Open letter to People's Alliance and white people who claim being progressive

MY HEART IS BROKEN. It feels like the loss of an old lover. I imagined it would be different. I had visions of our holding hands together until the end. I envisioned our modeling what it means to grow together while sharing a common understanding of what it means to be a beloved community.  

 

Most of that has ended. 

 

When I left Durham in 2013 to become my father’s caregiver, I felt the loss of my beloved home. I missed gatherings with friends to discuss local politics. I once took pleasure in knowing the diversity in the room didn’t matter. I embraced the vows I wrote when I performed the ceremony uniting residents and the city. The Marry Durham celebration defined how most of us felt back then. It was so good that we returned the following year for me to perform a renewal ceremony. 

 

I remember my ride through the mountains of Virginia upon my return to Durham. Close to four years had passed since the Herald-Sun wrote a farewell tribute and close friends gathered at Beyu Café to wish me luck and to say see you later. I shed tears on the plane ride to St. Louis, Missouri in preparation for a life unlike the one I’d come to take for granted. That ride through the mountains felt like a ride to freedom land. 

 

It didn’t take long for me to recognize things are radically different. The political differences weren’t different. The divide along racial lines are part of what makes Durham special. I was reminded of the hostility after the merging of the Durham City and County School systems. I was reminded of the divergent political ideologies between the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and People’s Alliance. Most of it involved land usage concerns.  

 

These were battles I wrote about as a columnist with the Herald-Sun dating back to 1997. The newspaper used the moniker “Kenney, voice of many” in framing my work in the middle. I publicly condemned the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and viciously attacked Black leaders. I lived with enemies on both side of the tracks and considered my version of truth my only consistent friend. 

 

I returned to a different Durham. As a result, my work shifted. I’m left with what feels like a eulogy of an old friend. Conversations involving differences don’t feel the same. Lost is the respect. Gone is a desire to make Durham better for all residents. What remains feels cruel. What remains feels different from the city I married more than ten years ago. 

 

Most of us know what destroys a happy union. It’s a lack of communication. Unions break when the desire to win becomes more important than the relationship. It’s the lack of nurture that kills. It’s an unwillingness to listen that builds resentment. It’s assuming you’re right and know what’s best that makes it harder to overcome the obstacles in the way of unity. 

 

The soul of Durham is severely harmed by the actions of members of the Durham Board of County Commissioners. It’s not what they did. It’s how they did it. It’s the pressing forward while discounting the credibility of opposition. It’s the consistent refusal to listen to outraged Black residents while using power to press an agenda. It’s pressing for unity without conceding the damage created by not taking time to honor the thoughts and feelings of Black citizens. 

 

It is critical that we understand the massive disrespect. It’s disrespectful to frame the decision to oust Wendel Davis as an attack against “far right” activity. It’s disrespectful to negate the progressive activism of the Black women on the board of commissioners and the Black people who serve as members of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. It is disrespectful to discount the history and legacy of the Black men and women who bleed tears over how these issues are framed. It’s disrespectful to claim ownership of an agenda aimed at uplifting Black and Brown people without serious dialogue with the Black and Brown people who begged members of the board of commissioners not to make this decision. 

 

It’s disrespectful to claim you know what’s best for Black and Brown people with a demand for all of us to work together. It sounds like a request to get back on the plantation. It sounds like clamor asserting being the “man of the household”. It comes across as the type of paternalistic jabber that makes it hard to trust again. 

 

I’m reminded of the hard work many of us put into making Durham a great place for all of us to live. I’m thinking of religious leaders – Joe Harvard, T. Mel Williams, Rabbi John Friedman, Bishop Elroy Lewis, Iman Abdul Hafeez Waheed and Haywood Holderness. I’m thinking of community activist – Ann Atwater, Sam Reed and all the grassroots organizers across Durham – who built a foundation for this present generation. We worked through issues more perplexing than this. We’ve loved Durham through far more brutal days than this, but Durham hasn’t been broken like this. 

 

There are no heroes in the vote to remove Wendel Davis. Not because of the decision, but because of how the decision was made. It was made during an echoing call for consulting to address a culture of racial dysfunction. Black residents pleaded with commissioners to do the hard work of addressing problems within. They refused, and that is why the soul of Durham is broken. 

 

I no longer recognize my beloved community. Asking me to get over it is not the solution.  

 

Own the damage you created and listen before making statements regarding the need for unity. 

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