Lessons from North Carolina

Gene R. Nichol

Description

• Advance reader copies 
• Author tour concentrated in North Carolina 
• Goodreads giveaway 
• Social media and online campaigns 
• Outreach to social justice and activist communities 
• Op-ed locally, regionally, nationally
  

North Carolina had a big, unfortunate headstart on now-common attacks on democratic institutions—the lessons learned as NC makes its way out of the chaos can benefit other states. 

Attacks from the radical right will plague the entire nation for the foreseeable future, and now is the time to seek out the causes and find the path to remedy them. In his most personal book yet, Indecent Assembly author Gene Nichol, takes on, unsurprisingly, race, religion, poverty, higher education, constitutionalism, movement politics, the meaning of North Carolina proper. He forecasts the future of democratic promise in the state, the South, and the United States. 

This book is not reportage, but rather a cri de coeur, with inspiration and aspiration for the next generation.

• Introduction 
• Chapter One - Rejecting the American Promise: The Re-Embrace of Racial Supremacy 
• Chapter Two - Politics, Tribe, and (Unchristian) Religion 
• Chapter Three - Politics and Poverty 
• Chapter Four - Destroying a Priceless Gem 
• Chapter Five - Movement vs. Partisan Politics 
• Chapter Six - The Limits of Law 
• Chapter Seven - Democracy, Equality, and the Future of America
  

Sujets

• American Government
• Political Science
• Civil Rights
• Partido Demócrata de los Estados Unidos
• Misconduct
• State
• Federal government of the United States
• Civil and political rights
• Democrat
• Republican
• Corruption

Informations

• Publié par: Blair
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781958888025
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

LESSONS FROM NORTH CAROLINA
★ ★ ★
RACE, RELIGION, TRIBE, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA
★ ★ ★
Gene Nichol
—BLAIR—
Copyright © 2023 by Gene Nichol
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Callie Riek & Miranda Young
Interior design by April Leidig
Blair is an imprint of Carolina Wren Press.
The mission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers.
We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and the North Carolina Arts Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nichol, Gene R., 1951– author.
Title: Lessons from North Carolina : race, religion, tribe, and the future of America / Gene Nichol.
Description: Durham : Blair, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022053402 (print) | LCCN 2022053403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781958888018 (paperback) | ISBN 9781958888025 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political culture—North Carolina. | Political participation—North Carolina. | Identity politics—North Carolina. | Right and left (Political science)—North Carolina. | North Carolina—Politics and government—21st century.
Classification: LCC JK4189 .N54 2023 (print) | LCC JK4189 (ebook) | DDC 306.209756—dc23/eng/20221206
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022053402
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022053403
CONTENTS Introduction CHAPTER ONE Rejecting the American Promise: The Re-Embrace of Racial Supremacy CHAPTER TWO Politics, Tribe, and (Unchristian) Religion CHAPTER THREE Politics and Poverty CHAPTER FOUR Destroying a Priceless Gem CHAPTER FIVE Movement vs. Partisan Politics CHAPTER SIX The Limits of Law CHAPTER SEVEN Democracy, Equality, and the Future of America Notes
INTRODUCTION
I have thought much of North Carolina. I wouldn’t claim to understand it. That’s the work of lifetimes, maybe many of them. But I have come to know that North Carolina is my place—after many years, many tries. It’s my home, the place that I love. Even when it seems not to love me—or perhaps that’s too grandiose—even when it seems not to love people like me or people whom I seem to be like. I’m all in. Its mountains, its small towns, its rivers and streams, its barbecue, its basketball (growing up as a Texas football player, I never dreamed there could be a higher cause), its cool cities (like Durham and Asheville), its battles, its challenges, its histories, its cruelties, its informalities, its habitually opened door, its heroism, and its eternal refusal to surrender …
It’s my place. Not Texas, where I’m from originally, whose exaggerated, defining machoism is both comical and cruel but mainly fake. (I grew up there when everybody didn’t wear cowboy hats, like all the imported Yankees there do now.) And not Virginia, whose fawning embrace of its past, stifling and self-deluding classism, and noblesse oblige, which turns out to carry neither nobility nor obligation but only pretense and privilege, is the opposite of uplifting. Nor even Colorado, which inspires and triggers much-justified awe. But Colorado is nature, not society. And I figured out halfway through my life that I’m (surprisingly) still a southerner—even deeply so, for good and ill. That means, too, that for me, North Carolina is a more potent illustration of the challenges and meaning of America than even Colorado, with its hopes and horizons.
I say all this without knowing or even much wondering whether North Carolina is the most pointed battleground over the soul and meaning of the United States and the American promise. Maybe that’s actually Georgia, or Texas or Arizona, or Florida or Wisconsin (though I can’t for the life of me figure out what all those right-wing Wisconsin folks have to be so pissed about). And for me, to be candid, North Carolina is mostly about its people. It’s Bill Friday, Bill Aycock, and Bill Finlator. It’s Frank Graham, Terry Sanford, Dan Pollitt, Tom Lambeth, and Julius Chambers; it’s Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Shirley Edwards, and Rosanell Eaton; it’s Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, John Hope Franklin, Doris Betts, Dick Richardson, William Barber, Irv Joyner, Roz Pelles, Tim Tyson, Bill Ferris, and Pat Devine. It’s other people you perhaps wouldn’t know but whom I worship. It’s the native home of my wife and her parents and the chosen home of my kids. It’s been a short love affair for me, only twenty years, but it’s been a deep and lasting one. And regardless of what happens, it abides.
This book is largely about matters that I wouldn’t have anticipated when I moved to Chapel Hill in 1999. I had come to the University of North Carolina after a long stint as dean of the law school at the University of Colorado. I was enthusiastic about UNC for two reasons.
First, for a lot of us southerners by blood, the state of North Carolina had long been regarded as a leading edge—perhaps the leading edge—of progressivism in the American South. To be sure, Carolina’s progressive habits were often timid and halting, and usually exceedingly modest. Still, the Tar Heel State was decidedly not to be confused with Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, or Georgia.
Second, I have a thing for the University of North Carolina itself. Quite intentionally, I’ve spent my entire academic career—as a student, a professor, a dean, and a president—at public universities. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against private colleges. But it has always seemed to me that the crucial democratizing work of higher education in the United States is played out, almost fully, in our great and ambitious state institutions. And though they have their challenges, the mission of public higher education is a near-perfect one: to bring the illumination and opportunity that are offered by the lamp of learning to all—rich and poor, high and low, rural and urban, newly arrived and anciently pedigreed, all races, all genders, and all sexualities. All can, the theory goes, deploy education’s prospects to make the promises of egalitarian democracy real. I’m a believer.
And also, for me, the University of North Carolina was the country’s greatest public university—or at least the greatest state university that actually wanted to be a public university. Michigan and Virginia are terrific universities, to be sure, but they have long since enthusiastically cast aside their public missions in order to emulate the fanciest private universities. Berkeley didn’t yearn, existentially, to be private, but perennial California state-budget crises effectively forced privatization upon it. UNC, on the other hand, was decidedly public and proud to be so. It didn’t hurt that my wife was a Carolina undergraduate, so I’d been hearing Tar Heel tales for years. For me, UNC was the tall cotton. It still is.
But much has changed here in the last two decades. North Carolina’s politics are no longer moderate or congenial, nor can they be deemed progressive—even if one believes there is a “southern progressive” government to be found in the land. Since 2011, North Carolina has experienced a powerful Republican revolution. The formerly purported “beacon of southern progress” is now what national pundits call a “laboratory for extremism,” a “poster child for regressive, conservative policies.” 1 Experts claim that the state has experienced a “bigger and quicker shift to the right than any other state in the union.” 2 The New York Times has decried the “grotesque damage” that has been done by the new North Carolina Republican majority “to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate.” 3 What was once deemed a rare example of “farsightedness in the South”—a singular “exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tight-fistedness”—has “dismantled a reputation that took years to build.” 4 North Carolina’s state government has become, as the New York Times explained, a “demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and equal access to the electoral system.” 5 Others have noted that Carolina’s citizens, including a diverse and growing minority population, are being “disenfranchised by the Republican-controlled General Assembly,” brazenly dismissing the will of the people and “showing no compunction about curtailing civil liberties.” 6 Tellingly, North Carolina Republicans “have continued to pass regressive laws that subvert the Constitution they claim to defend.” 7
The University of North Carolina has been drawn into the fray as well. Over the last decade, the N.C. General Assembly and its appointees on the UNC Board of Governors have become nationally and even internationally notorious for using their political powers to fire presidents and chancellors for partisan purposes, engaging in racially discriminatory hiring and tenure decisions, closing academic centers and programs in violation of free expression and academic freedom, punishing faculty members for engaging in constitutionally protected speech, and demanding leaders who will submit to the ideological requirements of Republican lawmakers and their representatives. National academic reviewing organizations have “resoundingly condemned” the UNC Board of Governors for instituting a “climate of institutional racism,” repeatedly “violating standards of academic freedom,” and demonstrating “alarming levels of political interference” with North Carolina public universities. 8 These very public wounds are deep and exceedingly difficult to repair. As a result, one of the world’s great public universities is severely threatened. 9 Across a spanning social and political landscape, the new N