Last week, Chris Heavener broke the story about how Discover Durham commissioned a Bull City anthem from rapper J. Gunn, then asked for changes—including making the song less hip-hop and removing a lyric about the city being “black and proud.”
David Hewitt thinks the tourism authority made the right call: “I find the ‘Durham, black and proud’ lyric to be excluding to white folks. If you think that makes me the racist, you have a problem.”
“The lyric isn’t excluding anyone,” counters Sophia Nell. “It’s expressing pride in Durham’s culture and history, which is the whole point of commissioning a song for the sesquicentennial, is it not? And who did they think they were hiring, anyway? Why would they hire J. Gunn if they didn’t want hip-hop?”
“Great optics and sense of perspective, Discover Durham,” writes James Gheen. “Are you gonna try to hire Charlie Daniels to write the song instead?”
Over in Raleigh, Leigh Tauss reported that the city manager kept the Human Relations Commission’s proposal for a civilian police oversight board from the city council—in part, it seems, because any oversight board with teeth would run afoul of state law.
“[The police] work for us,” writes Chris Howell. “We deserve—should there be reason—access to their records. They can just hide bad cops this way. They should be held to a higher standard, as public employees who can kill without much oversight as it is.”
“I don’t see any problem with requiring a lawsuit to disclose personnel file information,” writes Benjamin Nelson. “In today’s climate of search and destroy for non-contextual or nuanced data, I would hope this information wasn’t available for every keyboard justice warrior cherry-picking facts to suit their own confirmation bias. Perhaps I’m misreading the parameters and am not a lawyer, but as long as there is a path for oversight in warranted cases, that should be enough.”
Watt Jones argues that the public shouldn’t have access to police records: “As it should be. Those records by law are protected, as everyone, including police officers, has every right to privacy, much the same as any citizen. If there is wrongdoing, let the courts hold them accountable, not some civilian board that wants to be in everyone’s business. Council members are by law permitted to go into executive closed session to discuss personnel matters. Any ongoing criminal investigations records and files are not public record. All state employees are protected by privacy under the State Personnel Act. You want to open those up, too?”
Last week’s cover story by Jordan Green explored the legacy of white supremacy at North Carolina’s most prestigious universities—and the fact that black enrollment at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest is less than 10 percent of the student body.
“I take grave issue with your headline broad-brushing American history, as if all of America was not based on white supremacy,” writes F. Marion Redd. “The entire English adventure in North America—from the Virginia Company of 1606 to the Massachusetts Bay Company to the Carolina Proprietary of 1663—were all formed by white men. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution at the time of writing imply that rights only applied to free white men. That’s the way it was before, and at the time the universities were founded. Fortunately for all of us, men and women, black, white, and green, times have changed—radically. Instead of focusing on the divisive racist past—which is what it is—why not focus on the future?”
“The idea that Duke, Wake Forest, and UNC-Chapel Hill are ‘more prestigious’ than other universities and colleges, simply because more rich kids from powerful families go to those schools, is whack,” writes Charlie Burnett. “There are a whole host of other colleges and universities in North Carolina, and the idea that they are, somehow, ‘less prestigious’ is pure classism.”
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