When power meets progressive ideals
A story co-published with INDY Week shows how tough racial equity will be even for liberals who say they want just that.
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At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with a sense that more of us need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
It’s been too long, y’all. Last time, I dove into what it’s been like for journalist Antionette Kerr to take on dangerous, entrenched local corruption in trying to piece together the unfortunately all-too-common story of the murder of indigenous women. (Read, if you missed that one).
I have been head down on work work but also volunteer work in the form of helping to push along with the volunteer civic tech group the Open Raleigh Brigade a long-term project to make campaign finance more accessible in North Carolina; stay tuned for more on that.
But somewhat along those lines I started researching the funding of the People’s Alliance PAC, a well-known progressive group here in Durham, N.C. What the money showed was interesting but when I started making phone calls, it got even more interesting and turned into the below story, which gets at a big issue not just for this group but the left overall: What does it look like for historically white groups to support Black and brown members? Can white power-brokers better share their wealth and influence?
Hope you enjoy and thanks to INDY Week for agreeing to co-publish a version of this story with your humble newsletter writer.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.
Does the People’s Alliance Have a White Privilege Problem?
A battle within the Durham People’s Alliance leaves some wondering if the group is more concerned with power or progressive politics.
The votes had been counted and the surprising result was in: Alexandra Valladares had won the coveted People’s Alliance PAC endorsement for Durham School Board over an established, beloved incumbent and long-time People’s Alliance (PA) member.
It was a big moment for Valladares and her supporters. She was poised to become the first Latinx person on the school board. But the endorsement, it soon turned out, wasn’t quite what it seemed.
In many ways, the People’s Alliance PAC endorsement is vital in Durham politics. It comes with an army of volunteer campaigners, and carries with it the prestige of the area’s most powerful and prominent progressive organization in this Democratic stronghold. The organizations are split by the PAC’s electioneering and the People’s Alliance’s issue-based grassroots work. All members of the People’s Alliance are members of the PA PAC and can vote on endorsements.
PAC endorsements tend to have a ripple effect, looked to by other organizations, including media like the INDY, for a sense of who possesses progressive bonafides. Its roughly 1,200-strong membership, many of whom are active citizens, is a powerful force in down-ballot state and local elections where endorsements carry particular sway.
The alliance has accrued unmatched local power since its founding in 1976. It has fought for both candidates and causes, including the successful push for a $15 minimum wage for city employees. But in some ways, the alliance is a victim of its own success, reckoning with an increasingly prosperous city that’s still plagued by racial inequity, creating a divide in the organization and the area as a whole.
With her endorsement sealed, Valladares thought her long night was over. But she learned there was some kind of hiccup at the PAC’s January endorsement meeting—the vote apparently wasn’t finalized after all, she said in a recent interview.
Someone had decided there needed to be a recount, and Valladares was asked to wait. And so she did, humiliated, agonizing over what was happening in a room that had gotten tense and cold toward her. She looked at the mothers with children in tow who had come to support her now forced to wait even longer before they could go home after the grueling, hours-long endorsement process at a meeting of more than 600 people—the largest PAC meeting in the group’s history.
Valladares didn’t want to wait. She didn’t want to wait for a recount of an endorsement in her bid against a white incumbent, Steve Unruhe, with close ties to the organization’s mostly white and longest-tenured members. At 38, she thought Durham schools needed its first Latinx member, a representative who could speak for a school community that’s 33 percent Latinx. For her, they couldn’t wait, either.
Valladares also believed she had built up goodwill within the powerful local PAC in her time volunteering and organizing with them since 2015. She wanted to take a shot, working hard to develop relationships with the other grassroots volunteers and collaborating closely with them to earn the endorsement.
Ostensibly, that’s something the group could have celebrated, too, especially once she won the hard-fought endorsement. She is a woman of color, from the working class, and a Durham public schools’ graduate. She was looking to organize and shake up the status quo on behalf of brown people in a Durham school district that has struggled with the gaps between students of color and their white peers. What could be more progressive than that?
In what should have been one of Valladares’ proudest moments, the sullen look on the faces of the leaders who had told her after the wait that she had, in fact, won the endorsement tarnished her victory. The nasty comments and sideways glances that came afterward—towards her and her mother, she says—created a tense dynamic. Then, several prominent members of the allegedly progressive PAC organized a campaign for the incumbent, endorsement be damned, and sent around a widely circulated letter touting him. Despite their best efforts, Valladares still easily won the election this March, and now serves on the school board.
Valladares says her candidacy was a threat to what some white liberals think the proper role is for a person of color. She said she began to feel “othered” in People’s Alliance meetings, even by other people of color.
“Somehow I think being able to have a seat at the table and become electable has threatened a lot of notions,” she said. “I think there is something to be said about the kind of help that is people staying in their place and helping them” versus people of color taking on a leadership role, she added.
An “old guard” versus “new guard” dynamic—one that also reflects power dynamics and, for some, implicit racism for the historically white group—has developed within the People’s Alliance, something that leaders acknowledged in interviews. It is also reflected more broadly in the Bull City as racial tension mounts. Durham city and county are seen as increasingly unequal for people of color, critics within Durham’s progressive political circles say, as the city’s upscale development becomes a hotspot for homebuyers, new jobs, and trendy restaurants catering primarily to white people.
The question of who benefits and who is in power also emerges with the PAC’s bank account. Every candidate that has received the PAC’s endorsement since 2017 has contributed substantial sums, according to an analysis of campaign finance filings from the State Board of Elections. So far this year, contributions from People’s Alliance PAC endorsees represent about 75 percent of its total $46,807 budget. All of the candidates—100 percent—who contributed since 2017 are also PAC endorsees.
But campaign money, which is not an explicit requirement for the People’s Alliance or Durham politics, is just one form of how wealth and privilege manifests. Critics say Durham’s power brokers are using the language of liberal values without giving people of color the one thing that would truly foster change: access to power and wealth.
Omar Beasley, the chairman of a different local PAC, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People,, saidthat Durham’s version of liberal values hasn’t done enough for Black residents.
“It’s difficult for me to say Durham is progressive,” Beasley said. Specifically, he said that as Durham prospers, too few city and county contracts go to Black-owned firms and leaders fail to appoint enough members of the Black community to coveted roles on boards and commissions. Sometimes those divisions are along racial lines, but that can often be complicated by leaders of color who aren’t seen as doing enough for the communities they should represent, Beasley said.
“White Durham is telling Black Durham what to say about Black Durham?” Beasley asked, referring to the People’s Alliance. “We don't need no white saviors. Give us an opportunity and give us a seat at the table.”
Katie Todd, the president of the People’s Alliance as of this year, acknowledged the tension that has developed within the alliance and the city. She said that while the longest-serving members are mostly white, the group aims to grapple with the power dynamics coming to the forefront. “While these things are true, they’re not necessarily permanent,” she said.“We have been no stranger to the concerns and criticisms levied around the People’s Alliance.”
Todd also said that other PACs and groups will be welcome at the table to help with reforms. “The door has to be open and the room has to be inviting,” she said.
Tensions rise
Carl Kenney, a pastor and longtime journalist who is also a member of the Durham Committee, said the ongoing racial controversy around Durham County’s Black manager points to an incredibly fractious environment. “Right now we’re seeing the peak of racial tension in Durham,” Kenney said. “There's a sense that the white liberals in Durham are clouded by their white supremacy.”
At least among the area’s powerbrokers, it wasn’t always this way. Leaders of the People’s Alliance and the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People would meet and hash out shared candidate endorsements at the Chicken Hut on Fayetteville Street in the early ’90s, Kenney said.
That changed when the development of N.C. 751 and Southpoint Mall negotiations were underway. The mostly white People’s Alliance had environmental concerns, while the Durham Committee saw an opportunity to create jobs, Kenney said. “This massive political divide (developed) that is incredibly contentious, and in some ways the Black community sees it rooted in race, white privilege, white supremacy, and power,” Kenney said.
Beasley said the struggle within Durham’s various groups—all ostensibly fighting for a more progressive future—will have their own version of what victory looks like. “Power has to be taken away, and when it's taken away it has to be taken away in a fight,” he said. “Right now we're fighting for a piece of power, and I don't see anybody giving that away.”
Nana Asante-Smith, a PA PAC leader and coordinator, said the organization’s first step in addressing issues of inequity and white privilege starts with acknowledging them. “There has to be an acknowledgement of these issues through a racial equity lens,” she said. “It requires an organization largely founded… as a white organization that needs to be able to relinquish some sort of power.”
Asante-Smith admitted that asking anyone to give up control will be a difficult road. “The reality of the situation that exists is we’re still working within politics,” she said. “There’s a commitment [by individuals] to furthering those political agendas.”
Money, money, money
One way the power dynamic within the People’s Alliance has manifested itself is that candidates, many of whom are incumbents, give large sums of money to the organization.
Of the $176,547 the PAC has raised since 2017, more than $85,000—nearly half of the total budget—has come from candidates it has endorsed, according to campaign finance filings. The dollars raised from candidates versus overall donors has gone from 28 percent in 2017 to around 44 percent the next two years. So far in 2020, it’s jumped to 75 percent.
Candidates give anywhere from $350 to $3,000 per election cycle from their campaign accounts. There are some exceptions; in a two-month span in 2017, Mayor Steve Schewel contributed a total of $5,000.
For Valladares, when a PAC coordinator asked for $2,500 following her endorsement, she was shocked. “I was put under a lot of pressure to give money that week,” she said. “I was crushed. I was like, ‘oh my god, I don’t have this money.’”
Valladares and Asante-Smith later agreed on $1,000 whenever Valladares could give it; she made the contribution in February, her filings show.
Ultimately, Valladares gave the contribution but believes the PAC should develop a process that respects candidates regardless of what they can contribute—for “the next underdog,” as she put it. “I’m glad there are leaders that have a way to communicate, to value the person more than the money,” Valladares said of Asante-Smith.
Asante-Smith, one of five People’s Alliance PAC coordinators, said the PAC asks for contributions from endorsed candidates in order to fund its operation. That has been a big part of why the group is successful at the ballot box, providing funding for poll workers and messaging for candidates that it believes will advance a progressive agenda, she said. “We raise money, we raise money well, and we raise money effectively,” she said.
Asante-Smith said that the amount of money the PAC asks for from candidates varies depending on timing, strategy, the election cycle, and other factors. There’s no “uniform, concrete” formula, she said.
That said, Asante-Smith says the group knows its history and image as a historically white organization, unwilling to share the spoils of its efforts or acknowledge the barriers to entry for those with fewer funds. She doesn’t believe that candidates’ finances play a role in endorsements — the broader membership, which votes on endorsements, wouldn't be aware of those details when casting votes, Assante-Smith pointed out.
But she said that they should still make changes to become more inclusive.
“It’s something I wrestle with as a Black woman,” she said. “I really believe that we as Black people have to be present in the spaces where we want to see change and take ownership. I don’t think that absolves the PA of doing what it must do to address these issues. I believe we’re aware of it. The real question is, what are we willing to do about what we know?”
A school board brawl
When Valladares began to attend alliance events starting in early 2015, she felt inspired. She soon took leadership roles and helped found the group’s Latinx caucus, “Nuestra Gente,” with Ivan Almonte in early 2018. She felt good.
“I was like, this could become a political home,” she said.
Once Valladares campaigned against Unruhe, the tenor changed. Members accused her of “scheming” to get the endorsement, she said.
The pro-Unruhe letter circulated by some PAC members was a tough blow; Valladares felt she had to fight the same organization she had already supposedly won over. “Because this is about the power, then you do see progressive people fighting each other and trying to discredit each other’s work,” Valladares said.
The letter touted Unruhe’s credentials without making mention of Valladares directly. However, it also said, “While it is rare for many of us to support a candidate outside of the PA endorsements, we feel in this case that Steve is the much stronger candidate.”
The letter may have backfired. In response, critical race scholar Ronda Taylor Bullock circulated another letter on behalf of Valladares. She said that even though Unruhe was well qualified, opposing an opportunity for a qualified Latina to sit on the Durham School Board in a majority Black and brown district would be wrong. “In the historical context described above, signing-on to support a white male over a highly qualified Latina woman is an act of white supremacy,” she wrote. More than 150 others co-signed the letter.
The original letter didn’t explicitly break the alliance’s bylaws but, generally, leadership hopes members don’t collectively organize against endorsees.
“I thought it was very insulting that took place,” Asante-Smith said. “The message they sent on that occasion was very clear: it was that we are willing to defy our own (norms), benefits, and structure for a white man.”
Since, things have been fraught between Valladares and the group. New rules have been proposed against elected officials taking on leadership roles within the alliance, which Valladares believes target her. She has stepped down from her leadership roles and volunteer work within the group, but hasn’t made a decision yet on whether to resign as a member.
Mayor Schewel signed the letter supporting Unruhe. He dismissed Valladares’ concerns, saying if a similar situation happened to him,“I would just think it was politics.”
Schewel has been a member of the People’s Alliance since its inception. He said the group used to be about 90 percent white, which has changed markedly in recent years, and its longevity is a testament to the organization’s strength. Schewel, who is white, said he views his work to push for more affordable housing and a better bus system—among other issues—through a racial equity lens.
“The fight for racial justice is still the most important work that any of us can do,” he said. “It’s been that way for my whole life. It’s the most important work that I do.”
Katie Todd, the People’s Alliance president, said the group is focused on racial equity and has begun a strategic planning process that will find strategies to ensure it’s a more inclusive organization, including racial equity training for its members. “As people continue to move to Durham, we must educate our transplants on the history of what has transpired and how they can be a part of eradicating systemic racism and creating a truly affordable Durham and that all folks have access to the economic opportunities many of us take for granted.”
She added: “We have no illusions that we’re not going to make more mistakes.”
It’s unclear exactly how these tensions within the People’s Alliance or the city at large will be resolved, if at all. But given the power the group wields, the answer has dramatic consequences for Durham’s progressive image and the future of the left in this blue bastion.
For Valladares, it’s hard to tell whether the alliance’s traditional power brokers are thinking of the group’s well-being and future, or just their own.
“I think Durham being the progressive beacon of the South, we can do better,” she said.
Co-published with INDY Week, the alternative weekly that covers the Triangle in North Carolina.
Brief Postscript
I very much appreciate the people I interviewed that helped me discern and understand the issues at play. One is journalist Carl Kenney. One thing that didn’t make the final story is the current racially-charged insanity going on at the Durham County Commission. Long story short, the Black county manager accused a white commissioner of racism. An outside report commissioners asked for couldn’t substantiate overt racism on the part of the commissioner, Heidi Carter, but did say that given the working environment, implicit racism was not an unreasonable conclusion. (This strikes me as a very Mueller-esque conclusion).
As Kenney points out, the investigator wrote: “Nevertheless, because of the often-fractured relationship among the Board, the County Manager, and the staff, both the Manager and staff reasonably could have perceived Commissioner Carter’s criticism of the Manager on February 3, 2020, as racially biased, at least implicitly so.”
And, yet, Kenney found what, to me, seems like clear racism after obtaining emails written by Carter. He writes:
Carter’s email to members of the board assumes a position of innocence.
“The independent investigator has concluded that his allegations were entirely false and unsubstantiated,” Carter writes. “However, the manner, intensity and nature of the manager’s words and actions have created a hostile and threatening environment which makes it impossible for me to engage in work where he may be involved in any way. I am unable to sustain further risks to my reputation, my safety, and my health due to the possibility that additional negative and baseless allegations may be contrived.” [Emphasis mine.]
Carter writes the tale of a woman damaged by the ego of a Black man. It’s an age-old trope used to dismiss the integrity of Black people who question the innocence of white people. Carter fails to acknowledge the conclusion of Coleman’s report.
“The Durham County Government is in a state of periodic dysfunction, at a time when the residents of Durham County need it to be effective in dealing with several daunting issues, any one of which alone would be challenging,” Coleman writes in his August 2, 2020 report to the board. “In the circumstances, it is critically important as a matter of first order for the Board and the County Manager to find a constructive way to move forward and put these issues behind the County.”
Carter fails to follow Coleman’s recommendation. Instead, she uses the occasion to attack Davis.
“The manager’s actions have irreparably damaged my ability to have a working relationship with him and have unfortunately impacted my ability to fully uphold the responsibility the people of Durham have vested in me,” Carter writes. “I wanted to make you aware of this reality. I would appreciate it if you would please include this in the record for the 8/10/2020 closed session.”
Carter’s inability to acknowledge the severity of perceived racism, combined with positioning herself as a victim of unsubstantiated claims, points to how she is a key player in nurturing dysfunction. The high road is to press for conversation aimed at moving beyond perceptions of her racial bias. Carter’s low road it to place her innocence and reputation above what is best for Durham County. Rather than owning her contribution is brewing hostility, she points the finger at a Black man for speaking his version of truth.
This is an example of what Robin DiAngelo calls “white privilege”.
“We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputations rather than recognize or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination,” DiAngelo says.