NC 28 debate: Katie Dorsett and Bruce Davis

Katie Dorsett of Greensboro, who is serving her third term as state senator for District 28, appeared at a candidate’s forum sponsored by Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro at the Greensboro Historical Museum on May 1 with challenger Bruce Davis, a Guilford County commissioner from High Point. Both candidates are Democrats, and the winner of the May 6 primary will take the seat because no Republican candidate has filed. The district encompasses most of High Point, much of east Greensboro, all of Jamestown and Pleasant Garden, and a large swath of southern Guilford County.

The candidates discussed their views of the Street Gang Prevention Act, a bill that would enhance sentences for criminal defendants identified as gang members. The legislation, which enjoys the backing of a coalition of North Carolina mayors, including Greensboro’s Keith Holliday, stalled last year in the Senate Appropriations Committee, of which Dorsett is a member.

Dorsett: “I certainly know that we’ve done a lot of discussion on gangs. I would say that some of our communities have been further along than we have. High Point was one of the first ones to have their own area in the police department to look specifically at gangs. Senator Malcolm Graham had a bill that was looking for approximately $20 billion. That got stalled. Representative Mickey Michaux had one in the house. I do say that we do have some money though. We appropriated a little more than $4 million to the Governor’s Crime Commission for grants for different communities, so it has not gone unnoticed. I know that the activity and the awareness on gang prevention has been heightened in the last several months. But we have to understand, too, that when we get into a matter of priorities, it’s a matter of how we can get the most for our money.”

Davis: “I really need the bill in front of me. I really need to know the components of the bill. And I think our legislators and all of us as community citizens need to understand about gangs. We need to understand the history of gangs, and how they have always been a part of our community. Gangs are not a new thing to our community, but we have to understand where they come from and how they have evolved, and what they are right now, so that we can, first of all, not stereotype, and not just go after everybody with — every kid who puts a mark in his eyebrow, or every kid who wears baggy trousers, because now we become profilers, and so I would have to study that bill. There’s no way I can sit here and tell you that yes, I would support it, or no, I would not, without studying the issue and also having different forums throughout our community, so that everybody understands what gangs are about, where they evolved from, and what it is about gangs. We don’t want to have a fear factor in our gangs without knowing where they come from or the issue of gangs. Certainly there’s an education component that needs to go in there. I’m not aware of all the particulars in that bill. Would love to have the opportunity to have that discussion.”

Gov. Mike Easley said of the Job Maintenance and Capital Development Fund last fall: “Never in the history of the state has anyone given a company up to $40 million and allowed them to lay off hundreds of workers.” Dorsett voted for the legislation. The candidates discussed their respective positions on corporate incentives.

Dorsett: “Well, I’ll tell you, that’s a little bit misleading, because we did come back and the governor did sign that subsequent bill, and it was pretty much the same language. So he might have vetoed it in one sense, and then he went back, and there was some refinement, and we still passed that. In terms of incentives, I wish we didn’t have incentives, to be honest. I think that it is something that we could do without and be competitive in other ways. Having said that, when I was secretary of administration [under Gov. Jim Hunt], we competed trying to get Mercedes, and we lost that to Alabama. Alabama gave away the store, and it took them a long time to recoup some of that. Our package was not the same, but we recognized that there was a limit as to what we could do, and so we cut it off. I was secretary when we were trying to get the BMW plant, and we tried to put together a package. We again gave away all we thought we could do, and yet it went to South Carolina.

“I’m saying that to say that there has to be some way of being competitive, and incentives right now appears to be the only way we can do that. I did hear part of the discussion as we talk about Skybus…. There’s some producing that has to take place. We don’t just give this money up front. So Skybus didn’t get all that money up front. They have to be able to show that they will hire a certain number of people. And there are certain things that are part of the contractual agreement. And I think you saw in the paper that most of that money that was supposed to go to Skybus — it was an unfortunate circumstance — will be recovered or has never been given. I do not believe that we can afford not to have incentives.

“And we talked tonight about how we can increase the revenue. The only way to decrease the taxes is to increase the revenue. We can do that by bringing businesses into our communities. We bring businesses into our communities by being competitive so they don’t go to Virginia or they don’t go to South Carolina or they don’t go to Alabama. So we have to do some of that. And until the federal government or somebody at another level is able to intercede on behalf of all of us, I think we will forever be finding ways to compete to bring industry so that we can increase the revenue so we can keep our taxes low. So I don’t like them, but I think we have no choice but to have them.”

Davis: “I have supported those incentives because we have lost so many jobs in Guilford County. However, I have taken another look at those incentives and feel that just as was stated, once those incentives are put in place and then we start losing those jobs that we thought we were going to get, then there’s certainly a problem there. I would certainly like to see the counties taken out of the corporate incentive business. It is a necessary evil because that’s what they are doing right now. That’s what other states have to do. But right now, at the county level, it causes our counties to compete against one another. And so you find that FedEx may go to Forsyth County, or [if] we up the ante they’ll come to Guilford County. Well, truth be told, those workers will travel wherever….

“With that being said, it will probably be good to do away with them from a state level, but, again, understand that they’re a necessary evil. We could take those same funds that we give to large corporations and offer incentives to small mom-and-pop businesses, those small businesses that are really out there struggling because about 54 percent of America’s income comes through the small businesses. They are taxed at the same rate as the large corporations, depending on the property that they have or what have you. So I think that those incentives could be used in a better way, by supporting start-up businesses that maybe promote a greener economy. I’m a small business. And you start out a small business with credit-card debt. And you're continuously trying to chase those debts, and you never get a strong hold on what’s happening. But with my small business I put food on the table for 18 families. If I had those incentives I would be able to do much better for those families right here in our community. And if we were able to take those incentives and put them into start-up businesses, small mom-and-pop businesses, that’s where the money should go.”

The candidates discussed their support for restoring the protest petition in Greensboro. The protest petition provides that if a certain percentage of adjacent property owners protest a proposed rezoning the city council is required to muster a 75-percent super-majority to approve the request. Greensboro lost the protest petition in 1971 by of an act of the General Assembly, and it remains the only city in the state that does not have this provision.

Dorsett: “I’ve heard a lot and had public hearings over in Greensboro and High Point, and they’ve been to Raleigh as well. And I have agreed to sponsor that legislation in the Senate to permit Greensboro the same as everybody else…. I don’t know a lot — I remember looking back in history when it started, and I don’t know the basis of which it started, but I do think it’s unfair for all other communities and cities in our state to abide by one law and Greensboro have exemption, when there’s, in my opinion, no real justification for it.”

Davis: “I would support it. I have no real problem with that. I would have to agree with the Honorable Katie Dorsett. We need to have consistency.”

Gang violence: the view from the Hive

The setting: the Hive, a community center organized largely by a group of marginally employed post-collegiate, anti-racist, white activists in Glenwood, a multiracial, working-class Greensboro neighborhood whose residents have displayed pride and pluck in upholding their community’s reputation against recent incursions of violence.

The participants: a multiracial crowd – varied in age, and representing neighborhood residents, students at NC A&T University, members of white and black anti-racist caucuses and homeless people -- packed into metal folding chairs, sat on the floor and stood in the back of the homely meeting hall.

The draw: a film about gang activity, a problem increasingly evident in Greensboro that has spurred a minor panic across the city and prompted questions about the city council and police’s commitment to keep residents safe. While the tenor of the larger municipal discourse has leaned towards promoting more aggressive law enforcement, the film Bastards of the Party and its audience tonight took a decidedly different tack – diagnosing the problem as racism and vanished industrial jobs, and the solution as countering fratricidal self-loathing with community self-direction.

Directed by Cle “Bone” Sloan, a member of the Athens Park Bloods, the 2005 documentary covers the both the gang history and larger sociological history of Los Angeles, a city exponentially larger and more ethnically diverse than Greensboro where a particular set of post-World War II race relations, dashed expectations for economic attainment among black, Latino and Asian residents, and stark juxtapositions between glitzy affluence and crushing poverty conspired to create a model of gang violence that is now being replicated around the country. Consider Los Angeles the bellwether; and though the movie doesn’t say so, perhaps the lucrative gangsta-rap media industry acts as a potent marketing tool.

The film deftly limns seven decades of history, beginning with the mass migration of Southern blacks to Los Angeles during the World War II manufacturing boom, when the police were said to have skimmed graft off the nightlife scene flourishing on Central Avenue. Then in the 1950s, the film tells us, an anti-corruption chief took the reins of the police department, implementing a practice of widespread harassment against black youth. Simultaneously, nascent black gangs are said to have sprung up to defend black youth against white gangs intent on confining them to segregated neighborhoods.

As the ’50s turned to the ’60s and whites decamped from once-exclusive bastions like Compton, the black gangs turned their antagonism on one another.

Let me interrupt the narrative briefly to say that two fascinating themes emerge from this film. First is the premise that the organization of gangs is intimately tied to the organization of revolutionary black formations, with warring factions uniting in the late ’60s and then again in 1992 to pursue shared aims of community empowerment, only to be divided against each other by governmental forces and redirected towards fratricidal purposes. Second is a notion richly explored in scenes showing empathetic encounters between members of the rival Bloods and Crips gangs that suggests a capacity for breaking the cycle of violence.

One of the signal moments in this story is the eruption of the Watts riots in 1965, which were touched off by an incident of white police brutality. The movie tells us that after the riots a charismatic young black leader named Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter emerged from the Slausons street gang and, inspired by the example of the Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif., helped found a Los Angeles chapter. Instead of scuffling with other black groups, the Panthers focused their energy on arming the black community against the police and on implementing free-meal programs and other social services.

Carter was killed during a meeting with Us, an organization that emphasized cultural nationalism in contrast to the Panthers’ orientation towards political change, on the campus of UCLA in 1969. Although the exact details of Carter’s death are not fully explored, former Panthers interviewed for the film express little bitterness towards Us, instead blaming the FBI for stirring up division between the two groups.

In the vacuum left by the destruction of the Black Panther Party and Us, the Crips emerge as a social force among black youth in south-central Los Angeles. The term is reportedly an acronym for Community Revolutionary Inter-Party Service. With self-gratification and individualism gaining cultural preeminence in the ’70s, the Crips’ original focus on community upliftment devolves into increasingly violent thuggery. Non-affiliated black youth, fed up with the Crips’ arrogance, organize into the Bloods.

Sloan tracks down Mike Davis, a writer who exquisitely captured the social anatomy of Los Angeles in a book called City of Quartz, to provide the wide-angle, sociological backdrop for the explosion of gang activity in the decades that follow. Beginning in the mid-’70s, Davis says, deindustrialization set in and manufacturing jobs gradually disappeared. Young black men whose fathers had been able to count on employment in unskilled manufacturing jobs found themselves without the means to earn wages sufficient to support families.

Quick on the heels of deindustrialization came the vertical organization of international drug trafficking networks into efficient corporations that increased the profits and raised the stakes of their trade. Entrepreneurial black youth, otherwise unengaged in the mainstream economy, provided a ready supply for the retail marketing positions of a new cocaine product called crack. Where once young black men were expected to choose between “bangin’ and slangin’,” Sloan says, now they were supposed to do both. And in the context of the larger society, they became all the more expendable.

“Nineteen ninety-two, I think it was a great year for me,” Sloan says. Some people call the upheaval that followed the police beating of Rodney King “a riot,” he adds, but “I call it a rebellion.” We see footage of black youth chanting “take off the red and take off the blue” as the fires rage. Sloan ventures alone into Crips territory and is greeted with respect and friendship. A truce ensues, but pervasive patterns of vengeance soon undo it.

Sloan describes the engine behind gang violence as similar to the motivations that drive soldiers: “It’s about the man that died next to you that you loved,” he says. “That’s pretty much it, man.”

He reflects on how the Bloods slur the Crips as “crabs,” and the Crips reciprocate by insulting the Bloods as “slobs” – words that operate much like “jap” or “gook.” Each side calls the other “nigger.” You wouldn’t call someone you intended to kill a brother, he reasons, it wouldn’t make sense. When the other person is stripped of their humanity as a crab, slob, nigger, taking their life becomes an easy task.

The film ends with a scrolling montage of photographs of slain gangbangers accompanied by their street names, which are translated into their full given names, thus restoring their humanity.

“I love my neighborhood,” Sloan concludes. “I’ll never denounce my neighborhood. But I denounce banging.”

The handful of quotes reproduced here will give a poor representation of the flow of discussion, but responses from members of the audience demonstrated a sense of engagement with the challenges of societal violence and hopelessness.

“I have kids nine, ten and eleven,” said Todd Warren, a white Greensboro resident who teaches in Winston-Salem. “I know they’re not gang members, but they’re idealizing gangs. I see it in their notebooks. It’s what they’re conditioned to.... I see with my school kids this is where they feel accepted. One thing gangs do very well is culture.”

TC Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, suggested that the acceptance of death in the cause of fratricide should be re-channeled into a willingness to die in service of revolution.

Ted Nashland, a young white college graduate who lives in the College Hill neighborhood, jumped into the discussion, raising the specter of ecological deterioration.

“He’s talking about a war against black people,” Nashland said of Muhammad. “There’s a war against humanity. The system has to go down.... There’s got to be a spiritual revolution. There’s gonna be blood in the streets. I’m not going to be a pacifist.”

It’s difficult to tell where things go from here, if anywhere. Speaking on behalf of the organizers, Muhammad urged attendees to show up for the next Greensboro City Council meeting to advocate for an increased citywide minimum wage and to attend the next Guilford County School Board meeting. Names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses were collected at the door for the purpose of contacting attendees for later initiatives.

The revolutionary talk could seem abstract and detached from matters of everyday survival. So I asked Wesley Morris, a recent graduate of NC A&T University, how he thinks the dehumanization of black people and fratricidal violence should be addressed.

“It’s hard to address it from inside our community,” Morris told me. “Human rights struggles have always been about people raising their own cognition.... There’s going to have to be a lot of work. There’s no need to beg the state. The state has already made its statement about where it wants to put resources.”

Still, I found myself questioning where the forward movement might be, so I asked Morris where he places his hopes. His answer seemed to echo the Black Panthers’ ethos of self-resourcefulness and community mutuality, along with a much older, Old Testament moral code.

“I place my hopes on the inside,” he said, “on myself and God. You have to have standards of your own.”