From a correspondent in North Carolina
April 12, 2016
On April 7th Appstate students marched around the campus and occupied BB Dougherty, the central administration building, in protest of the university’s tepid acceptance of North Carolina House Bill 2 (HB2) enforcement, and the Board of Governors outright support of HB2. On the night of April 8th the occupiers numbered 95. This is from a student body of 18,000 students. As of today this is the longest ever occupation of the administration building on our campus.
There is more information at their facebook event.
Before we get into the reasons for the occupation, let’s look at the context.
On April 10th, the occupiers held a teach-in to explain to the public why they were occupying. Originally slated to take place in the occupied administration building the event was moved to the student union, and started late. The crowd was evenly mixed, white and people of color, which makes it largely more diverse than the campus or the county. Once the speakers got started it was clear that they were well organized, well rehearsed and well researched.
Their goal was to explain the state public university power structure. The North Carolina State system comprises 17 schools, one of which is a high school. These schools are governed by a Board of Governors [BOG] who set fees and budget, appoint a Chancellor for each school and mandate enrollment. The BOG is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state’s General Assembly. Their recently appointed president is Margaret Spellings.
Margaret Spellings is the former Secretary of Education to George W. Bush. She defunded a PBS show that highlighted LGBTQ concerns and was on the board of Apollo group, the people who profit from the University of Phoenix scam. Her time as Secretary of Education was marked by graft, corruption and profiteering. abc11.com/education/who-is-new-unc-president-margaret-spellings/1047839/ She was hired at a rate of $775,000 salary with a free house, car and paid vacation. This is a raise of 75,000 over the salary of her predecessor. Meanwhile statewide university staff haven’t had a raise in 5 years.
The keynote of the presentation (complete with powerpoint slides) was a refrain about an injury to one being a slight to all. The BOG, it was pointed out, has overseen the defunding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to the tune of millions of dollars in the past couple of years, along with “renaming” and “consolidating,” euphemisms for cutting funding, colleges and departments. They have vetoed Gender Neutral Housing, closed a center for poverty research, capped the amount of tuition that can be paid by student aid and eliminated diversity scholarships as they try to merge HBCUs with predominantly white institutions (PWIs).
BTW, although HBCUs receive their chancellors from the BOG, they have no representation there. The BOG is overwhelmingly white, male and republican (a whole slide detailing their political donations to the republican party was presented), largely have little to no experience in higher education and one of them is not even a NC resident. The increasing mandates for enrollment at PWIs is linked directly to BOG members’ financial interests with local property developers, as they admitted in a public meeting in December before continuing with the meeting anyway despite the admitted conflict of interests. These meeting minutes should be posted soon online here: abc11.com/education/who-is-new-unc-president-margaret-spellings/1047839/ “Student power won’t be a reality until the movement transcends the ‘student’ identity” and becomes peoples’ power,” said Rachel Clay, a student leader of the occupation.
Rachel was good enough to recognize that these problems won’t necessarily be fixed by voting. She insisted that Roy Cooper won’t be better than McRory. Apparently these two make up the expected field of governor’s candidates. Cooper has “refused to defend HB2” but also refused to re-try “former Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Officer Randall Kerrick, whose trial for killing an unarmed black man resulted in a hung jury.” (www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article66262367.html) She reminded us that in NC all of these struggles are led by Queer People of Color (QPOC,) such as the anti-discrimination law in Charlotte that was shot down by HB2. She reminded us that there is not one case of a trans person sexually harassing anyone in the US in a bathroom, but that they suffer attacks in bathrooms. She pointed out that in media and films these protests are always portrayed as being led by cis white people. The crowd collectively groaned about white washing.
Here’s why the students object to HB2. North Carolina is a state where employers freely discriminate against LGBTQ people, who are also targeted for horrific bigoted violence. One very prominent example was Blake Brockington, North Carolina’s first out trans homecoming king. On March 23rd of last year Blake Brockington was announced dead from suicide after being publicly attacked for his activism on behalf of trans youth. His words still haunt the movement: "Nobody should be scared to be themselves, and everybody should have an equal opportunity to have an enjoyable high school experience." www.advocate.com/obituaries/2015/03/24/trans-teen-activist-homecoming-king-dies
It was never just about forcing transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates. It also prevents local governments from setting their own minimum wages; allows employers to fire employees based on sexual orientation/gender identity; and eliminates recourse in state courts for discrimination on the basis of age, race, sex, color, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity.
In the wake of Blake Brockington’s death a political movement succeeded in making the City of Charlotte pass a non-discrimination that would protect LGBTQ people at work. HB2 blocks the Charlotte Law, and makes laws like it illegal, including local minimum wage laws. The media has sensationalized the explicit segregation of trans people into bathrooms that do not match their identities, and some part of the public has readily accepted the narrative that trans people in bathrooms are sexual predators despite the fact that there has never been a single reported incidence of a trans person attacking someone in a public restroom. http://mic.com/articles/114066/statistics-show-exactly-how-many-times-trans-people-have-attacked-you-in-bathrooms#.qeygcubCA HB2 is rightly regarded in this context as a green light from the State for continued violence against LGBTQ people on the part of bosses and reactionaries. The student occupiers have three modest demands:
In response to these demands Chancellor Everts has made private statements condemning HB2, a classic bait and switch, made vague private assurances that there would be no reprisals and spent most of her time consulting with her lawyer. In one such statement that was recorded and is available on the occupiers’ facebook page, Chancellor Everts stated that she “stood against this bill” emphasizing that the students’ trust is “the only way I can do my job.” These words, as nice as they are, do not in themselves constitute a public statement of opposition to the bill, nor are they expressive of any real commitment to make our campus safe for LGBTQ people.
The student occupiers were having none of it. In the same breath Everts stated that the administration “is not a monolith,” revealing the bankruptcy of liberal “diversity:” it’s the protection of a diversity of opinion in the managerial and ruling strata, but segregation for the rest of us. Mary Lyons, one of the student occupation leaders, insisted that getting Chancellor Everts to “sit at the table” with the occupiers was itself a victory and emphasized that the occupation was part of an ongoing discussion with the administration.
Unlike previous occupations of Appstate’s administration building, this one has explicitly reached out to the broader community, garnered broad public moral and material support, and benefited from having leaders who have established themselves in many previous local struggles such as Moral Mondays, campus rape crisis, fight for voting access, fight for 15, the BLM marches and so on. Though the clear call to solidarity with poor people seems promising, there was not on display any clear class politics.