Birthday Month

I'm turning 30 on the 6th so I'm trying to get a bunch of work done before so I can take a break before feeling guilty. I am aware of how ridiculous that is, but if  I don't  I'm just going to be thinking about it the whole day as an intrusive thought.  It's for my own sake.

But as such I've been going into overdrive. Expect an extra update on my birthday, no extra charge.

For now though lemme present the last part of the intro:

Late 80’s to 00’s Revival

A generation-and-a-half removed from the Civil Rights struggles of the 60’s and 70’s many of the cultural forces of the southern strategy found themselves curdled into a toxic identity and ideology. An uncomfortable amount of Civil Rights leaders from different causes found themselves dead, either from assassinations or the inevitability of lowered life expectancies. History found itself sanitized and polished into something more palatable to the white masses. Plantations became romantic get-aways and the historic homes of “kind slave owners” that begged you not to think of the bones under your feet. The politics of those since-passed civil rights leaders were separated from greater context and diluted as to not upset the moderates who fingerwag and “what about” at people using the same methods and politics today. And they had the monetary incentive to do so.

For one, a lot of those people who came from those plantations still had that money. They were the political class with the means to run for government at all levels, or at least lobby and fund who they wanted. White Woman, whose role in this often diminished in conversations about racism, played their part too and were major forces behind hate groups like The Daughters of The Confederacy or upheld it through weaponized fragility empowered by things like Home Owners Associations, neighborhood watches, and PTA’s. Many of which have direct link to segregation-era policy.

On top of this, while much of the politics of the 80’s punished marginalized folk, the 80’s as a whole is often thought of as a period of excess and rampant capitalism. Though it’s worth mentioning that there is often a world of difference between Outer Banks rich and Caribbean Island rich, their money spends as well as anyone else’s, if not better.

It became more profitable to be racist than to let people be uncomfortable with the truth. Anything else would get in the way of the version of the past they had worked to construct. It’s hard to spend money when being acknowledging how every inch of what is around them is built off stolen land and the backs of others rather than the mavericks with the independent spirit they fabricated.

So when time came to spend that excess of the 80’s, it went to racist infrastructure. The history that was decided was worth preserving, outside of maybe the lighthouses facing erosion, was a very select version of it. It was the pretty plantations, confederate forts, and colonial estates. It went to the elimination of low income housing and the prioritization of vacations homes empty for the majority of the year, rental properties for time shares, and empty abandoned properties for money laundering.

When the political class spent their money it went to shoring up their own self-interest. They starved out communities by denying them resources and built into the mechanism of the southern strategy already intact. Small things like providing outdated or biased educational tools. Bigger things like packing courts with bias or neopotism or passing legislation that directly benefits the businesses they have money in. In North Carolina, despite some select city and county ordinances providing select protection against gender and sexual orientation discrimination, it is illegal to sue the state over these forms of discrimination. A more recent example of this is, as of the time of writing this (2021), Farm Labour Organizing Committee et al v. Roy Cooper in his official capacity as Governor of North Carolina is challenging the North Carolina Farm Act of 2017. A piece of legislation which actively impedes farmworkers’ First Amendment Rights to participate in unions. Especially discriminatory once you take into account the fact that more than 90% of North Carolina’s farm workers are Latine.

It was from the farm that the biggest upheaval of the 90’s came for North Carolina. In 1994, U.S. Congress had an oversight hearing on the Tobacco industry. Tobacco is a complicated figure. For many of us, it’s a sacred plant. But as an industry, capitalism has made it responsible for many bodies, from sickness and disease, to exploitative labor from slavery to prisons to immigrants, to it’s deep ties to colonialism and resource wars.

This hearing was vital to establishing that nicotine was addictive. That smoking could cause heart disease, lung cancer, and other health issues. That the tobacco industry had coordinated to cover up decades of science and medicine that proved this. That their adds were manipulative and targeted towards the impressionable and young.

The resulting Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 cost the Tobacco Industry billions. How tobacco was advertised was heavily regulated. The four giants of the American tobacco industry, Lorillard, R.J. Reynolds, Phillips Morris Inc., and Brown & Williamson were made to make annual payments to the states to compensate for the cost of care that tobacco related illnesses and to fund an anti-smoking advocacy group. It also lead the dissolvement of tobacco industry propaganda groups such as Tobacco Institute, The Council for Tobacco Research, and The Center for Indoor Air Research. It also made public records of the original participating manufacturers had disclosed during the discovery phase of the litigation.

In North Carolina, tobacco was king. It had been a major cash crop and industry for hundreds of years. North Carolina specifically had their own MSA which required all distributors and manufactures to qualify and be approved as part of the “Approved Tobacco List” issued by the Attorney General under risk of becoming contraband and having civil penalties applied. This upheaval, while it’s effects weren’t immediate, made it so NC had to look elsewhere industry. It made it more reliant on it’s textiles, furniture, and tourism.

They looked to attract new industry by courting a young tech industry and to be an attractive (non-union) alternative for TV and film. And it worked to a limited extent until being undermined by H.B. 2, an anti-trans bathroom bill that was projected to cost the Tarheel State more than 3.76 billion dollars and over 6,000 jobs.

But in between these two points, Reedsboro found fame and a brief economic bubble in being the filming location of the his teen coming-of-age-dramady “Drystan’s Brook”. A 6 season show succeeded by 2 spin-offs which to this day attracts visitors out of both ironic and genuine curiosity and moves merch at the gift shops.

Today

If modern events has taught us anything it’s that the struggle for acceptance and human dignity isn’t linear. It requires constant vigilance and should never be taken for granted. The actions of a recent president and his attempted coups has emboldened white supremacist that their ideas are shared by everyone. Attacks from a packed court seek to undermine the cases that form the underlying structures of reproductive rights, racial justice, gay marriage, and Indigenous sovereignty. Ecological violence threatens all, but somehow people of color seems to be in the path of the worst of it all either by oil or the effects of global warming such as extreme weather, refugees, or ecological destruction that includes food sources.

Geno recently defeated another attempt to pass a registration act. Recently an app had been picking up it’s slack with a map of “suspected geno.” which has not only been used to harass and out geno (a danger in rural communities). But a number of net-savvy bigots have weaponized it against people they just don’t like or have just committed the crime of being too loud and too visible. North Carolina doesn’t have any genodiverse discrimination laws outside of what can be included under it’s ultimately lacking disability laws.

There are plenty of fights to lend your weight behind. It’s more a matter about where you want.