[State legislation is seeking to impose limits on discussions of
racism in North Carolina, even as one city ramps up its effort to
compensate Black residents.]
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AS ASHEVILLE PURSUES REPARATIONS, NORTH CAROLINA SEEKS SILENCE  
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Brentin Mock
November 1, 2023
City Lab - Bloomberg
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_ State legislation is seeking to impose limits on discussions of
racism in North Carolina, even as one city ramps up its effort to
compensate Black residents. _

The intersection of Market and Eagle streets, where Black
Asheville’s cultural and financial center once stood before it was
razed during urban renewal policies., Brentin Mock

 

Roughly 200 people gathered at the University of North Carolina at
Asheville recently to discuss the city's commitment to local
reparations. It was the first summit of its kind and an important step
in Asheville's plan to compensate Black residents for decades of
structural racism.

As the city ramps up its reparations effort, the state of North
Carolina is moving in a reverse direction, with state legislation
seeking to limit discussions about racism, especially in government
and academia.

A new law passed in June forbids any employee of the North Carolina
state government – which includes the University of North Carolina
system – from discussing racism-related concepts
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particularly in hiring practices.

In March, lawmakers in North Carolina’s state House of
Representatives also passed a bill that prohibits public schools
teachers from “promoting
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ideas related to exposing systemic and historical racism. For example,
teachers would be restrained from teaching concepts that say, “An
individual, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears
responsibility for actions committed in the past” that harmed
another race. The bill hasn’t yet been passed by the senate.

In March, lawmakers in North Carolina’s state House of
Representatives also passed a bill that prohibits public schools
teachers from “promoting
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ideas related to exposing systemic and historical racism. For example,
teachers would be restrained from teaching concepts that say, “An
individual, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears
responsibility for actions committed in the past” that harmed
another race. The bill hasn’t yet been passed by the senate.

Asked what impact these bills might have on the reparations effort,
North Carolina state Senator Warren Daniel, sponsor of the anti-DEI
law that passed in June, said, “I would hope any professors engaging
the public on reparations would stick to informative discussions,
instead of pushing the discriminatory notion that solely because of
one’s race, an individual should bear responsibility for the actions
committed in the past by other members of the same race.”

Reparations Leaders Undeterred

Asheville voted in July 2020 to create a reparations commission that
would investigate how the city damaged individual Black families and
entire Black neighborhoods through racist policies. This has involved
more than two years of unearthing historical documents, property
deeds, financial records, tax sheets and city ordinances.

 

A mural in Triangle Park, in downtown Asheville, remembers the
financial and cultural center of the city’s Black communities that
was destroyed under a federal urban renewal plan. Photographer:
Brentin Mock/Bloomberg CityLab

The new and proposed laws haven’t yet stopped any of this
reparations work at the city level, said Dwight Mullen, chair of the
city’s reparations commission. The commission members mostly have
just ignored talk from conservatives about clamping down on how racism
is taught and addressed in the state, said Mullen.

But both Mullen and Ruffin are already seeing the effect of the
proposals on other areas of their work. Ruffin said state lawmakers
have begun querying the university about how much funding is spent on
DEI initiatives and about what kinds of questions the Africana Studies
department asks when hiring professors and other staff.

Mullen has become embroiled in a federal civil rights complaint
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against Asheville PEAK Academy
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organization Western North Carolina Citizens for Equality named
Mullen, a PEAK Academy founder and board member, in the complaint,
which claims that the K-3 charter school employs “racial quotas”
that exclude teachers and students of certain races.

“It is completely and justifiably legal to — in order to reverse
and address racial harms perpetuated by the government — to use race
as a means of addressing it,” said Mullen.

UNC School of Law professor James doesn’t think either of these
bills would pass constitutional muster if challenged in court. But
that’s “almost besides the point,” she says. “The point is to
make people stop talking about these realities, which is a problem
because if you cannot talk about race and recognize how it operates
then you cannot do things to address its ongoing impacts.”

‘Local Governments Cannot Be the Complete Solution’

Resolutions that the city
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Asheville and surrounding county
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call for the creation of a reparations commission to investigate
racial harms, and for a report that outlines those harms and possible
remedies. The commission will then make recommendations by spring
2024
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While Asheville was one of the few places in the South that did not
have a slave plantation system, reparations advocates here say other
government initiatives, such as segregation, Jim Crow ordinances,
redlining and urban renewal devastated whole Black communities. In the
1950s and 1960s, hundreds of Black-owned homes, schools and health
clinics were razed and a thriving Black business district was
destroyed to build state highways
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Reparations advocates say those injustices are responsible for many of
the racial disparities seen in Asheville today. According to
the State of Black Asheville report
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the cancer mortality rate from 2011 to 2015 was 218.9 per 100,000 for
BLack residents compared to 155.1 for whites; the average per-capita
income was $15,535 for Black residents compared to $28,480 for whites;
and, as of 2017, there were just 858 Black-owned businesses compared
to 26,122 white-owned.

Representatives of Asheville’s reparation commission discuss their
recommendations at an Oct. 7 summit for community
feedback.Photographer: Brentin Mock/Bloomberg CityLab

The reparations commission is focusing on five areas for
investigation
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criminal justice, economic development, housing, education and health.
Some of the recommendations they are currently considering include
funding for families impoverished by having members incarcerated;
grants for Black-owned businesses; better salaries for Black teachers;
payments to Black families that would be used exclusively for mental
health support; and “reparations land” — properties and lots
acquired exclusively for Black homeowners and entrepreneurs.

There are also non-compensation recommendations that focus more on
policy, such as calls to eliminate racial disparities in the court
system, to recruit and retain more Black teachers, and for the
creation of a Black Economic Development Center to train Black
business owners.

As a local government in a conservative state, the city may ultimately
be constrained by which of these recommendations it can institute and
how. In an email sent three days before the summit, the reparations
commission cautioned that “local governments cannot be the complete
solution to the problems faced by the Black community” due, in part,
to legal limitations.

“In the end, the City and County stand with the Commission in
focusing on the goal of investing in and empowering Black Asheville
through the reparations process,” the letter states. “Yes, some
proposals may be beyond our legal ability, and working through these
challenges is simply part of the complex and important work being done
by the Commission, the community, and our local governments. We remain
focused on what is possible, rather than what is not.”

_BRENTIN MOCK is a writer and editor for CityLab in Pittsburgh,
focused on issues of racial equity, economic inequities, and
environment/climate justice._

_Get the CITYLAB newsletter
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* North Carolina
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* Racism
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* reparations
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* legislation
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* Systemic racism
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