INDY Week 7.22.20

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill July 22, 2020

DEADLY SERIOUS

COVID-19 REVEALS SYSTEMIC FLAWS IN ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE FOR LATINX PEOPLE

BY PAUL BLEST, P. 14

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Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 26

CONTENTS NEWS 8

It's time to lift the curtain on the legislature's backdoor dealing.

BY KIRK ROSS

10 UNC students are worried about the university's plans to bring them back to campus this fall. BY SARA PEQUEÑO 11

The death of Perry Hall raises questions about UNC's sensitivity to Black grief.

12

Thom Tillis is no statistician.

BY RUTH SAMUEL

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

FEATURE 14

Latinx people bear a heavy COVID-19 burden and face extra challenges in navigating health care. BY PAUL BLEST

MUSIC 17

Hip-hop artists raise their voices for Black Lives Matter.

18

A song for the late civil rights hero John Lewis.

BY KYESHA JENNINGS

BY BARRY SAUNDERS

19 Reviews of new albums by Libby Rodenbough and Manhole.

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH AND WILL ATKINSON

CULTURE 21

Indie-horror flick Amulet strains to be a Serious Film About Refugees.

BY RYAN VU

THE REGULARS 4 Voices

6 A Week in the Life

5 15 Minutes

7 Op-ed

16 1,000 Words

What's this car doing in the forest in Lakewood? p. 16 PHOTO BY BRIAN HOWE

COVER Design by Annie Maynard

WE M A DE THIS PUBLIS H ER Susan Harper

Digital Content Manager Sara Pequeño

EDITOR I AL

Editorial Assistant Cole Villena

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

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

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

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July 22, 2020

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BACKTALK

On Tuesday, the INDY reported that multiple employees at the Durham and Chapel Hill Whole Foods locations have tested positive for COVID-19. A current employee provided us screenshots of the messages they received when their coworkers were diagnosed.

“I work at a grocery store,” LISA COPENSKY-TUCKER commented on Facebook. “I don’t know of any grocery stores in the area that have not had at least one or two cases of covid-19 infect their employees.”

“I’m glad their employees called their doctors instead of stopping by the ‘wellness’ aisle to pick up some fake homeopathic sugar pills for flu-like symptoms,” says Facebook user JON PAUL DAVIS. “Yes they sell this nonsense.”

In other news, Barry Saunders wrote a column posing the question we’ve all been wondering: What is wrong with people who won’t wear life-saving face masks?

“They have a low intellect,” wrote Facebook user DONOVAN VERRILL. “The same low intellect that told them Trump deserved their vote. The same intellect that tells them Trump is a great president. By literal mathematical law, 1/2 of our country consists of people with lower intelligence than the median intelligence. So....”

Others were just surprised to see the familiar hat-wearing columnist, known for his years at The News & Observer.

“BARRY SAUNDERS?” JD QUINITCHETTE tweeted. “Where’s HE been?” (The answer: right here at the INDY, contributing to our Voices section.)

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voices

Enough with Raleigh’s Performative Allyship Under the cover of a progressive appointment, city council is pursuing its usual agenda BY COURTNEY NAPIER backtalk@indyweek.com

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hy did Raleigh City Council give Carmen Cauthen unanimous support, then turn around and vote six-to-one for Stormie Forte to take the District D seat vacated by Saige Martin?

Leading up to the decision last week, it was clear that it would not be business as usual. Between Martin’s shocking departure, the current protests for Black lives, and the pandemic’s impact on the local economy, the council had to make a choice that showed they were “for the people.”

While many qualified candidates threw their hats in the ring, all eyes were on the two Black women.

Cauthen comes from a long line of civil servants and has spent the majority of her adult life in service to government and community, most recently with the Southeast Raleigh Community Engagement Strategy Sessions and the Wake County Housing Justice Coalition.

Forte is a lawyer and real estate agent who is a part of the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Association (RWCA) and its affiliate, the Wake County Voter Education Coalition, both of which work to nurture Black political leaders and support voter turnout.

Both women were excellent candidates, yet the city council needed someone to fit certain criteria: a candidate who would communicate their support of Raleigh’s Black community while also letting them gentrify their neighborhoods with little pushback.

A couple of days after the council chose Forte, Cauthen demonstrated why she didn’t make the cut. During a “Downtown South” community engagement meeting hosted by consulting firm APCO and Kane Realty, Cauthen asked probing questions regarding Kane’s commitment to creating a community benefits agreement.

Bonner Gaylord, a representative of Kane, claimed they are working with public and private sector advisors and community members to discuss ways to make the necessary accommodations, but didn’t specify that a community-benefits agreement was in the works.

It is no secret that the Downtown South soccer stadium is a development that Mayor Baldwin and her allies on the council are very excited about. But residents of the diverse neighborhoods less than a mile away are concerned that the gigantic structures slated to be built in the floodplain will result in storm waters washing into their homes and rising property taxes washing them out.

Cauthen is known for tough questioning. Her participation in initiatives to stop gentrification and empower

the community to create their own development strategies is a clue as to why she would be problematic for the Baldwin “Moon Shot” agenda. In appointing Forte instead, the city council prioritized its agenda but got to look like progressive history makers—textbook performative allyship. Thankfully, Raleigh residents are not so easily fooled.

It is common knowledge in the Raleigh activist community how Mayor Baldwin and the council truly feel about the issues most impacting its Black and Brown residents.

In a forum before the 2019 election, Nicole Stewart said she did not support a police accountability board with subpoena power because “the only people who want it are from District C.” Jonathon Melton said that while City Manager Ruffin Hall and Police Chief Cassandra DeckBrown have made decisions that have negatively impacted the Black and Brown community “that he doesn’t agree with,” he does not believe they should be fired.

The remaining council members have all expressed opinions against defunding the Raleigh Police Department and consistently vote for zoning measures that push the gentrification of historically Black neighborhoods, including the recent decisions around accessory dwelling units and their approval for short-term rental use.

Forte is a part of an organization that represents Raleigh’s Black political establishment. Several Black politicians on the city, county, and state level value RWCA and the WCVEC as a source of support. But when one looks at the platforms and voting records of those politicians, one questions their effectiveness in advocating for working-class and working poor Black people.

On their watch, the affordable housing and homelessness crisis, excessive police force, and gentrification have worsened in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Many of these civic leaders have become “Black bystanders” as they allow their communities to be economically demolished.

With their eyes on the 2021 election—and on the developers that have exchanged financial contributions for support of ambitious building projects—Baldwin and her allies needed a candidate who was impervious to media scrutiny but wouldn’t hinder their controversial, injurious gentrifying developments. It remains to be seen if Forte will fulfill this role, but it was clear that “bystander” was not a position Cauthen was willing to take. 2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

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

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Raleigh

15 MINUTES Hannah and Jamie Rowen, 30 Runners and members of indie-pop duo Stray Local

BY MARY KING backtalk@indyweek.com

How does running tie into your music-making?

Hannah: Before COVID, we did our “Run Wild” tour from North Carolina all the way to California. We would stop at different run clubs and run with different communities and then perform afterwards. We would also stop at beautiful trails just to experience them. In Colorado Springs, we stopped at Garden of the Gods.

We ran through these beautiful trails in Big Sky and Lake Tahoe and Yellowstone. We made videos of our songs that we posted to our YouTube that just had these unbelievably beautiful backdrops.

You moved to Raleigh in March.

Hannah: This community’s so thriving. We wanted to be able to collaborate with so many of the amazing musicians and producers, and obviously COVID has made it a little bit more challenging to dive in and meet people. But we’ve been enjoying running the trails around here, and we’ll bide our time before we can meet up at venues and collaborate with other artists.

What inspired “Faint Glow?”

Hannah: It started as a response to a personal relationship in my life that was verbally, emotionally abusive. It was in the context of the Me Too movement, and we wanted it to be uplifting and inspiring for people in those situations, to have a voice and to rise up against that feeling of oppression and kind of re-identify yourself. So we pulled inspiration from my personal experience but wanted to make it so that anybody listening could hear it through their own personal lens and feel inspired.

PHOTO BY CHRIS FRISINA

One lyric says, “I’m putting up a smoke signal,” and the music video includes people releasing colorful smoke bombs.

Hannah: [It’s about] burning down something and then rising from the ashes. The smoke signal in the lyrics is basically saying, here’s the warning, this is it, I have decided to make a change. I feel like those colorful smoke bombs have a different meaning, and that’s the beauty of working with Honey Head Films. They brought their own narrative story to the project.

In the video, there’s five vignettes of people who are talented in their own way, and to me, each colorful smoke bomb is illuminating their personal, unique, creative essence—essentially saying, something that would have been invisible is now visible, and that we should appreciate everybody and see them for who they are and not just make a judgment for prejudices.

How can people stay up to date with what you’re doing?

Jamie: The Instagram handle @StrayLocal is for the band specifically, but we also have the @StrayLocalTrackClub handle, which is our running world. And we’re ambassadors for Brooks Running, the shoe company, so we do a lot of stuff in collaboration with them. W

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July 22, 2020

5

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE

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7/14 7/15 7/17

North Carolina sets a SINGLE-DAY RECORD FOR COVID-19 HOSPITALIZATIONS with 1,180 reported patients.

John Lewis—a Freedom Rider, the “conscience of the Congress,” and a civil rights icon whose career spanned half a century—DIES AT AGE 80.

The North Carolina Courage is ELIMINATED FROM THE NWSL CHALLENGE CUP, ending their hopes of a third consecutive league championship.

Antiracists MARCH THROUGH WAKEFIELD in response to a racist letter sent to an interracial family.

7/18

UNC approves a NEW BUILDING RENAMING POLICY, partially clearing the way to rename on-campus buildings that honor Confederates, KKK members, and other racist alumni.

Durham Public Schools and Orange County Schools announce they will START THE 2020-21 SCHOOL YEAR WITH ONLINE LEARNING.

Antiracists hold a VIGIL FOR RACIAL EQUITY AND UNITY at Garner town hall.

7/19

The Trump administration directs hospitals to report COVID-19 hospitalization data to them directly, STRIPPING THE CDC OF ITS RECORD-KEEPING POWER.

The heat index in Raleigh climbs to 108 degrees, the National Weather Service issues a heat advisory for most of the state, and the Triangle records its HOTTEST DAY SINCE 2020 BEGAN.

7/20

Gov. Cooper EXTENDS PHASE 2 of the statewide reopening plan until at least August 7.

ICE WALKS BACK VISA RESTRICTIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, meaning they can stay in the country without taking in-person classes this fall.

STORMIE FORTE becomes the first Black woman to be named to Raleigh’s city council.

The Asheville City Council UNANIMOUSLY APPROVES A REPARATIONS BILL for Black residents.

7/16

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

Raleigh begins BANNING ALCOHOL SALES AFTER 11:00 P.M. to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

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Asheville City Council In last week’s issue, Thomasi McDonald wrote about the historical argument for reparations. Hours after we sent that story to press, the Asheville City Council voted 7-0 in favor of a plan that brings that long-ignored suggestion closer to reality for Black residents in the Western North Carolina city. The resolution acknowledges the city’s historic role in the enslavement and segregation of Black people and calls for a committee to make “recommendations that will make significant progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic Racism.” No checks are being written quite yet, but the resolution made national headlines as one of the first meaningful legislative moves toward reparations in the entire country.

School reopening plans To be fair, there’s probably no way to create a truly “good” plan for reopening schools in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s encouraging to see districts like Durham Public Schools and Orange County Schools showing caution by preemptively planning for online learning to start the 2020-21 school year. Still, the number of unanswered questions about the fall makes us nervous. What happens if a teacher of an in-person class gets sick? How can we expect young children to adhere to social distancing guidelines in classrooms full of friends they haven’t seen in months? Should college students plan to return to campus at all in 2020? Again, this is a tough situation for education policymakers, but it’s not hard to see why enrollment at online schools like Wake County Virtual Academy has spiked recently.

Federal police in Portland On Wednesday, federal law enforcement officers in Portland poured out of unmarked minivans, approached protesters, and arrested them without a stated cause. Ignoring the obvious fact those protesters had a right to peacefully protest under the First Amendment, the federal agents violated the very first article of the Constitution by making arrests without a stated cause. The protesters were later released, but the dystopian images of those arrests reverberated throughout the antiracist community nationwide. If a 1984-style police abduction in Oregon isn’t awful, the thought that federal agents could pull something similar at a protest here in the Triangle should be. The only bright spot is that antiracists have continued to demonstrate anyway, fearlessly marching everywhere from Garner to Wakefield in the days since the arrests.

OP - E D

Execution by Inaction An “offender” to the state, Faye Brown was a friend to me. Her death from COVID-19 in Raleigh reveals the urgency of decarceration. BY LYNN BURKE backtalk@indyweek.com

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n May 6, 2020, my friend Faye Beatrice Brown died alone from the coronavirus while incarcerated at the N.C. Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh. The public announcement of her death reflects the callous disregard with which prison officials—and ultimately, Governor Cooper—are treating incarcerated people during this pandemic.

As in all of the state’s announcements of the COVID-19 deaths of incarcerated people, Faye is referred to only as “an offender,” stripped of her personal identity, dignity, and humanity even in death.

But she was much more than “an offender” to me, her family, and many others who served time with her during 34 years of imprisonment. She deserved a second chance, as we all do, but she ran out of time. I want to make sure her story lives on and to prevent the deaths of others that remain in the same desperate prison conditions that took Faye’s life.

Many lives are at stake during the COVID-19 pandemic, including more than 30,000 people, most of them Black, confined in state prisons across North Carolina. More than four months into this public health crisis, prisons remain overpopulated, understaffed, and ill-equipped while COVID-19 becomes more entrenched in facilities across the state.

Medical professionals, advocates, and the affected individuals and families are calling for the early release of more people to protect those who remain incarcerated and work in prisons, but those calls continue to go mostly unheeded. The inadequate response of Governor Cooper and the Department of Public Safety (DPS) has likely contributed to preventable illnesses and deaths of incarcerated people.

This grotesque inaction in the face of an unprecedented public health crisis belies Governor Cooper’s tweet on May 31: “Let

for Women, and over time we became friends. When Faye was not away on furlough at her family home in Garysburg, she and I would play cards or video games to pass the time.

Faye worked hard to educate herself while in prison. By age 44, she had earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Shaw University and a cosmetology license.

Within a few months, she was helping other students at Sherrill’s University of Barbering and Cosmetology.

In 2015, Faye applied for parole. I was able to advocate for her, but she was not allowed to speak in person. Several family members wrote letters of support. Faye’s sister Ola Davis stated, “Faye has changed from that teenager she was. … I really feel bad for the family of the state trooper that was killed, but Faye did not kill him. … Our family is hurting too.”

Ola said what we all knew: Faye Brown did not pull the trigger that killed Trooper Davis. She did willingly rob that bank, but she paid for that crime many times over.

Unfortunately, her parole application was denied. I wished a miracle would come, but it never did.

Governor Cooper, if Black lives matter to you, then take swift action to make sure that what happened to Faye never happens again. First, exercise your clemency power Then Faye was transferred to an all-white to get people out of harm’s way. Second, high school. Her teachers discriminated mandate that DPS reduce overcrowding in advertise feature prisons a pet for to adoption, allow for proper social distancagainst her, claimingToshe had tooormuch pleasetocontact pride. She stopped going schooladvertising@indyweek.com and ing, implement a uniform safety plan that started hanging out with the wrong crowd. includes COVID-19 testing and personal On September 2, 1975, when Faye was protective equipment for all, and utilize 22 years old, she made a foolish mistake alternatives to solitary confinement. advertise or and feature a pet TheTo moment is here, I beg and pray by robbing a bank with two others. Ten for adoption, pleaseCooper. contact meet it, Governor You minutes later, a state trooper named Guy that you advertising@indyweek.com power to ensure no one in prisThomas Davis Jr. was dead. Faye never saw have the on is sentenced to death by COVID-19. W freedom again.

Faye and I met more than 30 years ago at the Raleigh Correctional Center Lynn Burke is a lawyer based in Raleigh. me be clear about one thing: People are more important than property. Black Lives do Matter.”

Let me share the story of a Black life that mattered dearly to me and should have mattered more to Governor Cooper and NCDPS officials.

Faye, the second of eight children, was born in Halifax County on March 18, 1953, to Otis Brown Sr. and Catherine Edmonds Brown. Faye grew up in Garysburg, North Carolina. Everyone who knew her understood that she was special and had a heart of gold.

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

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

“Governor Cooper, if Black lives matter to you, then take swift action to make sure that what happened to Faye never happens again.”

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North Carolina North Carolina State Legislative Office Building PHOTO BY W. EDWARD CALLIS III / PUBLIC DOMAIN

votes in a row failed, debate sort of fizzled out. They cut the lights and went home.

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Curtain Call The pandemic has exacerbated the legislature’s proclivity toward backroom dealing. It’s time to lift the curtain. BY KIRK ROSS backtalk@indyweek.com

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little after 2:00 p.m. July 7, House Rules Committee chair Rep. David Lewis gaveled in the final slog to the end of the 2020 short session with a Hamilton reference.

“Welcome to the room where it happens,” he said.

It earned a few yuks, but everyone knew it was a lie.

The room where it happens is elsewhere in the building, somewhere near the leadership offices where the deals are cut. It’s a place best described as a black box, a place without daylight to which you and I are not invited.

The House and Senate rules committees, gatekeepers to the floor of the chambers, provide the pageantry where things become official.

It’s not unusual for the legislative short session in a presidential election year to be heated, hyper-partisan, or even weird, but this year was exceptionally so and included a particularly disturbing lack of transparency and open government.

The session began with a brief note of consensus, a handful of COVID relief bills, but quickly devolved into 8

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theatrics. Meeting semi-virtually, with some legislators on-site and some scattered around the building or at their home offices, things grew increasingly chaotic and divisive as the session wore on.

In the end, GOP leaders settled on a strategy to differentiate themselves from Governor Roy Cooper through a series of targeted reopening bills transparently aimed at providing grist for the election season. This was, of course, amid a backdrop of spiking coronavirus cases and hospitalizations statewide.

The session wrapped up in a bizarre, sloppy final 48 hours in which bills and sections of bills appeared and disappeared through the many trap doors of Jones Street.

Some of them became law, including an infuriating public records exemption tucked into a Department of Health and Social Services bill that shielded state death investigation records. It was among several that Cooper vetoed.

Legislators came back for a curtain call the next week to try to override the governor’s vetos, but after five

here’s no doubt that the COVID-19 crisis and our response to it have deepened our understanding of the inequities, injustices, and inadequacies of institutions around us. The North Carolina General Assembly is no different.

I went into this year already frustrated by the direction of the place and thinking about what reform would look like should there be an opportunity for change when a new General Assembly is sworn in next January. I’ve been writing about the legislature off and on for more than two decades and have been a member of the Capital Press Corps since 2014. I take no joy in reporting what a mess it is.

But after watching and listening to what happened on Jones Street over the past few months, I’m more concerned than ever. No matter what the outcome of the election is, what the mix of seats is, the bottom line is that the legislative branch is in trouble, in dire need of fixing, and for now is unable and unwilling to even consider it.

The preface of any writing on the government of our state should include a few riffs about the ultimate power of the state legislature. The North Carolina Constitution starts with a lot of nice stuff about all power coming from the people, but it quickly hands over the keys to the General Assembly, giving it the most important authority of all, the power of invention, the ability to write laws about anything and everything including itself.

Only late in the 20th century did the governor of this state get the power to veto legislation—and even then, only bills in certain categories. Among those excluded, naturally, are redistricting bills. That leaves no immediate check on how the legislature draws things up and no need for the majority to negotiate, even if it’s only a one-vote majority.

Over time, the legislature has crafted districts and election laws that suited it and used its powers to carve out convenient exemptions to laws on open meetings and public records.

This year was no different as General Assembly leaders asserted repeatedly that public health requirements issued by the executive branch do not apply to it under the constitution’s separation of powers clause. One late session bill even included a provision granting all 170 members of the House and Senate the exclusive right to dig into anyone’s Department of Social Services records on demand. That effort failed after last-minute objections got it stripped from the bill.

If you spend enough time at our legislature and watch

“By tradition, reform rides into Raleigh on the back of scandal.” people come and go, you start to see beyond the personalities of the day and get an idea of the ghost in the machine.

Once you do, a couple of things dawn on you.

The first is that you probably are never going to find two places where people think more highly of themselves than the floor of the state House and Senate. The second is that the legislature will never, ever reform itself.

B

y tradition, reform rides into Raleigh on the back of scandal. It usually takes something pretty bad, and pretty blatant. The last big round of reform came early in this century and was set in motion after the Speaker of the House secured his majority by handing over a bag of money in an IHOP bathroom off I-85 near Salisbury. Jim Black got 63 months in federal prison, and the state got another round of campaign finance laws and limits on gifts from lobbyists.

It was a start, but after the heat dissipated, so did the spirit of reform. Since then, there have been attempts to change the institution, but few wins.

Before COVID-19, the 2020 session was shaping up to be an opportunity for changes to redistricting, reform’s crown jewel. Putting an end to gerrymandering goes to the heart of the matter, but supporters hoping for an independent commission or at least a less cold-blooded partisan process saw their opportunity slip away when the COVID response made any other major initiatives impossible.

For me, the most disconcerting sign this year was how the fog settled in early and nearly all the work went behind closed doors, to the black boxes. Committee work all but shut down and they returned only to read through the latest version of the bills and vote. Any real debates were out of the public eye, in caucus rooms, conference committees, and among small groups of legislators and staffers.

For the past several sessions, cutting the public out of the process has been intentional, a strategy that centralizes power and decision making under the guise of efficiency. I’ve seen it happen in the past as well as leaders got more comfortable in the throne, but we’ve reached a new level of opaqueness in lawmaking.

This year, in the name of efficiency there wasn’t even a nod to the idea of open debate. For the last half of the session, nearly every bill arrived at whatever committee had been assigned to ram it through as a done deal. Some of the bills, many of them, were awful last-minute monsters, strung together sets of provisions, married only by the common fact that this was the bill the leadership said would pass.

Some parts of the bills came from other bills that weren’t going to pass or were likely to get vetoed, but in far too many cases there were provisions that came out of nowhere, items that had never been heard in a committee.

This is a violation of the legislature’s own rules, but you see it more and more now. When this kind of stuff happens, the reasons can range from sordid to mundane, but there’s almost no time to sort that out before the vote.

This should worry you for a lot of reasons, but especially because there’s a law of physics that says government lacks elasticity. Once you rely on workarounds like that, they become the way things are always done.

You see this in the changing legislative schedule, too. Special sessions or adjourning for a few weeks or months and returning were once rare occurrences. For the past few years, the legislature has been sliding toward a year-round schedule without first doing the kinds of things you’d do organizationally to make it work.

It’s confusing for the public or really anyone outside an inner circle of decision-makers who control the calendar.

Unless you’re in the know, you don’t know what’s coming, and you can’t plan ahead.

All this corner-cutting cuts us out of the process and allows for more insider-driven agendas and political gamesmanship. The more it’s normalized, the more likely it is to be abused and used by future General Assemblies.

With the heat of an unpredictable election bearing down, now would be a good time to ask the people who want to represent you in Raleigh if they would commit to something better: to not shut the public out, to provide some predictability and collaboration, to listen and consider what you have to say, and above all, to legislate in your name out in the open. W

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Chapel Hill

Unsafety in Numbers UNC-Chapel Hill students question the university’s plans for starting in-person classes during the pandemic

BY SARA PEQUEÑO backtalk@indyweek.com

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n June, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz walked through Polk Place with a Carolina blue mask on his mouth and a CBS cameraman in front of him. 60 Minutes journalist John Dickerson outlined the school’s preparations for in-person classes: starting the fall semester early, downsizing lecture hall classes, and disinfecting athletic centers.

The Chancellor said that students were excited about returning, even though “it’s not going to be the same Carolina.”

“Is it worth the risk, then, to bring everybody back, if it’s not going to be the same Carolina?” Dickerson asked.

“We’re not going to bring students, faculty, staff back onto a campus where we don’t believe it’s a safe environment,” Guskiewicz replied.

Now it’s July, and COVID-19 has yet to soften its grip on North Carolina. The single-day case count peaked on July 18, bringing the total to around 100,000 and rising.

More than 1,100 people are hospitalized throughout the state.

Despite the concerns of students, staff, faculty, and community members, on-campus residents are still expected to return as early as August 3. Off-campus residents, including graduate students, are already trickling back into town. Some students say that they have continuously voiced their concerns about coming back and who it will hit hardest—students of color and staff. While the administration says it’s making sure students’ voices are heard, the students don’t feel heard.

“It’s the students that are continuing to lead, even though we continually get shut out of the conversations when it’s time to make a decision,” says Greear Webb, a sophomore. “And now we’re talking about life and death, and we can no longer afford for that to be the case, 10

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which is why we’re putting such pressure on the administration.”

On July 14, Webb and 16 other students met with administrators in a closed meeting to discuss their concerns about plans for the fall semester and how they account for racial equity. The meeting occurred only after a week of requests from the students.

Lamar Richards, the chair of the Undergraduate Commission on Campus Equality and Student Equity, is crafting questions with the commission to get a better gauge on students’ opinions on campus reopening.

In the meeting, he told the chancellor he was worried that the questions the university sent out in their own campus climate survey were creating biased answers—such as asking students if they were returning to school instead of asking why. The chancellor said he didn’t see how they could be worded differently.

Faculty Executive Committee Chair Mimi Chapman told the committee that 89 percent of incoming students prefer a faceto-face or hybrid model, as do almost 78 percent of returning students. But as the school draws near, minority students are worried about equity.

“It’s very important that we look at how many students want to come back because their families sit in a place of privilege—‘Hey, we send you off to college and you get COVID, we got money to cover your expenses,’” Richards says. “Versus our minority and Black and Brown families, our first-generation families, saying, ‘Oh, shoot, I’m really worried because we’re already on loans trying to get you through college.’”

On July 16, Guskiewicz told the UNC Board of Trustees that 57 percent of classes will have an in-class component. Every class will have a virtual component, but many will require class attendance at least once a week, and not every class is available

UNC-Chapel Hill’s South Building

online. For upperclassmen deeper into their major, some classes they need are available only with an in-person component.

The school created a “Roadmap” website to navigate the school year, including “offramps” for getting students out of Chapel Hill if cases spike, though how many cases it would take is unspecified. While the idea of off-ramps has been mentioned in open meetings with faculty, the Board of Trustees, and the Carrboro Town Council, they are not clearly outlined on the website.

The roadmap relies on students following a set of community standards including mask requirements, social distancing, and cleanliness. If they don’t, they could face “administrative action.” Beyond campus, Orange County has a mask ordinance and prevents businesses from being open past 10:00 p.m. But these standards did not protect 37 student athletes, coaches, and staff from testing positive weeks ago.

Fraternities have also not received clear instructions on what they aren’t allowed to do. In an interview with NC Policy Watch, the former house mother for Delta Kappa Epsilon said the brothers told her that they would not wear masks or stop partying.

Thirty percent of UNC students say they will continue going to gatherings.

There is no public plan for how to alert students of clusters or outbreaks. Students, staff, and faculty say they first heard about the athletic department clusters from news outlets instead of the university, which is attempting to get around the need for

PHOTO BY WILLIAM YEUNG

constant campus-wide alerts with contact tracing. But this is effective only if there is a rapid testing process.

Students aren’t the only ones concerned about the safety of their peers. According to a survey from the UNC Faculty Executive Committee, more than 40 percent of faculty believe that the university guidelines weren’t enough, and the staff seems to have been left out of the conversation.

UNC adds 43,000 people to Chapel Hill and Carrboro’s population. While a UNC Hospitals representative says they “remain confident in our ability to care for all COVID and non-COVID patients,” there are valid concerns about having a reliable place to get supplies as the national totals continue to climb.

Vice-Chancellor Bob Blouin says that the school has set aside about 164 beds in two dorms for students that have tested positive, as well as students that are quarantining.

Two petitions to cancel in-person classes—one for UNC-Chapel Hill and the other system-wide—have been making the rounds on social media. They have a combined total of more than 5,000 signatures.

When it comes to in-person versus virtual learning, UNC is subject to the Board of Governors. And since the university system budget could be cut by up to 50 percent if campuses have to close mid-semester, all 17 UNC schools are at risk of furloughing or eliminating entire programs. The board is preparing for mid-semester closures. W

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Chapel Hill

Passing Mention UNC’s handling of the death of a beloved African American studies professor raises larger questions about its sensitivity to Black grief

BY RUTH SAMUEL backtalk@indyweek.com

O

n April 20, UNC-Chapel Hill students in two African, African American, and Diaspora Studies classes suddenly learned that their professor, Dr. Perry Hall, had died over the weekend. It was a sad, unexpected ending to a semester of sad and unexpected events. Hall was beloved by Black students, who were already under the stress of final-exam season, the coronavirus pandemic, and, in later months, an onslaught of racist state-sanctioned violence.

But instead of getting a formal notice of Hall’s death from the university, students found out through informal emails from department heads. Hall’s classes would continue on with a substitute professor.

“Not only were we robbed of an opportunity to grieve, but we were also expected to move on with the class + assignments w/o skipping a beat,” tweeted recent grad Olivia McPhaul.

McPhaul says the substitute professor, Dr. David Pier, ignored documentation of extra-credit opportunities Hall created to ease the transition to virtual learning for students who didn’t have the resources to complete assignments or were experiencing added stress during the pandemic. According to McPhaul, Pier said it was too much to deal with.

“I took it upon myself to reach out to the chair of the department to explain my grievances and what had happened,” McPhaul says. “She then said, ‘If you have evidence, you should send that to me and Dr. Pier in order to get that credit.’ But I shouldn’t have even had to do that.”

UNC’s handling of Hall’s passing raises larger questions about how the university responds to Black student trauma and the effectiveness of its mental health resources.

Tributes from colleagues after Hall’s death noted that he was a “pillar of our department” and an “incredible scholar” in the national Black studies community. He was a member of the International Journal of Africana Studies editorial board, and his work was highly regarded.

“He contributed a lot to the life of the department,” says AAAD professor Dr. Kenneth Janken, who worked with Hall for decades. “He worked on a significant reconfiguration of the major and minor requirements. He also took an important role in the development of a graduate program in our department, which is in its last stages of the approval process. He was consistent and principled and deliberate and considered in his opinion, not to mention kind.”

Janken says UNC’s Faculty Council, a governing body representing university faculty members, holds an in memoriam moment of silence for deceased faculty at the end of the school year. The council, along with the College of Arts & Sciences and faculty news publication The Well, posted a memorial for Hall, saying they hope to honor him in person when it is safe to do so.

While the AAAD department posted a memorial tribute on its homepage, it took the Black Student Movement sharing a graphic on social media and my article in The Bridge for most people to find out. BSM President Tamiya Troy says it’s “outrageous” how many responses they’ve received from alumni, parents, and current students saying they had no idea.

This isn’t the first time Black students at UNC have been left to handle their own mourning and community trauma. On September 25, 2019, UNC BSM hosted a “Fallen Tar Heels ” vigil honoring the people lost

from the Black Carolina community: Karriem “Eric” Ahmad Jenkins, Diamond Daniels, and former faculty member Ishna Hall.

On June 5, following the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed, George Floyd, and countless others, UNC BSM, UNC Black Congress, and student government organized a vigil in honor of Black lives. Troy notes that while Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz attended both events, the onus was on students to organize them.

In the past school year, several student deaths have been reported by The Daily Tar Heel—Wynn Burrus, Madison DeVries, and Patrick Nixon. But there has been no article on Hall’s death.

The university says that when there’s a faculty or staff death, individual units or departments handle notifications, memorials, and replacements. But given the previous response to faculty death and Hall’s influence in the Black UNC community, students expected broader recognition of his passing.

McPhaul says some of her classmates have checked in with one another in a group message, but her grieving process would’ve looked much different if she didn’t have familiar faces in the class.

AAAD department chair Dr. Eunice Sahle listed the Counseling and Psychological Services website and hotline in her email informing students of Hall’s death. But CAPS didn’t feel like an option to McPhaul.

“I’ve visited CAPS and Campus Health, and I felt like it was never really about me or that I was prioritized,” says McPhaul, a Black woman in UNC’s mostly white and male computer science program. “When I first went to CAPS, it was surrounding the experiences and the trauma that I had endured in the computer science department with my professors, the racism and discrimination and exclusion. Since that experience, I have not returned to CAPS, nor would I have advised other people to.”

Troy says there are too many hoops students have to jump through to receive the help or accommodations they’re paying for.

“The university hasn’t asked students what you need when you’re experiencing a death or when something happens, because they fail to acknowledge it,” she says.

The disconnect between CAPS and students of color, particularly Black students,

is evident, though CAPS Director Allen Hamrick O’Barr has made efforts to seek input from BSM and We Wear the Mask, a minority mental health advocacy group.

He says CAPS has a strong multicultural program in their training.

“There’s only a limited amount of interaction that we’re going to be able to do with any student just because of the resources and the demand,” O’Barr says. “It’s a bigger issue in that a lot of the student body wants to have unlimited psychotherapy and we just don’t have the capacity to do it.”

Although there are Black staff members, most are social work fellows or predoctoral interns from other schools, not psychologists. Since these positions are transient, it’s hard for Black students to find a counselor who works for them and get continuous long-term care.

As for grief counseling, there is a COVID19 focused support group that addresses it at a lower level—things like “losing” part of the school year and a formal graduation.

O’Barr says that they would need to create a specific group for dealing with death.

The university sent out formal emails about maintaining mental health during COVID-19, including one the day after Hall’s death was announced to students.

Guskiewicz records weekly video messages checking in on the Carolina community, and visited Zoom classes to discuss what returning to campus in the fall could look like. In light of recent events regarding police brutality, UNC has even sent out emails regarding Carolina’s commitment to “campus-wide dialogue, healing, and structural change.” But they did not mention the psychological toll that white supremacy and widespread death has on Black students or what will be done to rectify it.

Dr. Hall’s students aren’t just managing exams and trying to navigate an unforeseen pandemic—they are grieving the loss of a man that advocated for them, and UNC needs to advocate for its Black students.

At a university that claims to be for the people, the people’s needs seem to be rarely listened to. W An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Bridge, a media outlet created by UNCCH and Duke students to share the voices of women of color at these institutions.

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July 22, 2020

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North Carolina

He’s Not a Statistician Latino leaders take Thom Tillis to task for misinformed, racist comments on the coronavirus

BY THOMASI MCDONALD backtalk@indyweek.com

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wo state nonprofits joined a chorus of voices that took N.C. Senator Thom Tillis to task after he blamed the disproportionate spread of the coronavirus across the state on Latinos for not wearing face masks and improperly social distancing.

Calling Tillis’s claims “misinformation,” Piedmont Rising and Poder NC said in a press call Thursday that the senator’s comments were racist and demanded an apology from the Republican incumbent, who is trailing Democrat challenger Cal Cunningham by more than four points, according to Real Clear Politics.

At a virtual town hall on July 14, Tillis claimed that the state’s Hispanic and Latino members are less likely to wear masks and social distance and are to blame for the spread of the coronavirus in North Carolina. Journalists with Salon obtained a recording of Tillis’s remarks the next day.

“And I will tell you, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we’ve had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44 percent of the cases—the positive cases,” Tillis said. “And we do have some concerns that, in the Hispanic population, we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”

As The Washington Post reported, Latino Democratic legislators publicly sounded off on Tillis’s comments, while GOP members in Congress are the ones most resistant to wearing face masks.

“This racist BS needs to stop,” tweeted Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas. “Latinos & African Americans are most at risk, dying at higher rates — and STILL going to work everyday b/c they are essential workers.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Rueben Gallego of Arizona said Hispanics “pulled the food, slaughtered the animals, packaged the food that fed America,” while barely earning a minimum wage, only to return home to big families under one roof.

Tillis, Gallego tweeted, “could never do one full shift at a meat packing factory.”

As of Monday afternoon, Hispanics accounted for 43 percent of the state’s 101,046 confirmed coronavirus cases, the NC Department of Health and Human Services reported. But members of the state advocacy groups point to a report by the Centers for Disease 12

July 22, 2020

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Thom Tillis

PHOTO COURTESY OF UNITED STATES SENATE

Control and Prevention that belies Tillis’s interpretation of the data.

In a press release made public the same day Tillis made his claims, the CDC reported that support for wearing masks among a group of 503 surveyed American adults had jumped from about 62 percent in April to more than 76 percent in May. The increase, the CDC reported, was “driven largely by a significant jump in approval by white, non-Hispanic adults,” from 54 percent in April to 75 percent in May. Approval among Black, non-Hispanic adults climbed from 74 percent to 82 percent.

Hispanic and Latino adults, in fact, showed the highest support for wearing masks in April, with 77 percent of those surveyed saying they used a mask the last time

they left the house. That number held steady at 76 percent when the follow-up survey was conducted in May. “The data available makes it really clear that you don’t have to be a statistician or a scientist to understand why these remarks are blatantly false and irresponsible,” Jessica Coscia, a member of Piedmont Rising said in a Thursday press statement. “As a Latina, I am appalled. I am disappointed. This type of misinformation is so irresponsible.”

Irene Godinez of Poder NC called on Tillis to focus on solutions rather than relying on racism to addressing the health crisis.

“To think that on top of surviving this pandemic—the worst in our lifetime—we as Latinos have to now deal with having a target on our backs imposed on us for our mere existence here in North Carolina is shameful and merely racist,” Godinez said.

Fellow Poder NC member Cristal Figueroa said COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Latinos is a consequence of state lawmakers’ “ongoing failures on pandemic relief, PPE, and addressing workplace protections [that] have disproportionately impacted Latinos.”

“The truth is that Latinos have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic due to the lack of resources provided by the government—and that includes you, Senator Tillis. The truth is that Senator Tillis needs to ensure healthcare protections to all North Carolinians and, yes, Senator Tillis—Latinos are North Carolinians.”

Natalia Diez with Piedmont Rising said Tillis has a “history of hurtful comments” that have targeted the state’s Hispanic community. Diez referenced comments Tills made in 2014 when he said white North Carolinians are “the traditional population.”

“I am Latina and I am also a North Carolinian, but Senator Tillis doesn’t consider me so,” Diez said. “And truthfully, it’s really disheartening to hear someone who represents me—who has a responsibility to represent the Latino community—continue to fail in that duty.”

This isn’t the first time Tillis has shared dubious wisdom about public health. In 2015, the senator proclaimed he had “no problem” with restaurant employees not washing their hands as long as the establishments posted a sign declaring they didn’t have to. W

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July 22, 2020

13

DENIAL OF SERVICE

Latinx people with COVID-19 face unique challenges in getting health care providers to take them seriously BY PAUL BLEST backtalk@indyweek.com

K

eny Murillo could not believe what he was hearing.

It was the morning of June 23. The 26-year-old medical interpreter had taken his father, Saul, to a Durham hospital with shortness of breath, a cough, rising blood pressure, and low oxygen levels less than an hour before. These were classic symptoms of a worsening case of COVID19, and other people in the family, including Keny himself, had recently suffered their own battles with the illness. Now, the same hospital was calling and saying Saul—who doesn’t speak English, and was communicating through one of the hospital’s interpreters—was well enough to go home, and that Keny should come pick him up. Something was wrong.

Keny and Saul Murillo are just some of the tens of thousands of Latinx North Carolinians who’ve contracted COVID-19.

As of July 20, Hispanic or Latinx people constituted at least 43 percent of North Carolina’s more than 100,000 COVID-19 cases, despite making up about a tenth of the state’s population. That number 14

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could even be an undercount; ethnicity isn’t known for more than 35,000 of the state’s cases, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS).

But it’s not just the high rate of the coronavirus among Latinx people that worries public health experts. At a press conference last week, Viviana Martinez-Bianchi, a Durham doctor and adviser to the NCDHHS, said she’s heard complaints from the Latinx community that people are being sent home from the hospital despite being sick enough, in their view, to be admitted.

Saul Murillo was very nearly one of those people. By the time he contracted COVID, the virus had already ripped through his family. Along with Keny, Saul’s wife and daughter (a physician visiting from Honduras), and his two grandsons also came down with COVID symptoms. But it quickly became clear that Saul’s illness was worse.

He had developed a cough, and Keny’s sister couldn’t hear his right lung when she tried to listen with her stethoscope, suggesting a potential collapse. Earlier that morning,

around 5:00 a.m., Saul’s oxygen levels had dropped to dangerously low 89 percent.

Dropping Saul off at the emergency room was one of the hardest things Keny had ever had to do in his life. “It just hurts your soul,� he says. “The sense of helplessness knowing that I couldn’t go in with him.�

Too anxious and distraught to immediately go home, Keny stopped at a gas station to go for a walk and collect his thoughts.

That’s when his phone rang. Someone from the hospital—Saul told Keny it was a nurse—explained that his father’s oxygen levels were 93 percent, much higher than it had been a few hours earlier. The hospital was going to discharge him. (The hospital isn’t being named at the family’s request.) “I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it,� Keny said. “I said to her, ‘If his oxygen levels were 93 at home, I wouldn’t have brought him in.’�

After a tense back and forth, Keny said he began to dig deeper into what the hospital had actually done, and wasn’t reassured. “I asked her if she’d listened to his lungs.

She said she hadn’t gotten there yet,� he

says. “I said, what is his blood pressure?�

Saul’s blood pressure was 157 over 98, which the American Heart Association defines as a stage 2 hypertension, one step below crisis levels. “I don’t feel so good,� Saul told Keny on the phone. “They had me walk a little distance and I felt like I wasn’t going to make it.� Saul was also starting to suffer from a headache and had numbness in his arms.

In Keny’s view, he was quickly deteriorating.

For whatever reason—be it Keny’s advocacy for his father or Saul’s clearly worsening state—the hospital never discharged Saul and decided to admit him for two nights for observation. At first, things did not get better: On June 25, he was transferred to the ICU, and the doctors told the family they were going to intubate him. (During his stay in the hospital, Saul tested positive for COVID-19.) “His voice was so weak, we could barely hear him and could sense how scared he was,� Keny says, recalling the last phone conversation before his father was intubated. “We did a really quick prayer. We just put everything in God’s hands.�

Saul Murillo was lucky. He was intubated until July 1 (many COVID-19 patients are intubated for a week or longer) and was moved from the ICU to a regular room on July 5. He was discharged on July 9, more than two weeks after he entered the hospital. Keny says his father is slowly but surely getting better and regaining his strength.

Keny has turned the scenario over in his mind, and he’s mainly relieved that he was the one the hospital decided to call to pick his father up that night. “If they had called my mom and told her through the interpreter to pick him up, my mom would’ve been delighted and thrilled [and would have picked him up],� he hypothesized. “The next day, he would’ve gotten worse to the point where we had to call 911 or risked him not making it to the hospital.�

H

ealth inequities along racial, ethnic, and class lines have always existed in the United States. About one in five Latinx people in the United States were uninsured in 2018, twice the rate of the non-Latinx population, according to the CDC. The pandemic has simply made these systemic faults impossible to ignore. The numbers are stark in North Carolina: In Wake County, Hispanic or Latinx people made up 44 percent of nearly 9,000 cases as of July 20; in Orange County, they made up 29 percent of cases (the ethnicity was unknown in 27 percent of cases); and in Durham County, the hardest hit of all of North Carolina’s most-populous counties,

Hispanic and Latinx patients constituted 62 percent of cases despite making up just 14 percent of the county’s population.

Some, such as Republican Senator Thom Tillis, have tried to explain these numbers away by framing the issue as one of personal responsibility. “We do have some concerns that in the Hispanic population we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask,” Tillis said in a telephone town hall last Tuesday.

Tillis’s statement is tinged with racism. But it also ignores the many complex factors driving the virus’s racially disproportionate impact, as Martinez-Bianchi explained in a phone interview. She serves on a state DHHS task force and co-founded Duke’s Latin-19 group in March, a coalition of doctors, researchers, and other community members advocating for the Latinx community in its fight against COVID-19.

“A lot of Latinos are essential workers,” she says. “A lot of them continue to go to work in meatpacking, construction, and [other workplaces] where COVID-19 can be easily transmittable where people work too close together.”

Another issue, Martinez-Bianchi says, is that the concept of isolating with “family” doesn’t always mean the same thing.

“In the Latino community, that may mean the whole extended family. Mom, dad, kids, auntie, grandma, many family members living under the same roof,” she says. And, of course, people with fewer means sometimes aren’t able to isolate themselves, especially “in a 700-square-foot apartment where six people are living.”

Martinez-Bianchi has had to reassure people who are worried that COVID-19 patients only go to the hospital to die—an understandable fear, given the horror stories that have come out of hospitals during the pandemic. (Keny Murillo says he has had similar conversations.) Martinez-Bianchi recently spent hours on the phone with a Guatemalan-American patient who refused to go to the hospital because he had only recently received his citizenship papers and was able to bring his two children to the U.S. “This is the first time I’ve had my two children with me,” she says he told her. “I’d rather die at home with them than at the hospital.” She says she was ultimately able to convince him to go but added: “There are thousands I haven’t spoken to.”

D

uring a press conference last Thursday, a Telemundo Charlotte reporter told Dr. Mandy Cohen, the head of the state Department of Health and Human Services, that they had received “multiple allegations” that immigrants were being denied

“

THE ISSUE BOILS DOWN TO SYSTEMIC RACISM.

care for COVID-19 symptoms at hospitals due to a lack of health insurance.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, was passed by Congress in 1986 and requires emergency departments to treat anyone who walks in. It is also an unfunded mandate, and studies in recent years have indicated that the problem it was responding to, known as “patient dumping,” is still happening in American hospitals, albeit in a less transparent fashion.

In emails, Duke Health said they “weren’t aware of any instances of community members not receiving necessary care.”

WakeMed said, “We can assure you that WakeMed has not turned anyone away. We will never turn a patient away or delay care to patients who are in need of emergency treatment.”

Cohen reiterated in the press conference that emergency rooms are required to treat people under federal law, but said, “We do know that there are access issues for folks who don’t have insurance.”

The Spanish-language North Carolina newspaper Qué Pasa reported recently that one essential worker, a construction worker in Alamance County, was denied a COVID19 test from a CVS because he didn’t have a Social Security number or a driver’s license, contrary to the state’s guidelines. Another woman told the paper that it took three tests and two hospital visits for her to find out that she was positive.

These reports are not just limited to North Carolina. The New York Times reported in April about a 65-year-old Latinx man who went to three New York-area hospitals before finally being admitted to the third.

By then, it was too late to save him.

In May, the Des Moines Register reported a 54-year-old white man had died under similar circumstances.

Martinez-Bianchi, who serves on the DHHS’s Task Force on Historically Marginalized Populations, says she had even heard stories of people being “dropped [off at] the hospital, and if they didn’t have a culturally appropriate interpreter, they were overwhelmed by the questions and told they weren’t sick enough.”

Martinez-Bianchi says there were a few potential scenarios that might lead someone to be turned away at the hospital. One

is that someone who had COVID-19 genuinely didn’t need to be hospitalized even though they felt sick, which has been a problem throughout the country, as even “mild” COVID-19 cases (such as Keny’s) can lay someone out for weeks and continue to impact them after the primary symptoms have disappeared.

But someone might also be sick enough to be hospitalized but get turned away, either because their pain isn’t being taken seriously or because language and cultural barriers are preventing them from advocating for themselves.

If someone is turned away due to a lack of health insurance or a perceived lack of health insurance, Martinez-Bianchi says, “that’s horrifying.”

Dr. Leonor Corsino, an endocrinologist and assistant professor of medicine who leads Duke’s Center for Research to Advance Health Equity (REACH), has spent much of her career studying bias in healthcare. “[One] way I’ve seen this is that providers will make assumptions [about] the patient’s ability to pay for medication,” Corsino says.

“They assume you don’t have insurance and consciously or unconsciously make recommendations based on their assumptions.”

In emails, the public health departments of Wake, Orange, and Durham counties said they hadn’t received reports of sick Latinx people being turned away from hospitals, though the same perceived language and legal barriers that sometimes complicate the decision to seek healthcare exist in the bureaucracy as well.

“The issue boils down to systemic racism,” Orange County community relations director Todd McGee said by email. “The discriminatory rules, policies, etc. that make up our society are ones that we often don’t think about because they have become so ingrained in our society.”

I

f there’s any silver lining to this crisis, it’s that long-ignored inequalities in healthcare are finally coming to light.

Corsino said that REACH is working on a project to help providers acknowledge their implicit bias and change their behavior, though she acknowledges this is a controversial proposition.

“It takes a lot of effort [to change behavior], and there hasn’t been a lot of research

on how we can do that with implicit bias, so a lot of new information will emerge from this project,” Corsino says.

On a systemic level, Corsino is helping with a proposal to offer advanced medical Spanish as part of Duke’s curriculum so new doctors can “freely communicate with their Spanish-speaking patients without the need of an interpreter during the visit,” as well as another proposal to offer a Spanish-language version of Duke’s electronic records and communications system for patients.

At the local level, Wake, Durham, and Orange all said they’re working with local community groups, organizations, and businesses to educate and communicate with Latinx, immigrant, and refugee communities about COVID-19 and its effects.

“These community partners are also well trusted in the community, and this is incredibly important because public/government offices have a history of discriminatory behavior. We are trying to make sure that people know that they can trust us,” McGee says.

Statewide, the NCDHHS awarded grants to five nonprofits, advocacy groups, and media organizations in late June. Earlier this month, the NCDHHS pledged to deploy up to 300 free testing sites targeted to Latinx, Black, and Indigenous communities that have been especially impacted by COVID19. The state also launched a website last week to help Spanish speakers decide on whether or not to get tested for COVID-19 and to monitor their symptoms.

While Martinez-Bianchi says she’s conscious about the problems that could be caused by providers speaking out against inadequate conditions in their facilities— doctors and nurses all over the country have been alleging retaliation by their employers almost since the beginning of the pandemic—she believes it’s time to survey healthcare workers so the task force and the state can understand the “depth and seriousness” of the problem.

“Just like how we survey for personal protective equipment, we should start surveying health workers about the care being provided to people,” she says. “How do we convey to administrators what not providing care to people means? Why didn’t we put more testing in the middle of Black and Latinx communities? Why didn’t we start with free testing? This is part of the complexity of working with pandemic response.”

In a photo provided by the Murillo family, Saul lies in an ICU hospital bed hooked up to a ventilator. He’s unconscious. What seems like dozens of wires plugged into his body are keeping him alive.

“People should see this is no joke,” Saul told Keny in Spanish. “This is serious.” W INDYweek.com

July 22, 2020

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1,000 Words 16

July 22, 2020

It Eats Time PHOTOGRAPHY + WORDS BY BRIAN HOWE

You know the dogwood and the longleaf pine, but did you know North Carolina has an official carnivorous plant? The Venus flytrap seems too tropical for our mild climate, but it’s been here much longer than kudzu, a vine from Asia that put down rhizomes in the U.S. only 150 years ago. Southern suburbanites grew it for decoration, farmers for erosion control, and from there it spread out into the unruly green beard we see everywhere today.

Kudzu is as hungry as the flytrap, except that it’s a chronovore—it eats time. Its runners can grow a foot per day. Right now, they’re spinning their invisible, rampant organic tempo on the empty wheel wells and blank dials of a mid-20th-century car rusting in the woods outside of Tuscaloosa-Lakewood.

To find it, enter the narrow forest path off the sidewalk at McDowell and Pickett, then bear left at the first blue dot painted on a tree and walk for about a minute. The car faces toward the road through an unbroken wall of trees and foliage, as if it were an ancient monument the woods grew up around. See for yourself—but hurry. At a foot a day, time is running out, even if you can’t see it. W

INDYweek.com

M U SIC

Her Take: On Carolina Hip Hop

It is not just celebrities or mainstream rap artists who use rap and hip-hop as a form of expression and a means toward resistance. Right here in North Carolina, independent local artists have relied on the culture not only to grieve the unjustified killings of Black folk at the hands of the police but also to resist systemic racism and evoke change.

ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

Good Conscience North Carolina hip-hop artists use their voices to say Black Lives Matter BY KYESHA JENNINGS music@indyweek.com

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ip-hop emerged directly from living conditions in the Bronx in the 1970s. As in Durham, urban renewal and the construction of a highway—the Cross Bronx Expressway—led to the decimation of the South Bronx and the displacement of mostly Black and Brown residents. White flight and socioeconomic disparities led to increased crime and poverty rates. Black and Latino youth used the limited resources they had to create what we know as hip-hop.

Although the music in the ‘70s and early ‘80s was typically upbeat and intended for parties, there were also songs with socially conscious messages. More than 40 years later, hip-hop has produced many songs across its sub-genres that document the racial and sociopolitical ills of America.

The late radical poet and playwright Amiri Baraka reminds us that “Negro music and Negro life in America were always the result of a reaction to, and an adaptation of, whatever America Negroes were given or could secure for themselves.” Thus, hip-hop is a direct descendent of Black American music, from Negro spirituals to jazz, blues, soul, and funk.

Troya: “Black Boy” | @TroyaNC Representing Wilson, Troya’s “Black Boy” is a love letter to little Black boys, reminding them and the world of their value. The song begins with a chilling gospel-like plea, “Said I need ya to make it back home.” Troya offers advice to two different Black teens who are making vast decisions. The music video juxtaposes their seemingly different lives, displaying the familiar “good kid” and “street kid” narrative. We’re led to believe that the “street kid” will lose his life to gun violence, but instead, Troya chooses an alternate ending that’s a reality for many: the killings of unarmed Black children whose unlimited potential is cut short by the police. Knowing how often Black children are targeted in general—the school-to-prison pipeline, stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration, and so on—the repetition of Troya’s warnings evokes an emotional response.

Kaze4letters: “Wake Up.” | @Kaze4letters “Wake Up.” comes from Kaze4letters, a Triangle hip-hop veteran and the host of 97.9 The Hill’s “Inside Voices with Kevin ‘Kaze’ Thomas.” The new single is a dedication to victims of police brutality. “To know the history of the Black experience in America and to come to terms with that reality in 2020, you cannot ignore the three most recent cases of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd,” the multi-hyphenate rapper says.

“In this moment, silence is compliance.”

Ray Emmanuel: “Black” | @Rayemmanuel At age 15, Ray Emmanuel is fully aware of the racial and social injustices Black people have experienced. The Louisburg rapper is heavily influenced by Fayetteville’s own J. Cole, and like his idol, he’s been super intentional about his messaging. After the deaths of Arbery and Floyd,

Ray posted tribute freestyles on his Instagram to his 142K followers, rapping, “Look at me in my eyes tell me what you see/Do you see a Black dude that was running the streets?/ Ever since I was a kid I was running for dreams/Never knew that running can be the reason that I was deceased.”

Later, he takes on the cliché that all lives matter: “Yeah we know all lives matter, but why the lives treated different be the lives that’s Blacker?”

Eternal the MC & Shame: “Enough” @Eternalthemc & @iamshame This collaborative single from Eternal the MC and Shame is a direct response to the racial climate of today’s America. The song was commissioned by TW2 Inc., a nonprofit music-and-art-education satellite program in Raleigh. “When I saw the footage of George Floyd, it was by accident, but I was enraged,” says said Eternal, who was recently featured in the INDY’s story on Cypher Univercity. “I felt like this is enough. TW2 Inc. wanted us to focus on our communities.

That’s when I decided to focus on Raleigh.”

On his verse, he expresses his disappointment in Raleigh’s government, naming the mayor and the police chief specifically.

Shame, meanwhile, says his late brother’s spirit encouraged him to speak up. “I felt my brother speaking to me, telling me not to give up and to speak on a subject that definitely needed to be spoken on,” he says.

“Black AF” presented by Carolina Waves | @Carolinawaves Mir.I.Am (Miriam Tolbert), founder of the award-winning local entertainment platform Carolina Waves, curated and produced a cypher demonstrating the talent of North Carolina artists. The socially conscious cypher features rappers 2FLY KNG, TAGEM, Lena Jackson, and Jooselord. “I wanted to put together a group of talented individuals to timestamp this moment in history,” says Mir.I.Am. “Our generation needs to document the moment musically and on record, like previous generations did during their fight for civil rights and equality, and against war and police brutality. I’ve pulled together a specific roster of artists whose music addresses the injustices we face as Black people to speak to the cause.” W Her Take: On Carolina Hip Hop is a new recurring column by Kyesha Jennings.

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July 22, 2020

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John Lewis in the documentary Good Trouble PHOTO BY BEN ARNON/COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY.

A Song for John Lewis Only the saddest country music can express my grief over the passing of the civil rights hero

BY BARRY SAUNDERS backtalk@indyweek.com

FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

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INDYWEEK.COM 18

July 22, 2020

INDYweek.com

hen it comes to the saddest country music song of all time, there are only two possible answers: It’s either “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams or “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones.

Fight me.

Think about it: Just reciting “Did you ever see a robin weep when leaves begin to die?

Like me a lost the will to live/I’m so lonesome I could cry” is enough to send you running for a Jack & Coke or make you hide all of your sharp utensils.

And when, in the middle of a mournful dirge about a man whose love could only be ended by death, George recites, “She came to see him one last time/We all wondered if she would/And it kept running through my mind/This time he’s over her for good”—man, you just don’t want to be bothered after that.

Both of those songs are playing on the Wurlitzer jukebox in my head right now, 10 minutes after learning that Congressman John Lewis died on July 17, 2020.

When my buddy Dwayne texted around midnight to tell me of his passing, my first thought was, “Man, you know better than to answer the phone after midnight: It’s never good news.”

My second thought and return text was, “He stopped loving us today.”

Nothing but love—for his country, for his race, for humanity—could have made someone endure without bitterness the indignities and physical violence that Lewis endured. Fifty-five years later, you still can’t look at what happened to him on Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama without wincing.

In a comprehensive obituary, The Washington Post reported, “When a former supporter of the Ku Klux Klan named Elwin Wilson popped out of history in 2009, asking forgiveness for having severely beaten then-Freedom Rider Lewis in 1961 at a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, S.C., Mr. Lewis took him on three TV shows to show that ‘love is stronger than hate.’”

Most of us? We’d have demonstrated the power of a Louisville Slugger upside Elwin Wilson’s head—or at least said something bad about his mama—and then possibly have forgiven him.

I only met Lewis twice. I think I startled him the first time by sneaking up on him at an airport and enthusiastically telling him how much I appreciated him. But I feel like I lost a friend. Shaking Lewis’s hand gave me a spiritual sensation that I’d only felt once before, when I met Russell Thompkins Jr. after a Stylistics concert in Gary, Indiana.

Both are heroes, but for different reasons.

When Lewis ran for Congress to represent Georgia’s Fifth District, many Georgians I knew preferred the smooth, urbane Julian Bond—a warrior in his own right, to be sure. It wasn’t unusual to hear bougie “colleged” people criticize Lewis’s at-times tortured pronunciation and syntax, or the fact that his subjects didn’t always agree with his verbs.

Upon hearing such criticism, I pointed out—promptly, profanely and proudly—that while his critics were taking piano lessons, learning the latest dances, or fretting over which color socks to wear to their proms, Lewis was out getting his head beat in and stomped and kicked so that others would have opportunities to vote or study how to conjugate a verb.

To me, his voice, during our short conversation, sounded like what I imagine an orchestra of angels sounds like.

When Lewis was criticized for not being “Black enough”—yes, a man who was battered and brutalized by the law for being Black was criticized by other Blacks for not being “Black enough”—his response, as that Post obituary noted, was “I follow my conscience, not my complexion.”

Since he was known as the “Conscience of Congress,” that is a perfect epitaph.

Here’s another one: He stopped loving us today. W

M U SIC

Reviews

LIBBY RODENBOUGH: SPECTACLE OF LOVE

MANHOLE: PISS ON MY HEART

HHHH [May 29; Sleepy Cat Records]

HHH [June; self-released]

Under the Dome Libby Rodenbough’s spectacular new look and Manhole’s politically charged sound collage

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH AND WILL ATKINSON music@indyweek.com

Y

ears in the making, Spectacle of Love is the fantastic solo debut from Mipso fiddler and vocalist Libby Rodenbough, who has helped guide the group’s string band sound into more-adventurous territory since she officially joined in 2014. Taking advantage of a larger palette of instrumentation and a wide range of collaborators, Rodenbough’s inventive and intimate songwriting is cast in new light over the album’s 13 tracks, which frequently forego Americana associations in favor of lush, evocative pop.

Spectacle immediately shakes off any lingering expectations of a folk album, progressive or otherwise, as the ornately ornamented opening track, “How Come You Call Me,” begins with a jaunty piano lead. It’s soon joined by Danny Abrams’s warm, woozy bass clarinet before Rodenbough ruminates on relationship roles.

The chorus shines with gorgeous harmonies from Kate Rhudy and Bowerbirds’ Phil Moore, while the instrumental break showcases strings more fitting for a symphony hall than a fiddler’s convention.

Though well-versed in old-time traditions, the closest Rodenbough comes to them is on the stirring, unconventional fiddle duet “Under the U-Bahn”, featuring Tatiana Hargreaves on five-string violin, which launches directly into the dreamy “Country Jam,” with Rodenbough’s gentle strings and layered vocals complemented by ethereal Mellotron and an OP-1 synthesizer.

Riding a drum machine beat and a bubbling bassline, the brightly ornamented “Colors” is the album’s easiest earworm despite its explorations of identity and insecurity delivered with melancholic resignation. The lead single, “Tell Me How” takes a page from Tom Waits’s book of mournful late-night balladry, perfectly pairing Rodenbough’s forlorn lyrics with a sparse skeleton of piano and acoustic strums, gracefully accented with a simple rhythm and gentle harmonies. It’s one of several tracks that use a neat recording trick courtesy of

a quirky local landmark—the massive metal geodesic Picnic Dome at Durham’s Museum of Life and Science, under which Rodenbough’s vocals, at Moore’s suggestion, were played on a Bluetooth speaker, with the echo recorded and used as reverb.

Though subtle, it’s one of many times throughout Spectacle when Rodenbough’s songs are elevated by the contributions from a wrecking crew of familiar locals.

While providing the welcome opportunity to hear Rodenbough take lead and show off her songwriting chops over the course of a full LP, Spectacle is less a solo venture than Rodenbough surrounding herself with a different musical family, guiding them with spectacular results.

—Spencer Griffith

I

n 1988, Canadian composer John Oswald released Plunderphonics, a landmark experiment in unlicensed audio sampling that used songs by massively popular artists as source material.

One of the most striking tracks is “Pretender,” which turns Dolly Parton’s rendition of the doo-wop classic “The Great Pretender” into putty. Parton’s vocal gradually changes speed, shifting from a low croon to a helium-voiced squeal and back again. The effect is eerie yet beguiling—an aural uncanny valley—and the original song takes on a new shape in the process. Unsurprisingly, record labels were less enthusiastic, and all undistributed copies of the release were destroyed.

I found myself thinking of “Pretender” during the final seconds of *piss on my heart*, a dizzying 17-minute sound collage by Durham’s Mimi Luse, released under the name Manhole. In this case, it’s Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ bland 1963 hit “Sugar Shack” that gets mangled, slouching out from under the squall of noise like a broken wind-up toy.

Coming after nine tracks that flit between militant post-punk, found sound, and industrial techno, the moment passes almost before it registers. But it’s a fitting coda for a project concerned with the relationship between sound and source, property and ownership.

Manhole uses found sound as raw material to highlight a different sort of plunder: that of capitalism, racism, and the spectacle of violence in America.

Created during the recent national wave of protests (with all Bandcamp proceeds going to bail funds), the album proceeds in short, urgent fragments that dissolve before we can get too comfortable. “Autozone” refers to the burning of a Minneapolis AutoZone after George Floyd was killed by the police. “Communist Time Signature” includes recordings of the Durham protests that toppled a Confederate monument in 2017. “Cage to Cage” addresses animal cruelty. Connections are drawn between all these struggles, reflected in how sounds brush against one another and move in and out of focus.

As ideas come and go, the same insistent pulse moves beneath it all: a chromatic bass line gives way to a hammering kick drum, which finds its echo in the chants of protestors, who march side by side with a blasted-out, industrial percussion loop. As with Luse’s punk band, Cochonne, some of the fun comes from untangling the dense web of references and influences: the musique concrète of composers like Pierre Schaeffer, the poetry of Durham’s Jessica Q. Stark, the no-wave performance art duo Rosa Yemen, the post-punk band Pylon.

But it’s no intellectual chore—this record is nothing if not visceral. It’s a call to arms, a cry against a “degraded world,” and its intensity, at least until “Sugar Shack,” never flags. —Will Atkinson W INDYweek.com

July 22, 2020

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July 22, 2020

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SC R E E N

AMULET

H 1/2 Opening Friday, July 24

Amulet

PHOTO BY NICK WALL/COURTESY OF MAGNET RELEASING

Bad Luck

SUPPORT LO C A L

Amulet is a tedious indie-horror flick disguised as a serious film about refugees BY RYAN VU arts@indyweek.com

T

he best horror of the last decade has been as influenced by international art film as it has by the genre’s more commercial conventions. Yet for every indie horror masterpiece like Get Out or The Babadook, there are several more like writer-director Romola Garai’s vague supernatural thriller, Amulet, a film that strains for unearned thematic significance at the expense of competent storytelling with borderline offensive results.

Though the film is mainly set in London, a disorienting, vibe-y opening montage centers on an ethnically ambiguous soldier’s (Alec Secareanu) traumatic confrontation with a woman (Angeliki Papoulia) in a geographically ambiguous wilderness during an unnamed war. Aside from their names, Tomaz and Miriam, and a few clues suggesting Eastern Europe, little else is ever revealed about these characters’ backgrounds or where they met. Which is just as well, as the only motivation Garai seems to have for choosing them is to keep us from mistaking this Serious Film About Refugees for a mere horror movie.

Refugees being miserable in London is all the film seems to be about until almost halfway through. A nun (Imelda Staunton) offers to help the semi-homeless Tomaz by introducing him to a young woman named

Magda (Carla Juri), who also happens to be from an unspecified foreign country and needs help looking after the large, decaying house where she cares for her dying mother (Anah Ruddin). Tomaz’s awkward flirtations with Magda and PTSD-fueled flashbacks about Miriam take up long stretches of screen time, but without filling any gaps in their characterizations or making us care what happens to them.

The inevitable supernatural events are technically well-handled and impose some basic plot structure: Tomaz has to save Magda from some sort of demonic entity.

A big third-act reveal is meant to make us rethink everything, but the larger themes of the film are so vague until then that even some imaginative special effects in the last five minutes feel anticlimactic: A story that seemed to be about nothing in particular turns out to have been about something else.

Garai’s true intentions could have supported a fine horror film. Her decision to exploit the figure of the refugee for little more than fake gravitas and narrative misdirection undermines whatever potential Amulet might have had. Garai has the ability to build atmosphere, but without a minimal narrative backbone, what we’re left with is all distraction and no meat. W

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