctor, I can’t order parts from Sears. All of these parts came with my body, and they’re not replaceable.” He told me the strength would eventually come back even though he didn’t do any nerve tests for the deterioration or anything. He told me I was able to work.

I said he was crazy. I never went back to work after that. I knew that if I had gone back, something would have happened and I would have lost my self control and I would have hurt someone. Because I totally felt that Perdue hurt me intentionally. I felt that there was something that could have been done. The abuse that people at Perdue showed me when I went to them with my problem was unbelievable. And their definition of “light duty” was just stupid. I just think they are unsympathetic people that want to be the slave drivers. They like to feel like “this is my block of niggers and I’m going to whip them into line.” Even when Black men come into what little control or power they have at Perdue, they become oppressive. They get the whipping style, too. And I understand that. They want to keep those positions because it makes their life a little easier. And that’s bad.

Several times I stood on the line and said, “If this man says one more damn thing to me, I’m going to stick this knife in him.” That’s how bad it was. You actually felt like killing someone. Women shouldn’t have to work under those conditions, regardless of where it is.

* * *

I really want to be able to do something for Black women. To help them share their stories so they don’t have to feel all alone, all pressed and stressed out. Let them see that there are other women out here who got beat up, who got put out of their house, who were abused at work. Let them know that there’s someone out here that cares, that will offer support.

I feel what women feel. I know how hard it was — and still is — trying to overcome obstacles that seem to just block your whole path, your whole view. You feel so limited, so afraid.

There is so much fear at Perdue. We were passing out leaflets for the hand clinic, and I heard women say, “Aren’t you scared that the Klan is going to bomb your house.” Or, “Would you tell my story, but not use my name?” They don’t want to lose that job. Or face harassment from Perdue.

One way to deal with that fear is to share stories, and know that it’s okay to be afraid, frightened. It was real intimidating to go to a bunch of white men and say, “I’ve got this problem and your job caused it.” I was scared half to death to walk into this white man’s office that has what I consider to be the keys to Heaven and Hell in his hands.

I go back, because I was raised in the church, to the 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” I’ve tried to keep that in focus, that the Lord will be there to provide. I’ve wanted things I couldn’t get, but I’ve never been hungry.

Even if you don’t have a religious view, you can keep a positive dream in view. That’s how books I would read about other women’s stories would really motivate me. Like Sojourner Truth, her life and her sayings. And Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.” That just stuck in my mind. I have a dream, and now I have to set my goals and objective. I don’t want to settle for what I have caused my life to deal to me. I don’t want to wallow in self-pity. I want to get up and get out and do something, and become this important member of society.

I can’t honestly say that I’m ready to die for the cause of educating and organizing Perdue workers. But I think I am willing to die for the cause of feeling free and having the sense of helping women find freedom. If I can educate this woman about carpal tunnel syndrome and workers’ compensation, and even if she goes back into the plant, at least she knows. She’s free from not knowing; that helps her be free.

I can’t just tell a woman to step out like I did. I can show her the options and get the facts and figures together. I’ll try to steer her in the right direction, but I won’t do all the work for her. She has to take the steps for herself.

That’s one thing the Center imposed on me. “You take on this leadership position. You do this, this and this for yourself.” So I was really educated about the power that anybody has, even low-income women. I found out that if you can talk, you have a lot of power. You can get your message across, open the lines of communication and use them for yourself. I can’t impose my values on someone, but I do want to help people before they get to the breaking point.

This article is republished as part of Poultry and Pandemic: Meat Industry Workers and COVID-19, a months-long investigative series about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Southern meat industry workers. It is published in conjunction with a reported essay by Olivia Paschal on the poultry industry since 1989, and a new interview with organizer Magaly Licolli of the Arkansas workers’ justice group Venceremos.

Our Trespasses 
By Greg Jarrell

On a crisp November morning in the year 1960, Charlotte Redevelopment Authority Director Vernon Sawyer walked up the steps into Friendship Baptist Church. He was bringing a message to Friendship this morning, though he had not alerted them to his visit prior to his arrival. A deacon in black suit, crisp white shirt, and black tie greeted him at the door, transforming his surprise at seeing a white man coming to church at Friendship into a look of welcome. Sawyer found the pastor and asked for permission to occupy the pulpit for a special announcement.

Sawyer was not bringing good news. Friendship, one of Charlotte’s most prominent Black churches, was going to be torn down as part of an Urban Renewal project. That federal program was going to pay for the city’s efforts to raze 238 acres of the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, home to more than 1,000 families, hundreds of businesses, a dozen churches, and more memories and sacred moments that could be counted.

Sawyer broke the news, and then tried to frame the news in terms that sounded like a special mission: “The time is getting late to make plans to rebuild your church,” but, “I’d like to point out one thing. Somewhere in the span of endless time, it was you who were chosen to lead in solving this problem in this crucial hour…. The challenge is before you.”[1]

Only a few years later, and only a few blocks down the street, the all-White First Baptist Church of Charlotte was at the end of years of conflict over moving from their prominent, but small, site on Charlotte’s Main Street. The congregation had nearly fled for the suburbs a few years earlier, but in a contentious meeting that nearly split the church, they decided to remain downtown. By 1965, they had located the site they wanted – nine acres in the newly cleared Urban Renewal area, just a block over from where Friendship Baptist had intended to stay, prior to Vernon Sawyer’s visit. The city was auctioning off the land following the eviction and displacement of every family and institution that had made its home there, all of them Black.

In a united and happy meeting, First Baptist voted to approve their move into the Urban Renewal area. Following the vote, they closed their business agenda by singing a hymn: “Lead on, O King eternal, the day of march has come…. the crown awaits the conquest; lead on, O God of might.”[2]

Interestingly, though, the primary arguments for First Baptist moving within downtown, and not out to the suburbs like many of their peers, were grounded in the language of mission. The church belongs downtown, one key leader argued, among “drunks, unclean people, people without the right clothes.”[3] That language chafes, but I get the impulse – as a member of a Catholic Worker-adjacent community, I’ve heard myself say similar things. I’ve talked extensively about God’s preferential option for the poor, about the importance of living together in solidarity with the oppressed, about how the Church is found among those who strive for liberation from the margins of the Empire. The language and the ideas are a bit different, but I’m still unsettled as to how close I am to the same legacy. Hidden just below the surface of the missionary impulse is the politics of conquest. I inherited that legacy.

In our intentional community, sixty years later and only three miles away from those historic Charlotte institutions, we’ve tried to reckon with the legacy of the missionary impulse. Then, displacement of Black people came in the form of Urban Renewal; now it is happening through gentrification. Our community has made the fight against gentrification our central focus. It hasn’t worked. The trickle of displacement has become a gaping wound. There are no solutions in sight.

We’re left to wonder whether two decades of our efforts have only been cosmetic, an attempt to spare ourselves the x-ray image that might show us how little deep the cancer of White supremacy runs in us. Have our attempts at solidarity merely obscured in our own eyes the history of missionary conquest that courses through our veins?

We’ve struggled against it, done our best to justify ourselves and our presence, but we cannot avoid it: White supremacy comes attached to White people. My presence on sidewalks and porches is a sign of safety to the newest batch of conquerors as they ride through, looking for real estate deals. It is also a signifier of the coming damage to my Black neighbors, as yet another generation faces displacement from places they called ‘home.’ I’ve worked so hard against those impacts. I’ve tried not to be White. But nobody – my old neighbors, my new neighbors, “the market” – is fooled. White supremacy will use every one of us to grab title to every square inch of land on God’s good earth, our best efforts and intentions be damned. None of us racialized as White can be pure or exceptional. There is no escaping Whiteness, only abolishing it.

I think a lot about Vernon Sawyer’s cruel speech to Friendship Baptist now. Vicious politics still get framed as benevolent mission. The wrong pulpits get seized and the bulldozers run in the wrong places. A great reversal is upon us: the mission field of our moment is not the disinvested neighborhood, but the barren souls and frozen pews of those of us who think we are White.

The challenge is before all of us who have been taught we are White to get at the foundations, down deep into the stolen soil we inhabit.

[1] Charlotte Observer, 7 November 1960.
[2] Cited in FBC’s newsletter, The Church Voice, 25 Feb 1965.
[3] Charlotte Observer, 28 Oct 1963.

This essay was originally published by Geez Magazine.

Greed Does Not Have to Define Our Relationship to Land: On Choosing to Belong to a Place
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dear Readers—America, Colonists, Allies, and Ancestors-yet-to-be,

We’ve seen that face before, the drape of frost-stiffened hair, the white-rimmed eyes peering out from behind the tanned hide of a humanlike mask, the flitting gaze that settles only when it finds something of true interest—in a mirror. Cruel eyes, a false face and demeanor of ravening hunger despite the unconscionable hoarding of excess while others go without. The spittle quickly licked away from the sly “fox in the henhouse” smirk that sends chills down your spine, a mouth that howls lies pretending it’s an anthem.

Americans keep acting surprised by the daily assaults on American values once thought unassailable. I can’t speak for all Native people, but we’ve smelled that carrion breath before. We know who this is, the one whose hunger is never slaked—the more he consumes, the hungrier he grows. We’ve met him on our shores, at the Thanksgiving table, at the treaty table, at the Greasy Grass, on the riverbank at Standing Rock, and in the courts. His mask does not fool us, and having so little left to lose and all that is precious to protect I call him the name of the monster that my ancestors spoke of around the winter campfire, the embodied nightmare of greed, the Windigo.

We know him. Perhaps this is why he has taken special efforts to poke Indigenous peoples in the eye, because we see him. He has proven himself an equal-opportunity offender to people black and brown. But with the spite of bullies everywhere, he has sharpened his stick with special vindictiveness for Native people from the first days of his administration, by reversing the glimpse of justice we held for one shining moment at Standing Rock, to dishonoring the Code Talkers, to undermining treaty obligations and threatening termination for our people, to casting Pocahontas’s name as a slur that manages to taint every stereotype across a range of Indigenous identities, to denying protection for Gwich’an livelihoods, to sending drill rigs to penetrate sacred land.

Americans are called on to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable.

He is the obscene of the Anthropocene, the colon of colonization, the grinder of salt into the original wound of this country, but lest I spend any more words on cathartic name-calling, let me say that Windigo is the name for that which cares more for itself than for anything else. It shrieks with unmet want—consumed with consumption, it lays waste to humankind and our more-than-human kin.

Windigo tales arose in a commons-based society where sharing was a survival value and greed made one a danger to the whole. But in a profit-based society, the indulgent self-interest that our people once held as monstrous is now celebrated as success. Americans are called on to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable.

The particular weapon of the Windigo-in-Chief is the executive pen, used against what has always been the most precious, the most contested wealth of Turtle Island—the land. With the stroke of that pen, he has declared that “oil is life” and that protecting the audacious belief that “water is life” can earn you a jail sentence. The same pen gutted the only national monument designed by Native people to safeguard a sacred cultural landscape, the Bears Ears. In opening those protected lands for uranium mining, he triumphantly claimed that he was re- turning public land to the people.

From his origins as a real estate developer to his incarnation as Windigo-in-Chief, he has regarded “public lands”—our forests, grasslands, rivers, national parks, wildlife reserves—all as a warehouse of potential commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.

Let us remember that what the United States calls “public lands” (and, if the truth be told, all of what the United States calls private property as well) are in fact ancestral lands; they are the ancestral homelands of 562 different Indigenous peoples. A time-lapse map of North America would show the original lands of sovereign peoples diminishing in the onslaught of colonization and the conversion from tribal lands to public lands, some through treaty-making, some through treaty-breaking, some through illegal sale, and some through what were termed “just wars,” by executive action and “encroachment.”

Not only was the land taken and her people replaced, but colonization is also the intentional erasure of the original worldview, substituting the definitions and meanings of the colonizer. That time-lapse map of land taking would also show the replacement of the Indigenous idea of land as a commonly held gift with the notion of private property, while the battle between land as sacred home and land as capital stained the ground red. Of course our ideas were dangerous to the idea of Manifest Destiny; resisting the lie that the highest use of our public land is extraction, they stood in the way of converting a living, inspirited land into parcels of natural resources.

You, right now, can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place, you can choose to belong.

Native people have a different term for public lands: we call them home. We call them our sustainer, our library, our pharmacy, our sacred places. Indigenous identity and language are inseparable from land. Land is the residence of our more-than-human relatives, the dust of our ancestors, the holder of seeds, the makers of rain; our teacher. Land is not capital to which we have property rights; rather it is the place for which we have moral responsibility in reciprocity for its gift of life. Here is the question we must at last confront: Is land merely a source of belongings, or is it the source of our most profound sense of belonging? We can choose.

Our ancestors had a remedy for Windigo sickness and the contagion it spreads. Those who endangered life with their greed were banished from the circle of what they would destroy. They were cast out from the firelight and the bubbling stewpot, from care and community. You colonists also have that power of banishment. Will you use it? It’s not enough to banish the Windigo himself—you must also heal the contagion he has spread. You, right now, can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place, you can choose to belong.

Colonists, you’ve been here long enough to watch the prairies disappear, to witness the genocide of redwoods, to see waters poisoned by the sickness of Windigo thinking. The Windigo has no moral compass; his needle swings wildly toward the magnetism of whatever profit beckons. Surely, however, the land has taught you differently, too—that in a time of great polarity and division, the common ground we crave is in fact beneath our feet. The very land on which we stand is our foundation and can be a source of shared identity and common cause. What could be more common and shared than the land that gives us all life? Rivers don’t ask for party affiliation before giving you a drink, and berries don’t withhold their gifts from anyone.

The moral compass guiding right relationship with land still remains strong in pockets of traditional Indigenous peoples. The sharp stick of the bully in the White House only hardens our resolve. The needle still points faithfully north, to what we call in my language Giiwedinong, the “going home star.” When we acknowledge the truth that all public land is in fact ancestral land, we must acknowledge that by dint of history and time and the biogeochemistry that unites us all, your dust and your grandchildren will mingle here. They will know what you do here, they will reap the consequences of whether you choose to banish Windigo thinking. You could follow the “going home star” and make a home here grounded in justice for land and people.

Colonists become ancestors too. The question is, What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

Sincerely,

Robin Wall Kimmerer

From Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield, published by Trinity University Press. Used with the permission of Trinity University Press. This excerpt was first published by Lit Hub

Really Becoming America
By North Carolina Black Alliance staff

A NATION ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING

Increased attacks on voting rights, ramped up gerrymandering, the January 6th insurrection, and the endless stream of videos of unarmed Black and Brown men and women killed in unjustified police shootings make us question who and what America is.

A common sentiment is that these assaults are merely an unmasking of the systemic racism and oppression that has always existed beneath our nation’s surface.

The North Carolina Black Alliance views these upheavals not simply as the unmasking of the real America, but as yet another cycle in the struggle that has existed since the genesis of the movement for Black freedom and equality. It is the struggle to determine whether our nation will be one that is inclusive with the same rights applied to all its people, or one that is exclusionary with a privileged group having all the rights, and others tiered below.

This battle to determine our nation’s character is evident in that historically every advance that African Americans have made in the fight towards full and equal representation in the land of our birth, has been followed by a well-orchestrated and virulent rebuke of that advance.

The current Congress’ failure to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) and the Freedom to Vote Act (FVA) is the latest iteration in that struggle.

The JLVRAA would undo the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that occurred under the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Decision. That decision removed key voting rights protections applied to seven southern states with a history of voting rights discrimination.

As a result of the Shelby Decision, according to And Still I Vote, “As of July 22, 2021, state lawmakers have introduced more than 400 bills and enacted 30 laws that create barriers to voters’ freedom to vote in 48 states.”

The Freedom to Vote Act would legislate even further voting rights protections. It would: make Election Day a national holiday; allow all states to have early voting for two weeks before Election Day, including nights and weekends; allow ‘No Excuses needed’ voting by mail, and same day voter registration; and outlaw partisan gerrymandering.

A VICIOUS CYCLE

The protections afforded by both measures are what one would expect in a democracy. Failure to pass them reinforces the belief that our nation will never advance beyond its legacy of slavery, inequity, and discrimination. The cumulative weight of these obstructions is disheartening, but the North Carolina Black Alliance is mindful of the fact that the wave of white nationalism sweeping the country, and the efforts to dismantle voting rights, like previous discriminatory measures, can, and will be, defeated.

For before the current proposed voting rights legislations and the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act there was the 15th Amendment of 1870 that gave African American men the right to vote—though very few were able to exercise it given the racism of the times—and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited discrimination in public places. (Women did not yet have the vote.)

These laws—passed during a brief period (1865-1877) following slavery when African Americans were afforded some measure of protection under federal law—were soon subject to a forceful pushback. For just as African Americans began to make inroads 
into American society a wave of Jim Crow laws swept the country, with the rapid implementation of practices designed to intimidate and prevent them from exercising their rights as citizens.

Laws like the October 1883 U.S. Supreme Court ruling decreed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, while 1896’s Plessy versus Ferguson established the practice of ‘Separate but Equal.”

These Jim Crow-isms would continue their surge well into the 1960s and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. And with their growth, so too did the Civil Rights Movement become more vocal, and its use of mass protest more visible. (Jim Crow was a racial slur applied to Blacks and its laws segregated Blacks from Whites. The Jim Crow period lasted from 1877-1968.)

CIVIL RIGHTS & THE 1960s

The Sixties produced landmark civil rights legislation—namely the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968—but it is also responsible for mass agitation on a scale previously unseen, and some of the bloodiest moments in America. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers in 1963; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young African American girls; the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in New York; and the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, some two months apart, mark this period.

The CRA outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; the VRA expanded the voting rights protections of the 15th Amendment and prohibited racially discriminatory voting practices like the poll tax and literacy tests; and the FHA made it “unlawful to refuse to sell, rent, or negotiate with any person because of that person’s background.”

These acts opened the doors of equality, but their passage was preceded by massive nonviolent social protest, including marches, sit-ins, and boycotts. The protests were in turn met by violent Jim Crow terror tactics bent on subjugating African Americans.

MASS AGITATION AND RESULTS

What has linked every civil right gain through the years, and enabled us to overcome racist practices and discrimination, has been strategic, organized movement led by African Americans and formed through collaborations of community activists, interdenominational faith leaders, and ordinary Americans of every race and background. This extends from the early Civil Rights Movement with Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and the Abolitionists, to Dr. King, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The most recent example of this is in the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement on building global awareness of police brutality against Black and Brown people and the disparate treatment accorded White Americans and People of Color.

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rashard Brooks, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Jordan Edwards, Botham Jean, Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright.

These names form a tapestry of death and would register as anonymous individuals had it not been for the Black Lives Matter Movement creating massive social protests demanding police accountability.

BLM engaged individuals of all races, genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds. As television had broadcast the attack dogs, fire hoses, and baton wielding police to the world during the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, so BLM used social media and images from cell phone videos and police cams to highlight the reality of Black lives.

The result? More police officers have been held accountable for the shooting and killing of unarmed individuals of color

THE NORTH CAROLINA BLACK ALLIANCE

The North Carolina Black Alliance is grounded in this history. We recognize that the cycle of progress and regress has been here for as long as the fight for African American equality has existed. We know, too, that the barriers to justice can be overcome with the strategic organization of resources, partnerships, and community.

Our Alliance was formed 22 years ago by a coalition of Black state legislators, county commissioners, school board members, and municipal elected officials working to address inequity and injustice and empower communities of color. Our mission is to create systemic change by strengthening the network of elected officials representing communities of color throughout the state and collaborating with progressive, grassroot networks on intersecting issues. These issues include voting rights, gerrymandering, criminal justice reform, environmental justice, health and wellness, economic development, and education.

Led by Executive Director Courtney Crowder, NCBA exists to combat systemic violence against communities of color, whether that violence takes the form of police brutality, the suppression of voting rights, or the disproportionate location of environmentally hazardous facilities in low-income areas and communities of color. Advance North Carolina, led by Executive Director Marcus Bass, is our voter education and mobilization arm.

OUR PRIORITIES RIGHT NOW

COVID-19 – A PERFECT STORM OF OPPRESSION:

COVID-19 laid bare the deep inequities in our nation. Early on the pandemic revealed the glaring disparities in healthcare, education, wages, and access to technology. Black and Brown people got sicker and died at higher rates than our White neighbors. More children of color lacked access to the internet, high speed connections, and other educational supports; and individuals of color were over-represented in high-exposure service industry jobs, more prone to getting ill, and more likely to suffer income and employment losses. It is what we refer to as a perfect storm of oppression.

Gen Z:

Young Advance North Carolina members staying safe with COVID-19 masks while getting our the vote in 2020.
Since March 2020, NCBA has taken proactive steps to educate our community about vaccine safety, testing locations, and overall safety measures aimed at stopping the spread of the virus.
COVID-19 has shown that we cannot afford any more losses of our political power. In real world terms, lack of representation leaves us defenseless, making us the last to get access to vaccinations, proper healthcare, sufficient doctors, and hospital beds.

RACIAL GERRYMANDERING AND THE ELIMINATION OF BLACK DISTRICTS

Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled the latest congressional maps unconstitutional. The ruling required the state legislature to redraw and submit new maps by February 18th, 2022. NCBA has been active in calling for a redrawing and will continue to work with our partners to ensure that the final maps are truly representative of North Carolina’s Black and Brown communities.

Analysis has shown that the maps were racially gerrymandered to eliminate retiring Rep. G.K. Butterfield’s district and dilute the voting power of North Carolina’s Black and Brown communities. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, using the discredited map Republicans could have captured 11 of the 14 existing seats, leaving Democrats with only three. Republicans currently have 8 seats to Democrats 5.

A January 2022 report by the Center, titled Redistricting: A Mid-Cycle Assessment, found that “The map, moreover, achieves its partisan skew with a shocking targeting of Black political power, making the seat of one of the two Black members of the state’s congressional delegation much less likely to elect a minority-preferred candidate. As a result, a state that is one-fifth Black could have only a single Black member of the U.S. House come next January.”

With the approaching mid-term election the stakes are extraordinarily high. An additional congressional district would create an opportunity to expand representation and combat the increasing threat posed by a Republican party that is ultra-conservative, racially motivated and committed to manipulating voting maps to obstruct the electoral power of a growing Black and Brown populous.

THE URGENCY OF THIS MOMENT

NCBA recognizes the urgent need in this moment to prevent the dismantling of Representative Butterfield’s district and protect Black and Brown political power.
We have answered this challenge. Through our Code Red Redistricting program, in addition to voter education, we are employing our resources to attack this threat from multiple angles, including providing our communities with PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for voting, encouraging absentee balloting, and assisting students at North Carolina’s ten Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to register and vote.

INJUSTICE IN OUR WATER

Environmental Justice is a priority issue for NCBA and earlier this month, joining with five other organizations, we resumed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requiring that more testing be done on the health effects of PFAs (Per -and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) that have been dumped in the Cape Fear River for decades. The river provides drinking water to the homes of two hundred fifty thousand North Carolinians, many of them Black, Brown, and low-income, and there is concern about how they may have been affected. Environmental justice is fundamental to good health, the ability to work, and the capacity to learn and grow. Despite this we know that often our communities are exhausted from fighting too many battles individually. The cumulative weight of oppression is one of its most effective tools for preventing change. NCBA understands this. And it is why we know that the collective strength of our collaborations is where our community’s power lies. Working together with our partner networks we will continue the fight to protect our community and ensure it has clean water.

NCBA is on the ground in our communities 365 days a year. We know how they are being impacted. It is because of this that we utilize policy and activism to ensure the protection of fundamental rights, but we also help individuals access resources through our network of attorneys, elected officials, and community and faith leaders.

‘OTHERING’ – ‘AND AIN’T I AMERICAN?’

 “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American 
voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
 — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Alleged lapses in speech and other attempts at ‘othering’ African Americans cannot separate us from our citizenship. Stigmatizing Mexican immigrants as rapists and Black and Brown skin as innately threatening does not erase the history of our contribution to building this country. Our blood, sweat and tears have been laid in the foundation of this nation. It traverses its railroads, highways, and interstates. Our labor created the industries that power this land. It is the price we have paid for full citizenship and inclusion

A WIN FOR ONE, A WIN FOR ALL

The advancement of equality and justice for Black and Brown people is not a zero-sum game. When communities of color advance, it does not mean that someone else loses. Throughout the history of the Civil Rights movement, legislation that has strengthened equal rights and fought discrimination in education, housing, employment, criminal justice, and healthcare, has benefitted all Americans.

Many of the issues confronting African Americans and other People of Color are economic and affect low-income White Americans as well. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to this commonality of interest shortly before his death during his planning for the Poor People’s Campaign. During sessions with the SCLC, he spoke of “the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.” 

The efforts aimed at cementing racial animus and furthering divisions among Black, Brown, and White Americans are calculated to prevent the recognition of our common interests and the collective power that could result from joining forces.

It is why the North Carolina Black Alliance remains committed to doing the work necessary to move our community and our nation forward. The tumult of the past several years is about really becoming America. It is about the struggle to create America in the image of all its citizens, one that is inclusive, and guarantees equal rights for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief.

This article was originally published by Philanthropy Journal.

“You need to ask ME!”: On place names, changing names, and strategies of conquest
By Greg Jarrell

I started getting calls and emails a few months ago from a couple of development companies who were introducing new plans down the street. Their reps were looking for some combination of buy-in, or solidarity, or absolution, all of which I ran out of a while back. I’m not sure they’re mine to give anyway, but regardless, the tanks are dry.

The plans for which they were seeking forgiveness rather than permission involved a series of renovated and new buildings. The specific plots are centered around some commercial properties between my neighborhood, Enderly Park, and the next one over, Seversville. The plans fit squarely in the day’s trends: tall, airy warehouses turned into offices; five stories of apartments on top of a garage and a few commercial spaces. It’s all pleasant. In a neutral world, it’s the kind of place I might like to have an office for writing, with a coffee shop nearby, and the greenway just across the creek for a long walk when the words won’t come. But the world is decidedly not neutral, and pretending about its neutrality is to help drive the bulldozer your neighbors are standing in front of.

At some point in my conversation with the developer, I asked the hot-button question: With the apartments you are building, what portion are reserved for those being displaced by the rapidly rising costs of housing nearby? The answer: “Sir, we decided to forego any affordable housing options with these structures.” This was no less distressing for being entirely predictable.

Landlords and portfolio holders, together with local government, have spent decades disinvesting in this ZIP code. Now they’re ready to cash in. Charlotte is one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. Prices are soaring as institutional investors and their local agents search for rental housing and potential adaptive reuse projects. One recent study by the real estate company Redfin found that 42% of homes sold in my 28208 ZIP code in 2021 were purchased by investors. In nearby 28214 and 28216, more than 50% of home sales went to investors. The insatiable appetite for land – for that is what those investors value more than structures – will further destabilize neighborhoods, which is to say, people and the spaces that support them. Most of those harmed in my ZIP code will be Black, yet another injury in a centuries-long series of exploits for cheaper land and labor. Rents will be paid as tribute to faceless lords in far-off places, people accountable only to spreadsheets. The biblical image that comes to my mind is from Psalm 59: speculators prowl the city like coyotes, and “each evening they come back…they roam about for food, and growl if they do not get their fill”(vv. 14-15).

Among the most eye-catching of the plans in the new nearby development was their idea to give the space a new name. It’s an in-between space, they said. It is neither Enderly Park or Seversville. It needs some branding.

And perhaps it is in-between. But tossing a focus-group name onto something feels like an answer in search of a question. And it plows over the long story of how development and naming and the colonial project of extraction has worked.

A place name has layers of meaning inside it. Names form identity. They help to build solidarity among people. Names identify a set of shared experiences, even for those who do not know one another. They point to common spaces and geographical features. Place names sometimes elicit strong negative responses as a reaction to adverse experiences from people inside them, or as a reaction to prejudicial assumptions made by people outside them.

Place names often call back history that helps illuminate the current conditions of the place. That is the case in Enderly Park, so named by the Alexander family when they sold off their father Syd’s farm, called Enderly. There’s plenty that is troubling about the place’s history. Syd Alexander came from a family of enslavers, and joined the Confederate Army to defend the institution of slavery. During the important 1898 and 1900 elections in North Carolina, he sided with the white supremacists seeking to establish Jim Crow, eventually landing a seat in the US House of Representatives. A history like that might call for a name change. But only by the careful consideration of those who have suffered under years of white supremacist tyranny, and only with their collective vision in mind.

I talked with my neighbor Michelle Hagens about the planning underway, and specifically about the naming. She is a Black woman who has lived here most of her 44 years. She knows the streetscape with the intimacy of an old friendship. Michelle speaks with authority. She is always insightful. She gave me permission to record her words and publish them here. Here’s what Michelle has to say, lightly edited for clarity:

“When you’re coming into my area, you need to hear me. No, it ain’t ‘you need to hear me.’ You’re gonna hear me…. If you want to change something, you need to talk to me. You need to go and talk to Dot [a long-time neighbor]. You need to go talk to some of these families that’s been here 15, 20, 30 years before y’all want to come and change something.

“What I want to tell them – this is my ingredient: Where do you live? No, seriously? Do you live over here off Tuckaseegee? Your whole council, everybody that’s backing you. Do y’all live over here? Have you seen the blood, sweat, tears that’s been poured into this neighborhood? Have you seen the people that’s been here, living here, that’s fought and gave up because y’all didn’t want to do nothing for us?

“But let the lily white people with privilege come over here? Oh, that’s when you see the police around here. That’s when the police talk to you with some sense. But when we was fighting [for a better place], they didn’t give a shit about us. They talked to us like we was dogs.

“Have y’all experienced anything over here [in order] to change anything? What gives you the right to even ask? What gives you the right? Oh, because you bought something? Because you got some money in your pocket? Like, really, that’s what makes you feel like you could change something? You need to ask me if you can change anything. Because I live over here, I’ve lived the lifestyle of Tuckaseegee.”

Naming is power. Re-naming is an exertion of power that seeks to establish proprietorship and to draw new lines of exclusion and inclusion. In his book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, David Day points out that naming is one of the consistent strategies used by conquering groups across human history. Colonizing and settling groups establish legal justification, draw new maps, rename places, fortify borders, till the soil, tell new foundational stories, and people the lands. The eventual end of conquest is always extraction. Sometimes it is complete expulsion, even genocide. The story of conquest is not foreign to this continent. It is not even foreign to this city, as the Catawba people can testify. Naming a space – or re-naming it – is part of an old story whose ending we already know.

Among the things that strikes me in Michelle’s words is that she readily imagines a world of belonging that is defined outside of economic possession. She can imagine what the propertied class cannot, namely a world where she belongs, along with her family and the neighbors she has loved. That is precisely what the economics dominated by white supremacy cannot imagine. Naming a place is a cheap substitute for belonging to it. Nevertheless, the battle over what the place is called is now the site of a larger struggle that will help determine what kind of city this will become, and who it will be for.

This post was originally published for Trespasses of the Holy, a Substack newsletter by Greg Jarrell.

Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)
By bell hooks

1.

hear them cry
the long dead
the long gone
speak to us
from beyond the grave
guide us
that we may learn
all the ways
to hold tender this land
hard clay direct
rock upon rock
charred earth
in time
strong green growth
will rise here
trees back to life
native flowers
pushing the fragrance of hope
the promise of resurrection

2.

such then is beauty
surrendered
against all hope
you are here again
turning slowly
nature as chameleon
all life change
and changing again
awakening hearts
steady moving from
unnamed loss
into fierce deep grief
that can bear all burdens
even the long passage
into a shadowy dark
where no light enters

3.

night moves
through the thick dark
a heavy silence outside
near the front window
a black bear
stamps down plants
pushing back brush
fleeing manmade
confinement
roaming unfettered
confident
any place can become home
strutting down
a steep hill
as though freedom
is all
in the now
no past
no present

4.

earth works
thick brown mud
clinging pulling
a body down
heard wounded earth cry
bequeath to me
the hoe the hope
ancestral rights
to turn the ground over
to shovel and sift
until history
rewritten resurrected
returns to its rightful owners
a past to claim
yet another stone lifted to
throw against the enemy
making way for new endings
random seeds
spreading over the hillside
wild roses
come by fierce wind and hard rain
unleashed furies
here in this touched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginnings
avalanche of splendor

5.

small horses ride me
carry my dreams
of prairies and frontiers
where once
the first people roamed
claimed union with the earth
no right to own or possess
no sense of territory
all boundaries
placed by unseen ones
here I will give you thunder
shatter your hearts with rain
let snow soothe you
make your healing water
clear sweet
a sacred spring
where the thirsty
may drink
animals all

6.

listen little sister
angels make their hope here
in these hills
follow me
I will guide you
careful now
no trespass
I will guide you
word for word
mouth for mouth
all the holy ones
embracing us
all our kin
making home here
renegade marooned
lawless fugitives
grace these mountains
we have earth to bind us
the covenant
between us
can never be broken
vows to live and let live

bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), “Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)” from Appalachian Elegy. Copyright © 2012 by bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins).  Published online by the Poetry Foundation.