In this together

a mama rant

North Carolina, my adopted home state—and the only home Bea and Harriet have ever known—is a beautiful place to live. We have majestic mountains, smooth white-sand beaches, the green rolling hills of the Piedmont. Adorable towns, the best farmer’s markets, Jane Goodall’s Research Center. We have Jill McCorkle and Tyree Daye and Allan Gurganus and the memory of our beloved Randall Kenan. Tift Merritt and Rhiannon Giddens and DaBaby! We have America’s Largest Pork Display. Soul City! Just down the road from us there’s an open-air tea garden in converted shipping containers, surrounded by herb gardens and blueberries.

But we also have a Republican legislature, who’ve held such tight control over the state’s laws and budget, and have wielded such control over our university system, that most of us struggle. The current legislative control dates back to 2010, when anti-Obama sentiment drove Republican voters to the polls in an off-year election. This was intensified in 2012’s primary season with Amendment 1, a referendum banning same-sex marriage that was popular with conservative voters. The amendment passed (only to be invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court), and helped solidify a right-wing legislative majority that has endeavored, ever since, to suppress voting and the voting impact of Black and Latinx voters through gerrymandering, voter ID, closing polling places, and more. More than anything else, racial gerrymandering—drawing voting maps to dilute the power of groups of voters—is the reason Republicans still wield legislative control in our state.

Since then, things have declined around here. We rank near the bottom of the country in per-pupil public school funding. Teachers haven’t had a raise since 2018—and, thanks to the legislature, it looks like they’ll only get 1.5% this year. Our major energy supplier, Duke Energy, perpetrated such a horrible coal ash disaster that it polluted both my adopted home state as well as my home state of Virginia. Have they cleaned it up, or paid a penalty large enough to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Not really! They’re currently planning to build gas-fired power plants, which the Center for Biological Diversity claims will “supersize climate change.”

Last Saturday, when we arrived at the beach, my parents were excited to tell me that NC State had just won their first game, against Stanford, in the College World Series. I don’t follow baseball but of course I root for the Wolfpack. I root for us to win, and I root for us to stay healthy and safe. In 2020’s lockdown summer, I spent a not-insignificant amount of time organizing with other professors, across the UNC system, to encourage better university COVID-19 safety protocols, including conducting most classes online. We had a petition signed by thousands, we wrote to all the chancellors and I think to the Board of Governors too. We did media interviews and wrote op-eds. This was, of course, before vaccines, and when Covid transmission was extremely high, our hospitals at capacity. This did not go well—we reopened, only to send our students home again, almost immediately, as COVID-19 infections tore through the dorms and student apartments.

It was pretty much a national embarrassment—but, for NC State, an embarrassment that hit UNC-Chapel Hill first and hardest. They were the ones in the national news, answering for the decisions that endangered their students, workers, faculty, and the community. This has happened again to UNC-Chapel Hill, as their Board of Trustees refuses to schedule a vote on tenure—which the faculty voted to recommend—for Pulitzer Prize-winning MacArthur Fellow Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones would have been an extraordinary hire for the journalism program, and a step in the right direction for a university whose faculty, for the most part, does not look like its student body or the state as a whole. Only about three percent of UNC Chapel Hill’s tenured faculty are Black women (this is all too common at predominantly white institutions—click here for a searchable database of all universities).

It’s tempting, at NC State, to think of this as another UNC problem. But we have even fewer tenured Black women professors (less than two percent of total tenured faculty!), and we’re cowed by the same legislators who have created a culture of fear and retribution within the state through budget cutting and threats (we do have a separate Board of Trustees). The culture that says “be wary of hard truths” (the 1619 Project, for example) and “every man decides what’s true, damn the facts” pervades the state’s institutions. It affects me too, making me (a person with tenure!) feel nervous before I post something like this on my own little newsletter.

(Which if you are enjoying, go ahead and forward to someone already!)

So, back to the baseball game. We were cheering! Go Pack! But the night before we left the beach, the NCAA released a statement that NC State had to forfeit their next game, because of COVID-19 protocols. Members of the team and coaching staff had gotten sick, and others on the team tested positive for COVID-19. Hopefully they will recover quickly, without the long-term side effects so many face. But in the meantime their dreams of a college world championship are crushed. I feel awful for them, because I know how hard student athletes work, and because winning the College World Series would have been a momentous first for our school.

A lot of people have been angry at the NCAA—and it’s true, they don’t require vaccines, and they don’t conduct the games within a bubble or have proof-of-vaccination (or even mask) requirements for the thousands of fans who fill the full-capacity stadium.

But the first news I read, early Sunday morning, included an interview with coach Elliott Avent. He refused to answer when asked if he encouraged players to be vaccinated. “My job is to teach them baseball, make sure they get an education and keep them on the right track forward,” he said. “But I don’t try to indoctrinate my kids with my values or my opinions. Obviously, we talk about a lot of things. But these are young men that can make their own decisions and that’s what they did.”

When asked whether he was vaccinated, he rolled his eyes and said his job wasn’t to talk “politics.”

I’m sure coach Avent was upset—his team, which he’d mentored and coached to a world championship, had just been kicked out of the tournament. But if I were the mother of one of the players, I’d have some words for the coach. Words like: Life-saving vaccines are not political! They aren’t opinions or indoctrination! And My kid better not get long Covid!

Teacher to teacher, I’d say he made a grave mistake. Even though NC State doesn’t require our students (or even our student athletes, I guess) to be vaccinated, he had an opportunity to be an example for them. To say, I got vaccinated and I’m proud because it protects my life, your life, and the lives of my family and neighbors. How on earth is that indoctrination?

So I spent the early coffee-drinking morning (the best part of the day!) in a funk—was this what returning to school in August would be like? (You don’t teach baseball coaches, Richard reminded me.) Why is our beautiful state so seriously lagging in adult vaccination rates? What about the younger kids, who aren’t even eligible for vaccines yet, but still have to live in this “make your own decision” culture (see our legislature’s “Free the Smiles” act for more on that dangerous possibility)? I was also grumpy because we had to clean up at the end of our beach trip, which had been so awesome and went by so fast. Blah, as Toad would say.

Then I glimpsed something, from where I sat on the balcony. A man in a blue shirt, standing a little ways up from the water, near the wave conditions flag, talking on the phone. He didn’t leave. Was he changing the yellow flag back to red? I watched as other people in blue shirts came up to him. When a few kids and moms gathered I knew something cool was happening.

“Come on!” I said to Bea, Harriet, and Mamie. “I think they’ve found a sea turtle nest!”

We rushed to the beach, Harriet still in her nightgown, and watched as five Indian Beach Turtle Patrol volunteers donned gloves and carefully scooped and dug in the sand, looking for the nest. They crouched low, sweeping and digging with careful hands, until finally someone yelled. They’d found the nest! A clutch of perfect, golf-ball-sized, almost glowing white eggs. They covered the nest and marked it, protecting it until the turtles could hatch and make their way back to the ocean.

It was such a great way to end the trip, not just because we love sea turtles, but also for the chance to watch a group of unrelated humans helping their fellow Earth-dwellers, and helping each other. Working together, because we’re in this together—all of us. The humans, turtles, snakes, frogs, spiders, flies, birds, fish, plankton, jellyfish… all of us. And we have influence, every one of us, that we do have the power to use.

Oh, and on the way out of town, we saw a Pride parade! Happy Pride!

Bea will be back on Tuesday to tell you more about the turtles. See you then!