Archives for March 2023

Fear should not be a deal breaker when debating tough topics

Is healthy debate a thing of the past? You know, when people can disagree without being disagreeable, respect one another and work toward a solution that might involve compromise.

You’d be forgiven for giving up on the concept or thinking it never existed, especially as discussions of what books should or should not be on school library shelves turn into school board shouting matches with teachers subject to interrogation or relegated to the sidelines. And don’t even try to have a civil chat on where COVID-19 may have originated or what could be the most effective treatment. That’s the best way to start a fight while ignoring the next pandemic that could be right around the corner.

That’s why it was interesting to talk with the directors of “The Big Payback,” which premiered on PBS in January. Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow didn’t exactly choose an easy topic as the subject of their documentary. The two are traveling across the country, with recent stops at historically Black colleges and universities in North Carolina, to foster debate and perhaps understanding of reparations, a topic that could charitably be called controversial and one that’s been making recent headlines.

The film spotlights the push by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, for HR 40, which would establish the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The bill, named after the post-Civil War broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to the formerly enslaved, itself has a long history: It was first proposed in 1989 by then-Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who died in 2019.

In the film, the congresswoman’s fight on the federal level is paired with the ultimately successful effort of Robin Rue Simmons, a former alderwoman in Evanston, Ill., whose community advocacy targeted the very real racial discrimination in housing laws and policies — history that determined current disparities in her city, history that could be documented with facts and figures. That the solution eventually reached was criticized by some for its narrow focus, for being too much or too little or much too late, is also the point.

It was, however, a start for Evanston, and it happened only because of healthy debate.

Local News Roundup: CATS goes off the rails, political maps back at NC Supreme Court, ‘Banktown’ reacts to SVB collapse

On the Local News Roundup, the Charlotte Area Transit System goes off the rails. At least one Lynx train did in a derailment last year that officials are just now hearing about. They also discovered that every train car in the fleet needs repairs and until that happens, trains will be slowing down.

North Carolina’s voter maps are back in front of a now-Republican-controlled State Supreme Court. They’re rehearing a case at the request of the legislature.

Meanwhile, the legislature calls Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget “unrealistic.”

And we look at possible reverberations here from the collapse of a Silicon Valley bank.

Our roundtable of reporters fills us in on those stories and more.

Guests

Steve Harrison, WFAE’s political reporter

Erik Spanberg, managing editor for the Charlotte Business Journal

Mary C. Curtis, columnist for Rollcall.com, host of the Rollcall podcast “Equal Time”

Danielle Chemtob, investigative reporter with Axios Charlotte

Two visions of America’s past — and future

“I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” And just to make sure everyone in the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference and those watching at home got the message, former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated that last line: “I am your retribution.”

Trump revisited his “American carnage” 2017 inauguration speech to again paint a picture of an angry and divided America — with a promise to lead a charge into battle if elected.

On the same weekend, President Joe Biden traveled to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, that day on March 7, 1965, when marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge heading to the capital city of Montgomery for voting rights and for justice in the name of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson — who was killed by an Alabama state trooper — were met with violence from law enforcement as the world watched.

The result of the marchers’ resolve and sacrifice was the Voting Rights Act, signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965.

“No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know,” Biden said Sunday. “We should learn everything — the good, the bad, the truth — of who we are as a nation.”

And, after renewing his call to strengthen those same voting rights citizens had demanded that day in 1965, Biden concluded: “My fellow Americans, on this Sunday of our time, we know where we’ve been and we know, more importantly, where we have to go: forward together.”

At CPAC at National Harbor, Md., last week, the speaker’s list included Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, whose followers attacked his country’s capital city after his loss; and Kari Lake, still in election denial about her own November defeat in Arizona’s gubernatorial race. Notice the theme?

Attendees could choose between sessions on “Finish the Wall, Build the Dome” or “No Chinese Balloon Above Tennessee,” but there was no room for a lesson on the American history made on that Selma bridge 58 years ago.

There’s no escape from any country’s complicated history

America is so invested in its exceptionalism that it sometimes seems to take any glance abroad as heresy. When even delving deep into America’s reality has become taboo for attention-grabbing politicians eager to whitewash the present and past, looking beyond our shores for both lessons and warnings is certainly a no-no. Me, I like to explore how other countries tell their stories and learn just what they think of ours.

That’s not to say I lean into criticism of my own country overseas. In fact, I seem to grow more defensive about America the farther I roam, sort of like when someone else talks trash about the family members you’re constantly feuding with and you reflexively jump in to sing their praises. I reserve the right to get cranky about America’s shortcomings — as a citizen who wants it to do better. But if anyone without skin in the game chimes in, I immediately start waving the Stars and Stripes.

It’s funny, though, how a recent trip to Portugal illuminated commonalities rather than differences in human nature when it comes to how countries build the stories they tell about themselves.

Looking for a relaxing vacation, I left a country embroiled in how history should be taught and memorialized, and traveled to one where similar debates are taking place.

Portugal is confronting how it represents the country’s involvement in the international slave trade, which spanned the 16th through 19th centuries, as well as 1960s and 1970s battles to retain control of colonies in Africa. How does any country decide which parts to highlight and which details it would rather gloss over or leave out altogether?

I visited castles and forts where conquerors and kings resided, opulent palaces, beautifully preserved. In Sintra, the brooding Castle of the Moors is a stalwart reminder of their rule over the region centuries ago. I stood next to the giant Monument to the Discoveries in Belem, a tribute to the country’s so-called Age of Discoveries, with Henry the Navigator at the prow and other names we learned in our own history books here — Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan.

It is an amazing and impressive structure, the backdrop for countless tourist photos, including mine.

But, of course, those discoveries that gathered wealth, so much from the trade in human beings, came at a cost. Are the enslaved and the free Black people who helped build the country just a footnote in the official story?

Why Insulin Prices Keep Rising

It’s a rare bi-partisan point of agreement: the price of insulin is too high—and it’s still rising. With the stakes literally life-or-death for millions of Americans, what can be done?

Guest: Bram Sable-Smith, Midwest correspondent for Kaiser Health News.