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Resourcefulness and Reparations in North Carolina with Christine Edwards
134 Plays6 months ago
This week on the podcast, I'm joined by Christine Edwards of Civility Localized, a Charlotte-based public engagement firm that is changing the game on so many levels.
But most of all, this is an episode of two Black Southern women who are connected in some shape or form to North Carolina, talking about how we both are motivated and have or haven’t been supported by that state.
About our Guest
Christine Edwards is a civic firebrand who has immersed herself in helping urban communities grow with dignity. Since founding Civility Localized in 2018, her work has affected change nationwide through innovative outreach strategies that support racial equity, reducing barriers to participation, and encouraging sustainable growth for cities. Christine earned her Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Urban Management and Policy from UNC Charlotte. Christine’s work has been featured in Fast Company, Axios, The Business Journals, Queen City Nerve, Mountain Xpress, Pride Magazine, QCity Metro and many other local and national publications. Christine serves as a board member for Generation Nation, an organization cultivating the next generation of civic leaders and is a member of the board of directors for the Humane Society of Charlotte. She enjoys southern food, and loves seeing urban policy theory play out in daily life.
- Social Media & Websites:
- Websites:
- https://www.CivilityLocalized.com
- https://www.CivicImpactAcademy.com
- https://www.MeetChristine.co
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/civilitylocalized
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/civility-localized/
- Twitter: @CivilityCo
- Instagram: @CivilityLocalized
- Websites:
Also, I had to have an NC-related hot topic this week and it’s about this new mask and protest banning bill, that’s just the latest of laws making me not want to move home again, despite my love and homesickness.
Read the reference article here — https://www.wral.com/story/nc-senate-votes-to-ban-people-from-wearing-masks-in-public-for-health-reasons/21433199/
And I found two Black North Carolina authors for you to read this week, you can purchase then in my Bookshop.org store:
https://bookshop.org/a/5060/9781982163693
https://bookshop.org/a/5060/9780679737889
Never miss an episode, subscribe to my Substack or on LinkedIn
You can also find me, Kristen , @blackurbanist or @kristpattern.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Defying Gentrification'
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to Defying Gentrification. I'm your host, Kristen Jeffers. We are on episode seven. And if you're new here, this is a podcast where we talk about how cities work and we are going to the grassroots. We're going to the average folks and we're helping you understand how you can define an gentrification. This is a very special episode for me. It's an all North Carolina themed episode. So of course anything having to do with my home state is going to be a special episode.
Experiences of Young Black Women in North Carolina
00:00:31
Speaker
I have,
00:00:32
Speaker
As a guest today, Christine Edwards, who has started a firm, Civility Localize. We talk about that firm, but then we also talk about being young women, young black women of North Carolina in two different cities, even though our cities, we've interacted and lived in both.
00:00:50
Speaker
You know, been around both. And then the hot topic, I gotta have a hot topic. I gotta sit on the street corner and have a hot topic.
Critique of North Carolina's New Law
00:00:57
Speaker
The hot topic of this week is yet another law that North Carolina has passed to ban something about my life. This time I can't wear a mask in public, even though I need it, among other things.
Promoting Black and Urbanist Literature
00:01:12
Speaker
And then I have two wonderful book recommendations. But first, let me tell you about that bookshop store and then we'll head back into the episode.
00:01:21
Speaker
Hey y'all, did you know that I have a bookshop? And it's powered by Bookshop.org. You can head over to Bookshop.org slash shop slash Kristin E. Jeffers, and you can check out my three bookshelves. Throughout the show today, I'm gonna recommend two books off of my bookshelves, but in the meantime, you can check out my Black Prayer Feminist Urbanist The Booklist, which is a special shelf that I highlight queer and women written and about books.
00:01:50
Speaker
as well as my black urbanist book list which is sort of my master list that covers all urbanist thought the books I feel like you should read if you're going to be a good urbanist period and then finally my crafty people I've got a book list for you as well some of my favorite crafty books bye
00:02:08
Speaker
black folks as well as just in general some really good craft technique books. And again, all of that is over at bookshop.org slash shops as Kristin E. Jeffers and come back to the other two ad breaks. And I'm going to tell you more about my two favorite books for this week.
Political Frustrations and Activism
00:02:24
Speaker
Now back to the show.
00:02:30
Speaker
And so we're back. Welcome back to Defined Gentrification. I'm your host again, Kristen Jeffers. And yeah, the hot topic of the week. I pulled the article from WRAL News. It basically states pretty blatant. I mean, you can find this article in pretty much every headline of any paper in North Carolina covering North Carolina General Assembly. The North Carolina Senate has banned masks in public for public health reasons.
00:02:58
Speaker
Part of this stems from, of course, the necessary upstanding of our young folks on our campuses, like statewide as well as worldwide. And basically, it's just yet another excuse to punish people for speaking up for what's right. I'm going to keep it real. This is what pains me about my home state.
00:03:22
Speaker
In addition to the fact that now gentrification has just run rampant, like there are communities and neighborhoods and places in North Carolina I would have never imagined would be too expensive to live in.
00:03:38
Speaker
I put graphic on my Facebook the other day that showed that pretty much in every state of the United States, it is six figures to live in. But I'm talking about the best. Now, it's really ironic that in a state that gets a lot of yellow pollen and this is yellow pollen season and even being outside with a yellow pollen is just miserable.
00:04:00
Speaker
So they would just rather make us miserable than, you know, address the situations that have gotten us to the point where we are protesting in the streets. We are taking over campuses. We are going on a rich strike. We are demanding that there is codification of full civil rights.
00:04:18
Speaker
We have no we are no stranger to this. I actually when I still lived at home, I went to Moral Monday a couple of times. I've supported pretty much every civil rights movement that we have. And it's really heartbreaking because I have to be real honest. It's tough out here.
00:04:40
Speaker
And it's tough to find gentrification in DC and there are times when I wish I could just go home and forget that it's ever happening. But we can't put our heads in the sand. We have to be about solutions. And that's what I hope that we can do.
Christine Edwards' Civic Journey Begins
00:04:58
Speaker
I I could have just put any article up with like a negative headline about North Carolina because that's just the direction we're going in. And it's a direction that is so unnecessary. This is not that we've never been a divided state. And I talk I'll talk about that more in the interview today. But I just I just wanted to like center in on how ridiculous
00:05:25
Speaker
outlandish, outrageous, appalling. And if anybody wants to ask me again when I am coming home to live, that should be the answer to your question. And honestly, I'm looking, I love the South and I'm looking at Maryland and Virginia hard, because of course, me and DC aren't getting along as much as we could lately, but I definitely want to be somewhere where civil rights are going in the right direction.
00:05:52
Speaker
After the break, I'm going to sit down with Christine Edwards. We're going to talk North Carolina. We're going to talk Black women in North Carolina. We're going to talk public engagement. We're going to talk reparations. And I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation. So let me go and refer you to a wonderful book, and then we'll be back with that conversation. Again, this is Defying Gentrification with Kristen Jeffers.
00:06:16
Speaker
So yes, Bookshop.org has my bookstore and I have added this book that I walked up on when I was in the library, the DC Public Library, the main MLK branch. It's called Carolina Belt. It's by Kiana Alexander.
00:06:33
Speaker
And I got to be real honest, there's nothing that gets the content of the book. I'm just so shocked that I'm just now hearing about the subject of the book, about this wonderful black woman who managed to buy portions of a town and get out of slavery and live in Edenton and thrive. And I'm still reading through the book. And Keanu Alexander also has written some lovely, lovely little lesbian romances if you're into that. But they are set in Texas.
00:07:03
Speaker
This book is set in North Carolina in the past, of course, because it's based on a true story and it's based on someone who, in the 1800s, who managed to free themselves of slavery and buy a property. So you can buy that book in my bookshop store, bookshop.org slash shops, slash Christine Juppers. And now let's get to our wonderful interview.
00:07:28
Speaker
Welcome back to Defying Gentrification. I'm your host, Kristin Jeffers, and I'm so excited for this guest today. If anything, Kristin Edwards is a fellow North Carolinian, and yes, y'all know I still consider myself a North Carolinian, even though it's been almost a decade since I have been there.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I love that in her bio, she refers to herself as a civic firebrand. And that might be a good place for us to start with our conversation today for our guest, Christine Edwards to just tell us what hasn't influenced that being a civic firebrand. And then of course you can tell us about how that childhood up to now and we get into your company and it will get into like everything that you are doing that the people need to hear about on this episode and then some today.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Kristin. I've always admired your work
Education and Government Work
00:08:22
Speaker
and just your passion that you have for bringing justice into planning and justice into just understanding how our world works. So thank you for having me.
00:08:37
Speaker
I think that I describe myself as a civic firebrand because one of my early sort of taglines was public service is my jam, right?
00:08:51
Speaker
I've always just been so interested and obsessed with how cities work. And I also wanted to be a city manager one day. Like, hey, I'm going to be a city manager by this age. And just thinking and going into my earlier interviews with just that confidence of, oh, yeah, I can run this whole thing.
00:09:14
Speaker
But just not understanding the intricacies of day-to-day operations of running cities and understanding things. But I'm a sociologist by trade and by education. I went to school for sociology and I just always was interested in how people and groups interacted with each other and how that power differential really played in.
00:09:41
Speaker
to our world and our communities. A lot of that, like you alluded to, does come from my upbringing of moving to Charlotte, North Carolina at an early young age. We moved to Charlotte when I was entering into first grade, and we lived in an awesome neighborhood in East Charlotte. This is back when starter homes were still a thing.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah. And my mom had recently separated from my dad. And so, you know, she was starting over with me and my brother, two young kids starting over in a whole new city. We moved from Virginia to Charlotte and she worked in, she still works in healthcare. And so Charlotte was a place where healthcare was
Addressing Urban Growth and Economic Challenges
00:10:27
Speaker
booming and it's still a big industry here. So she worked for one of the main hospital systems and she was able to get us enrolled into school.
00:10:35
Speaker
and able to get us into a nice duplex where it was a neighborhood where I felt safe. There were a lot of kids my age and my brother was a little bit older than me so we were able to kind of get around and navigate even walking to school.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yes. Yes. Yes. It does happen in the South, y'all. It's real. It does happen. But because it was an elementary school and it was an older, more established neighborhood and this was like the early 90s, so a lot of that was it was available. But as I got older, we got into middle school and going into high school.
00:11:14
Speaker
I started to just become more aware and thinking, okay, I can go to school in my neighborhood. Sometimes we get groceries in my neighborhood, but for everything else, we have to go somewhere else. We've got to get in the car and go on another side of town to go school shopping for our clothes, to go grocery shopping if we want to get fresh groceries and things like that.
00:11:35
Speaker
And so I started to ask questions like, you know, how come this side of town has, you know, things that our side of town doesn't have, or they have, you know, better sidewalks, or they have the nice stores, or they have these different things, different kind of playgrounds than what's in my home neighborhood, right? So just that curiosity earlier in life, I think led me to
00:12:02
Speaker
where I am today, even though I didn't know what that was at the time. I wanted you to say all of that because I'm listening to it and anybody who has heard my story, you're going to hear parallels. And that's what I love. I think some of it is regional. Some of it is the time period of the early 90s. Some of it is coming from
00:12:24
Speaker
my mom was a single parent, my parents, I'm an only, but they raised me with their siblings children. So we all kind of had this big community. They worked for institutions that continue to lift our areas up and that were hiring black people, specifically black women into middle-class positions. Like there was so much of our world in the early nineties into the 2000s that was set.
00:12:52
Speaker
But like you said, I also was noticing stores were moving away. White flight was real. Like one minute the neighborhood was all right, and the next minute nobody wants to be there, including the people that had started there. And then, of course, now I'm seeing that wave of gentrification come back. My neighborhood that I grew up in is so close to UNCG, is so close to downtown.
00:13:18
Speaker
It's a target neighborhood and of course the people who had lived in Smith Homes Art public housing project for years wanted that development to happen.
00:13:29
Speaker
then they realized that it wasn't gonna happen with them. And so that's the sort of the watching Greensboro of it happen while I'm here in DC. And of course, DC, there's books upon books on what has happened here and how the presence of the federal government has shaped here and how so many things are piloted here. But in the Mid-Atlantic region, we look to, on the one hand Atlanta's the place we look to, on the one hand,
00:13:58
Speaker
DC, but why don't you talk about your side of watching Charlotte change and watching Charlotte Raleigh, even Greensboro, Asheville become these destination cities and how things that we never thought we would have to talk about in the early nineties and 2000s. Cause our industries were holding us down. Now we're having these same conversations that other people are having in our region.
00:14:21
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'd be happy to talk about that and just my involvement. So I went to school at UNC Greensboro. So I spent some time in Greensboro, made my bachelor's in sociology and African studies and graduated at the height of the 2008 recession. And so didn't really quite know what I wanted to do with this liberal arts degree.
Founding of Civility Localize
00:14:48
Speaker
You know? Yes, yes. Yeah, because I came on out of Raleigh, out of NC State, and I had maybe like six months in Durham, crash-landed with my communication degree. This was before all those stuff had happened.
00:15:03
Speaker
And that's kind of where it happened because, you know, yeah, I knew enough to write a blog. I knew enough to like maybe get a temp job. I was working in North Hills. And I know at the time I would come home on the weekends and I was watching like UNCG gradually grow across.
00:15:20
Speaker
was now Gate City Boulevard. We were having that debate about Gate City Boulevard. And then of course, you know, the turnaround, and I think we both felt like we both decided, okay, 2008 recession, not working out for us to try to be in other NC cities. We come to our home cities, and I'll let you tell your half of this, because they've heard me tell my half so many times, but yours is very parallel.
00:15:43
Speaker
It's similar. I feel like it's very similar, so I graduated with this degree not knowing what to do with it, but at the time I had an internship with the Greensboro Housing Coalition and I knew I wanted to do some type of public sector work, something that would be impactful, but at the same time I
00:15:59
Speaker
I had student loans and I wanted to get a job with stability and able to get my career kicked off on a good path. And so I was talking to one of the counselors there and she was studying for her MPA. And I was like, Oh, what's an MPA? What is that? And so I looked into it and just, I had just enough time to go ahead and apply and enroll. And I literally, as soon as the same year that I graduated, I enrolled into the UNC Charlotte MPA program.
00:16:28
Speaker
And when I was growing up in Charlotte, UNC Charlotte was not a school that people would choose willingly, but now it's just it's huge. And it has there's so much support. There's support for math and science and engineering, but also the public policy school.
00:16:49
Speaker
um was uh renamed after um Gerald Fox and he was a former county manager who had made a huge impact on our county systems and really kind of helped to get where we are today but I hadn't I didn't know I didn't know there was such a strong network and local government in Charlotte because of the city and county government now at the time the city government probably had about a billion dollar um budget so this
00:17:19
Speaker
almost, it's like a billion dollar corporation. Tax base, right? The tax base of the county and of the city of Charlotte, people were moving to the area at an alarming rate. And so I think it was something like,
00:17:35
Speaker
100 people a day at one point, you know, I'm probably gonna have to check those numbers, but they don't like it. On our end, it was like, okay, Charlotte is just one minute you look up, you're like, wait, 600, like, seven, eight. How? How? Like, what is happening here? And
00:17:52
Speaker
Even for folks who haven't been down like for me, and I'll let you get back to it, but I just want to insert here like just seeing this happen. On the other side, and because the story could have very well been you could have we could have been shared NPA programs because Greensboro is our NPA programming at UNCG.
00:18:12
Speaker
pretty much if you are working in any of the triad counties, somebody knows somebody or somebody came through the program. One of our that's one of the strengths that our institutions in the USC system used to be known for and I'll say used to be because we're having that problem right now where they're trying to
00:18:32
Speaker
abandon their public mandate. But when they were in the public mandate business, it wasn't just if you were at Chapel Hills Institute of Government, if you are at UNCG's MPA, if you're at UNC Charlotte's, and those schools are being pumped into and invested into and people were writing checks, and people were connecting people
00:18:52
Speaker
And it was a regional jobs driver, just like some of our engineering programs at the institution. So this was a viable thing. And with your your pathway, you realize, OK, I need to go ahead and get in the grass. Whereas for me, I took the LSAT.
00:19:09
Speaker
I was writing, I was working call center, and I was walking at a call center that was helping people process losing their jobs back. We were in that wave of layoffs. So I was in that wave. And then I had had my eyes, y'all know I've had my eyes on PC forever. And so I was like, Okay, I got it in American. But it was UNCG that gave me the financial
Philosophy of Civic Engagement
00:19:30
Speaker
aid package. And it was UNCG that had the concentration and community and economic development, which is now
00:19:35
Speaker
even more focused on urban planning and development since my time being there and since me matriculating in 2010 and graduating in 2012. But your timeline is a little bit accelerated. So what happened in grad school and what happened after grad school? Because, of course, you're saying you got to be exposed to this billion dollar city, this million dollar region, everything that is every, of course, I'm getting all these Charlotte has got a lot tourism ads to that.
00:20:05
Speaker
Talk about coming up into this time. Yeah, so I think from my standpoint, coming into grad school in 2010 and understanding kind of the pipeline, a lot of the folks that I were in school with and the people ahead of me, the pipeline is go get a job with the city or the county or some public sector agency of which there were plenty in the Meckleburg County area.
00:20:35
Speaker
Um, so I got, I feel like there was a lot of luck involved. There was a lot of hard work, but there was also a lot of luck involved. I was, um, lucky enough to get the, um, a management fellowship with the city manager's office, um, for Charlotte. And I was also at the time, I think this was Obama's first term and, um,
00:20:57
Speaker
He had the energy efficiency block grant program. That was one of the programs that came from his administration was his first round of modern energy efficiency, like making the energy conversation and the sustainability conversation. That was kind of the first time that I had really seen that happen at the local level. And so one of my tasks during that internship or that fellowship was to manage the energy efficiency block grant, which was a $5 million grant.
00:21:26
Speaker
We were able to modernize EV. We got EV vehicles for the city. We were able to get some solar panels built on city facilities. And we also updated our wayfinding in downtown. And so it was like, okay, Charlotte is like growing up a little bit. We got finding, we got signage, we got EV charging stations. And this was in 2020.
00:21:49
Speaker
12-ish, right?
Work with Reparations Commissions
00:21:52
Speaker
Around that same time, another huge development while I was in college, I don't know the exact year, but we got light rail. We finally got our very first light rail line called the Blue Line. Yes, yes.
00:22:05
Speaker
And so I think that was while I was in undergrad. But then when I moved back home, I was like, we have a light rail, you know? And so the mayor at the time was Mayor Anthony Fox, who, again, after his tenure while he was mayor, he was picked by the Obama administration to serve as a US Department Secretary of Transportation. So that was huge. And in that really solidified Charlotte's place,
00:22:34
Speaker
in the national stage, especially as it relates to transportation mobility. So now we're a part of the conversation. I think a lot of it also has to do those relationships, bringing the DNC to Charlotte, bringing that international convention to Charlotte. We got this fancy new rail line. We got our, you know, yeah, yeah.
00:22:56
Speaker
This is why for many of us in our generation, we saw the Democratic Party actually do something. I remember being, I wasn't a delegate, but I was there. I have all these little buttons. I have a picture of me standing in front of the light rail with all my little buttons, and I was at the street parties, and I was really absorbing being in Charlotte at the time, and it felt like we were on a growth trajectory.
00:23:24
Speaker
And then you got a chance to really embed yourself into the city manager's offices and everything. And one of the things people are like, well, Kristen, how did that not happen for you? I'm like, there's there's people and mentorships and all those things matter. Like when I was live streaming just early before we went on the recording, like people were asking me, how do I get connected and how did I stay connected? And that was the thing. Your mentorships.
00:23:53
Speaker
And then just being in a city that was chosen and that's the thing we're seeing that not every city has been chosen and I think that's a good segue to talk about how your work has evolved and how you're talking to cities around reparations and
00:24:10
Speaker
asking and demanding the government give cities, communities, black communities, and other communities of color, especially what they deserve. Now, yeah, you can start us off there, but definitely fill in the blanks too. Don't let me take you away, but I think that's a good segue because you had that opportunity to kind of be a city manager, but here we are and it's 2024 and you're running your own firm,
00:24:37
Speaker
and you've been training people on how to do things. You're actively talking about reparations and you're actively talking about it in the sense, even though we had all these things that we had and all these things working for us, and yet still like myself, you found ways and found and saw a need and you're feeling a need and challenging the conversations and the ways that we've been working on civic development,
00:25:06
Speaker
and urban planning and all those things. So just talking a little bit about that. Sure. So thinking about where we're sort of left off and just talking about how Charlotte is moving into this growing city, urban, super progressive. And at the time we did have a black mayor. We also elected our very first black female mayor not long after that.
Future Civic Engagement Plans
00:25:32
Speaker
And so you have a lot of
00:25:34
Speaker
black and brown faces at the forefront leading this, oh gosh, what is it called? Leading this, the city of the New South, right? The New South. So this is like, oh man, we are quote unquote, post-racial. We've got Obama, we got the DNC, we got, you know, the incumbent president came and visited us. And so a world-class city. That's what we're on our way, we're on our way to becoming a world-class city.
00:26:02
Speaker
So as Charlotte urbanized and becomes more and more rich and more and more urbanized, we're sitting right at around 35% African American, about 40% by 15% Hispanic right now.
00:26:18
Speaker
But around that time, there was actually a study done by Harvard. It was called the Chetty study. That was the research. And they found that Mecklenburg County and the region was 50 out of 50 in terms of economic mobility. That means that if you were born in Charlotte, you are more likely to die in poverty than anyone in any of the other 50 top municipalities that they tested. So we're ranking 50 out of 50 states.
00:26:48
Speaker
Um...
00:26:50
Speaker
So what that's showing is that the people that move here can take advantage of the prosperity offered, but the people that are from Charlotte are seeing the same disparities over and over, generation after generation. So how can we stop? How can we curb this? So around 2015, that's really what launched a lot of our economic mobility, really caused the city and city leadership to really look internally
00:27:19
Speaker
and ask those big questions. And I think my involvement kind of came in. At the time in 2015, I was working with Queens University of Charlotte. I was laying the foundation for what is now called the Center for Digital Equity. This was around the same time that Google Fiber was getting ready to start building an infrastructure in cities, cities like Charlotte. We're getting Google Fiber, but then when they peeled back the layers and they were like, oh,
00:27:49
Speaker
people, this is something people really need. There's a lot of disparities happening. I think that was something like 20% of the 20% of residents of Mecklenburg County do not have any broadband access. And when you're talking about 20% of almost a million people, that's a lot of people that do not have access to the internet. And pretty much all of those people are of the same background racially.
00:28:15
Speaker
and are of the same income level and education status or education level. So yeah, a lot of our black and brown demographic, you lay over that map, that map overlay for education, for income, for race is the same.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You know, so I was working for Queens at the time and that's when I really started to get into this equity work. Looking at economic mobility and just wanting to do more. I didn't work at Queens for very long. I worked there until about 2016. 2016 to 2020 is when I worked most recently. My most recent local government job was with Mecklenburg County government and
00:29:02
Speaker
I'll take a pause there. I started working at Mecklenburg County and I served as a community relations coordinator from 2016 to 2020. And we saw a lot happen in that time. Yeah, it shook it for me. By this time period, I
00:29:26
Speaker
was getting more into bike ped advocacy. We had piloted a little bit of bike share in Greensboro. Of course, y'all actually finished your light rail. And then, of course, Raleigh and Durham tried and tried and tried and tried. And I'll just leave that because, yeah, it
00:29:48
Speaker
it's each each of our regions has our characteristics and each of our regions has taken bad news like no economic mobility and they've taken it in different directions. I feel like that's where we're starting to see how people are responding differently to various challenges everything from gentrification
00:30:12
Speaker
to over policing or policing period abolition like uh new like more newcomers and then of course the color of the map and then for me personally one of the things that keeps me from like even thinking it's like it's so hard because i get so much when i go home
00:30:31
Speaker
but at the end of the day is the law on my side. Can I bring less my partner? Can if, if everything like 2016 really zeroed in on the thing that we wanted to happen, the person we wanted to get elected nationally, like what happens in the presidency does matter and it does trickle down. And there's not to me, it's not okay anymore that our States are just picking and choosing and
00:30:58
Speaker
Charlotte really saw that in a big way, because as progressive as y'all were, y'all's airport, and of course, yours non-discrimination law became under a lot of scrutiny at the General Assembly. Yeah, yeah. It did, it did. And it, you know, it, that was just a really kind
00:31:21
Speaker
was embarrassing time. To be from, to be from Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, because it's so funny because my dad, he will always pick on me and be like, well, I don't know why y'all moved to that Goober state. I'll move down there.
00:31:38
Speaker
We love being from the South. I love being Black and Southern. But at the same time, I'm not going to pretend like the people in this state care about me and my family. When my future children, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that this is a safe place for us because it never has been. But it's a daily
00:32:06
Speaker
It's a daily work in progress to make our experiences safe.
Conclusion: Continuing the Fight Against Inequality
00:32:12
Speaker
But there are things that we can do in our policy and in our day-to-day work that will help us get there and that will just create better experiences for everyone for the good of them all. You know what I mean? So there are things that we can do, but you're right. The quote unquote bathroom bill was not a
00:32:32
Speaker
not a very good time in our history here, but I think what was happening was also a microcosm of what was happening nationally, right? You have the blowback of having a very progressive, you know, black president and a safe progressive, but you know what I mean?
00:32:48
Speaker
So left leaning, you know, democratic. And so that was happening all across the country. And we saw the response from that in North Carolina and specifically in Charlotte, where there's all this opportunity.
00:33:03
Speaker
So just quickly sort of getting into the reparations work and where that all started and where we kind of started with our firm. So in 2018 I applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation and it was called the Emerging Cities Champions Challenge.
00:33:24
Speaker
They had, I think we were one of 25 cities and again, growing cities, urban cities with lots, you know, young talent. And so I think you had to be like under 35 years old in order to apply emerging champions, right? So I applied, and this was the second year that I applied, but on the second year in 2018, I actually won a $5,000 grant.
00:33:49
Speaker
To do it. I remember this. I remember this in real time I remember like and that's another thing. This is another thing like grant makers that Invest in certain places because not only is night is Charlotte a night city Ally has a special homeownership campaign there And of course we could talk about kind of the McCall sort of overarching investing and saying hey
00:34:16
Speaker
white leaders continuing to invest in your black leadership. This is a good thing that we have black leadership, we have progressive leadership that we're moving forward. But I want to hear, I definitely want you to tell me more about how you got to this point, but I wanted to put that pin in there that once again, cities investing in their black and brown residents, philanthropies
00:34:39
Speaker
investing not just in one city but in many cities will make this a more level playing field. That's the one thing I don't see across the board. You don't have as you have focused cities and Charlotte has been a focused city on so many levels and Charlotte has been like an avatar that whole city of the new south has helped it financially and of course having the banking industry having a healthcare industry having it be a destination city for so many people
00:35:06
Speaker
but that is not happening in other cities, not even in the South and not even nationally. I just wanted to put that in there, but definitely talk more about how this $5,000 changed it. Cause I remember when this happened in real time and I was like, yes, this is when I saw the ship and your career being on the sidelines being, and we've been Twitter friends for like,
00:35:26
Speaker
like parallel let me let me put that out there forever and then finally last year we met in real life so but let's get to that point let me let me let you talk about how those five thousand dollars changed everything it really did change everything and i didn't think it was going to change everything but it did um so the grant came with um
00:35:47
Speaker
a trip also to Toronto and going into the 880 cities and they do like a whole day of planning you know how to plan out your community challenge, how to get the resources that you need to make it happen and track the changes over time. So my project was called Amplify Charlotte and Amplify Charlotte is all about amplifying your voice
00:36:09
Speaker
learning how to reach out to your city council, learning how to get on a board, how to write a letter, how to start a letter writing campaign or to get something done in your neighborhood. And I think the catch or the attention grab with Amplify Charlotte was we actually had civic toolkits.
00:36:27
Speaker
because so often we don't pass down information from such a person. Like, if you're a neighborhood leader, a lot of that is really informal. And so we put together these civic toolkits. I might have one here, actually. Here we go. Yeah, and I'm happy to link to this in our show notes. Yes, just for you. You got the box. Yeah, there was also a digital element to this as well, but you had a box like, yeah, we had a box with the stuff in it, which is, yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker
We had like templates. We had like voter registration information. So that was the first year of Amplify Charlotte. And I don't know what it was. I think it was just the funding. I had never received that much money in one lump sum before. And it was awarded to me. It was not awarded to my job. It wasn't awarded to an organization. It was awarded to me as an individual. And I was like, oh my God, what do I do with this?
00:37:27
Speaker
I started my LLC. That's enough to really, and that's another thing. Like a lot of people ask me like, Kristen, why are you been doing so many things? Like it helps to have a targeted grant, a lump sum. And yeah. And actually full disclosure, like for a previous class of like
00:37:48
Speaker
80 cities community fellows in 2015 actually was a mentor. I went to Toronto. They actually, now they did pay for my passport. I had them to thank for my passport and it's now up for renewal because I was 10 years ago. So yes. So they were the first organization to take me out of the country as a mentor. That was the first time. That's why I can say that like I'm a US Canada person, like as far as like advising people. And of course I'm,
00:38:15
Speaker
I'm from Greensboro, North Carolina, and my family's from like the little rural Hamlet. This is a big deal. And once again, I want to highlight this as part of this episode, because I know people are listening for motivation. They're looking to us for motivation. And Christine, you have created
00:38:34
Speaker
not just with this, but not only taking an amplified Charlotte and moving into like civilly localized, like that being able to follow through and also just, you have a support network, you have a system, you have people backing you up, you have a team, even though you've had to shift that team over the last few years, but the pandemic moment for you, you were able to take what you built upon
00:39:03
Speaker
and family, friends, community members, the public will. That's something we talk about a lot in our NPA classes, like the Overton window and the public will and like getting people engaged. Of course, our young people right now are trying to push our window again for a good reason in 2020.
00:39:25
Speaker
lockdown, shelter in place. I like to say shelter in place as somebody who still got the issues where I can't just be willing to lay out in the streets, shelter in place, and it being one of the states. North Carolina was one of those states where having split governance has been very interesting, but it kind of helped us out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it helped. Yeah, it definitely helped because the county was as trusted
00:39:53
Speaker
agency in terms of health and human services so everybody knew this is what the county is doing they're they're taking care of the health and the environment and then for this city and this i know this is not unique to charlotte but i know that in the south we have that council manager form of government and i think that having having that council manager
00:40:14
Speaker
For the city, I think was really helpful for us because the city could maintain infrastructure. They could maintain public safety and provide some of the structure that we needed like for neighborhoods and getting into the community. And it wasn't political. Like you have this council and they do answer for people and they represent people.
00:40:35
Speaker
but it wasn't purely political like it might have been in some other places like in the northeast so having having our cities run by a manager i think has really helped and it also helps people get involved and understand what's going on because nowadays um probably in the past 10 years they have gotten a lot more transparent with the budget having budget events budget public meetings
00:41:00
Speaker
you know, starting budget engagement earlier on in the process. You know, when we we talk about that billion dollar budget, now it's it's two billion.
00:41:09
Speaker
Because it's bigger. It's bigger. It's bigger. The tax base is bigger. So 2018, I won the grant. And I got my LLC. And we did the Civic Toolkit Project for about a year. And then in 2019, I became registered as the minority-owned business for the state of North Carolina. And so then it added me to these vendor lists. And so I'm eligible.
00:41:39
Speaker
you know, and I'm in demand like, oh, you're an MBE, minority business enterprise, you are a WBE. So this is valuable to outside companies who want to come in and partner with local firms to do community engagement. And I was offering community engagement.
00:42:00
Speaker
Like not marketing, not digital marketing or communication. And I think I was one of the very first local woman owned, black owned firms that would put engagement first. And a lot of times people, you know, again, people put marketing first because they think that's what you need and what I earned.
00:42:18
Speaker
What I learned during my time in Mecklenburg County is what we need is two-way communication. We need intentional engagement and we need people that can be boots on the ground and so it really just kind of snowballed. In 2019, I got my first subcontract
00:42:36
Speaker
Um, so I was, you know, working, you know, hourly work on, on these smaller projects. Um, and then in 2020, I got my first prime contract. And so then I had to make a choice. Yeah. Yes.
00:42:52
Speaker
The real money thing here, and once again, let me emphasize support, networking, infrastructure, and an MWBE system that makes sure people that care and are concerned and love engaging with the people are getting the resources they need. So yes, tell me more about having this prime contract.
00:43:15
Speaker
Yeah. So the prime contract that I won in 2020 was with the city of Asheville. And so I had to make a choice. I said, am I going to go all in? I need to make sure that this is my very first client. I need to make sure that we do it well. And then I was looking at, you know, financially, can I make the leap? And so there was three there were three reasons that I decided to quit my job in 2020 and go all in on my business.
00:43:43
Speaker
um the first reason was kind of going back COVID so at the beginning of the year as we all know COVID uh hit you know across our country and across the world um so my world just looked different you know and working for the county government looked very different and um
00:44:03
Speaker
as a consultant and as a change maker, the government needed help. So I was getting requested to get on projects to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, to help prevent the spread of coronavirus through outreach campaigns, through engagement, and just helping other local governments that are not in Mecklenburg County to do that. The second reason, of course, was the 2020 election. A lot of people forgot. They just
00:44:31
Speaker
they do we have an election yeah we had an election in 2020 and it just sure did so there was a lot of misinformation out there um in 2020 so again i was being hired to do voter engagement to set up those text campaigns and you know the outreach campaigns that you saw a lot of in 2020 um you know we were doing like virtual
00:44:55
Speaker
uh webinars and info sessions how to use an absentee ballot you know creating content from voter engagement was taking up a lot of time outside of work um the third thing of course especially this is what prompted me doing my work in ashville is just the the impact of the social justice movement the resurgence of this movement because of the murder of george floyd you know and all of the harm that came out of that um and
00:45:25
Speaker
the harm that it did to us as a nation, but also the swift response.
00:45:32
Speaker
from some local governments. From some. Some. Not all. Clearly not all. And I want to pin it in here. In 2019, I spoke in Asheville. And one of the things, this is one of the first times, because when you're tapped as one of these speakers are supposed to transform the minds, oftentimes you come in,
00:45:57
Speaker
And you do your speech and especially when somebody like me, it feels a little tokenizing because they're like, well, we have Kristin Jeffers come and speak to us and we listen to her podcast and we've been following her blog for years. But one of the first things I did was I made sure I actually had a talk back with the community, the black community in Asheville. We went to the community center there.
00:46:17
Speaker
And I was like, how did y'all feel about this? What's really going on here? What's really going on on the ground? Because when I was in Raleigh earlier that year, I did a similar thing and a similar panel. And they really wanted me that night to erase the voices of the people. I had warned them that they were going to get interrupted. We were probably going to get interrupted. And we did. And I think a lot of people thought, oh, no. I was like, the way y'all set this up,
00:46:46
Speaker
And they were censoring my slides and all those things. So even within our state, these could be different. And I'm seeing, and I was excited to hear that you got this project because clearly Asheville, listen, Raleigh.
00:47:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Shrugging, shrugging emoji. Shrugging Tom emoji. It takes time. And, you know, especially with Raleigh being the seat of the General Assembly. Oh my gosh, it just seems like there are.
00:47:17
Speaker
people that are specifically working against any progress that is made. It's like they're keeping tally. They're literally keeping tally and say, oh, voter ID got shot down. Well, let's just take a look at that. Okay. Come on.
00:47:37
Speaker
Like, do we really have to go back to voter rolls and, you know, what is it? Cause of course now we're, now we're trying to ban masks. I'm like, y'all really don't want me to come home. Y'all really don't want to see my face again. Cause y'all already don't see half of it in public anyway, but you really don't want to see me again.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah. Again, North Carolina is becoming and people love it. Love it here. I know. Yeah. Move here and spend their whole lives here. But I think that they're trying to make this state and some areas of the state more comfortable for people from Florida or California or New York like, hey, y'all had that lifestyle there or you want to move, you want to bring your values with you. And so it's just like, OK.
00:48:23
Speaker
But what about the rest of us? What about the people who are leaving because we can't get civil rights? What about the progress we have done? We have been known like people may not realize and know in our history, just like you had great society. We had like Terry Sanford and all those
00:48:41
Speaker
We had Jesse Helms too, but then we also had Terry Sanford and other people. We've always been that balance. We've had side by side where black folks were working in the mills next to their white colleagues now. We were still in segregated housing, but our cities were smaller. Now, yes, Charlotte's region has grown exponentially. And so y'all have had things like Valentine wanting to be its own city.
00:49:04
Speaker
people moving into South Carolina deliberately, but they work in Charlotte because they want a more conservative environment. But then you have folks like Braxton who, you know, I would have never thought like that to me is indicative of the paradox of Charlotte.
00:49:21
Speaker
You have a brother who is like in the posture. He is being vilified. He is a meme. Mm hmm. Yeah. One of his next phone calls is hey, hey, come and learn more about getting involved. And now not only has he been on city council, now he could be because he's running for what labor is department. He's running for Labor Commission, right? He is. Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker
Yeah, and not to say that he's got everything all together, but when we were at seeing you as Charlotte this year, you know, people are, you know, he's at least gotten all the education he needs to get into place. But still, we've got a brother with locks, even with the symbolism.
00:50:01
Speaker
those of us who grew up in the South remember a time where you couldn't even look like that. You couldn't look black, you couldn't be black, like it's the reason why a lot of our programs are called minority programs or we say. It hasn't changed at all. Yeah. Yeah. And there, that is, that's a distinction. And I feel like Christine with your work,
00:50:25
Speaker
and making a way and being able to fall into this pathway and listening to, hey, maybe I don't want to do local government this way. The need is here, the need is here to make sure we get through COVID. The need is here to
00:50:44
Speaker
Center our black lives because you know, they're already making money on it You know, my brother and me was setting Charlotte even though they filmed in Florida like that Charlotte and blackness has been centered. We've had all these resources We have all these special programs and then of course Asheville taken the call by me and others who have been brought in to tell people hey do this right and then of course we have Raleigh
00:51:11
Speaker
And then, of course, Durham Next Door trying. And then sometimes I don't even know what Greensboro is doing, but I'm glad that they're doing something. And of course, this is not a site to my hometown. I know folks are on the ground and we are one of the most on the ground groups that can own the ground. Oh, absolutely. But we have to have that support, the support. Yeah. Infrastructure and support and.
00:51:33
Speaker
as you're in this period now with where you are with civilly located you you've localized rather sorry about that like you have of course you are branded this is a this is a um you've gotten to this point you've branded your company you're getting more and more clients things are successful you are getting on like obviously i'm a media outlet but you've gotten some national media press with what you've done
00:51:58
Speaker
just center me in that moment and where you are right now. And I remember even us having a conversation a couple, I don't think it was just like last year, you're like, okay, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm like, in this last calendar year alone, since the last time we have talked on Zoom, and of course this is a recorded line, but still in a recorded episode, but let me tell y'all,
00:52:20
Speaker
She has really taken her business to the next level. And as you're hearing on this show, and I mean, we could probably wrap up with this, as she are hearing on this show, despite gentrification, rearing this ugly head, because they're selling our state to people that have a little bit more money, and they're selling this idea of, hey, you can move here and get more house, or hey, we can charge these rates, or hey, we can have these politics now,
00:52:49
Speaker
Because we've got newcomers coming in. We want this to be our future, despite what we are known for and what others know us for and what others love so much about this state. Just kind of take us home and take us to like.
00:53:07
Speaker
this last year and really leaning in and of course the success of the work in ASHA because there is a success story in ASHA. I think so. Yeah, we'll be happy to and thank you for the compliment. I feel like being able to be seen by your peers, by you, like it feels so good. So thank you. We've done a lot in the past year. So to kind of get you up to speed,
00:53:31
Speaker
So we first signed on to work with the city of Asheville in 2020. I actually had a previous relationship with the current city manager, Debra Campbell, because she was this planner. She was planning director for Charlotte. And I sat down with her years ago for lunch and I said, hey, Debra, I think I want to be a planner. And so she was like, are you sure?
00:53:56
Speaker
And she was like, well, you're going to have to go back to school. And I was like, OK, well, I don't know if I'm going to go back to school. And she was just telling me, like, Christine, we need you at the policy level. We need you in the community. And so, you know, I definitely listened to that advice. But, you know, having that previous relationship and knowing who she was, you know, I think helped us go after this opportunity. And it was reimagining public safety for the city of Asheville. It was around that defunding police conversation.
00:54:25
Speaker
highly unpopular, just really controversial and nobody wanted to touch it.
00:54:31
Speaker
No, no. But Deborah Campbell and the city of Asheville in her city, she was one of the only one of the very few city managers that is listening. And so there was a huge demand in the community for more equality in terms of policing. And their actual demand was to reduce the police force by 50%. And so, you know, in our conversations, I knew, okay, that's not going to happen. That's
00:54:57
Speaker
But at the very least, they want to listen and learn about the practices that have been harmful, learn about the experiences with the police that have been harmful and how they can reimagine that. So that kicked off a four year relationship. You know, that was our first contract was reimagining public safety. We did a series of listening sessions.
00:55:16
Speaker
surveys on the ground knocking door-to-door to understand people's experiences and that resulted in, oh gosh, I don't really know exactly how much the amount that was. But still, it's a big contract. It was massive.
00:55:34
Speaker
Yeah, the amount that was moved from the police department into other areas of the city operation to go towards community engagement. So that was the first iteration. The second iteration of our work with Asheville was equity based budget. And so again, taking those tax resources and applying them in an equitable manner. So that really set the stage for us managing and being the project manager for the city of Asheville Community Reparations Commission.
00:56:03
Speaker
This is a 25-member commission, and it was a big undertaking. So the city put up, I think they, through the sale of land, they initially put up 5 million
00:56:21
Speaker
For the reparations commission fund and an additional 500 K year over year and the county Buncombe County did the same thing. So they said we are committing funds. We are committing time. We are committing resources.
00:56:38
Speaker
to research and solve for harm. We're searching harm and we're going to do what we can to repair harm. And I think the disconnect is that when you have government at the table, unfortunately, it comes with strings attached. Yep, yep, yep. You know, they can only do
00:56:59
Speaker
what's in their purview. If you are an activist, you need to, everybody knows you need to be acting outside of the system of the oppressor. You can't expect your oppressor to be the one to solve your problems. And, you know, so a lot of people had taken issue very early on with the city's involvement in this, but, you know, they were curious. They wanted to see what would happen, right?
00:57:28
Speaker
Where we're at now is I believe the commission is going to be disbanded because it was supposed to only be a two year long commission. But during the time that they're together, they are aiming to create a third party organization so that they can receive the funds. So it's not just the city applying the changes.
00:57:51
Speaker
So that's the goal is for them to work together, use city and county resources to research and repair the harms. And also the funding will go towards recommendations. So if the recommendation had to do with health, then it would be the health department. It would be in the health department budget. It's similar to participatory budgeting. And so they really could only impact change within the city and county purview.
00:58:18
Speaker
All in all, this is all to create momentum, positive momentum to get private sector entities, to get corporations involved, get nonprofits involved, get individuals involved for reparations for African Americans in this country, and to also encourage on the national stage. There's, what is it, HB 40? I think that's the reparations bill. Yes, yes.
00:58:43
Speaker
Let me look that up. Yeah, I'll put this in the show notes for everybody who wants to look at the federal bill. But yeah, I'll just pause you there and just say this, so many places won't just do the conversation.
00:59:01
Speaker
Right. So many people wouldn't even do the commission. And now this commission is like, OK, we're ready. We we got this platform. We were embedded. We saw exactly what our city needs to do to rectify our local wrongs. And one of the things that's needed is local context because, yeah, there's the overarching need for reparations. But that's going to look different because we there's different ways that each of our states
00:59:28
Speaker
has engaged with their black communities. Like there's different legacies. What our reparations committee looks like for us in North Carolina or even up here in DC or Virginia looks different than say Oklahoma or California because there's different legacies, different colonizers, different oppressors, different relationships to our blackness, indigeneity, all those things. So
00:59:55
Speaker
and different harms and of course those harms go across because racism and anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity was embedded in all of our systems even our best most aggressive systems so yeah just having the conversation then even though the conversation is going to shift they're looking at creating an entity to be able to receive and have a more direct relationship so that they can go further because
01:00:21
Speaker
one of the things I am seeing in my work is that we have to imagine what this looks like. And in some cases it's a remembering because there's certain things that we did that worked. It's one of the things being in part of when I went to NC State and our African American studies coordinator and we had like a special purpose. NC State got kept getting rightfully so
01:00:46
Speaker
recognized and sued and pushed against for the fact that our campus was not doing civil rights correctly. You know, even in a time where the UNC system is dismantling diversity, equity, inclusion, our campus was like a hotbed of how that wasn't working out. And so one of the things we got was an African-American cultural center.
01:01:06
Speaker
and coordinators in every single academic. How do you remember this? Yes, because we had everything. Now, when we were in undergrad, we had a sitting. We had a sit-in, and they had a sit-in there. And one of the leaders of that sit-in, Faith Leach, is now a Baltimore city administrator. She is. Yeah, OK. And she's one of my mentors. And yeah, and we had that. And one of our things was, St. Copa was one of our centers, because our leader,
01:01:35
Speaker
of our African-American cultural center. We had the bird. And of course, I was a counselor. We had pre-orientation. We had a special pre-orientation program for Black students. And we learned about that principle of Sankofa. We have the bird. And so I think a lot of what we're doing, we've done some good things in the past, but we've got to do some wonderful things in the future. And we should not be casting things away. Reparations is a rep repair. It's literally in the name. It's repairing harm.
01:02:04
Speaker
And then once that harm is repaired, how do we get ourselves situated to not do harm again? And what do we pull from? And where do we pull for? And how do we see ourselves? How do we break down our existing borders and barriers? Because one of the things I love to say right now is that we only got one earth. Like that's my new model right now. We only have one earth.
01:02:26
Speaker
going to spaces and working out for us. We can't live in space. And of course, right now, the way they got space set up, I don't think we're going to be living. We are going to be living in space. They got capitalism in space. I'm not going to be it. Can I afford? Yeah.
01:02:41
Speaker
it on the moon like yeah exactly because yeah we we need things like we need to like we need abolition we need guaranteed housing we need all these things and honestly you are working you have managed to figure out a way to push the system and i love that work i'm gonna have this episode up and it's gonna be a model for folks to see
01:03:05
Speaker
If you're going to still be system adjacent, keep in mind this is her background. This is where she came from. This is how she thought process. And Charlotte is a special place in that there are certain things that happen. We have to in our work, we have to be mindful of our local context.
01:03:24
Speaker
We have to be mindful of how our systems are established. Our systems don't all work in the same way. But many of them, if not all of them, do need to be dismantled. And we have to be mindful of the traumas and the things that people have been through while they've been waiting. There's been people looking at, oh, I want to move out of southeast DC to Charlotte. I see this connectivity. I see something different going on.
01:03:47
Speaker
why is how have we just let southeast DC go down like why is it that east Greensboro is going down why is southeast Raleigh like everywhere should have these opportunities everywhere should be having these conversations and hopefully people can look to your model and the models of others that are doing similar work that y'all are in tandem we can continue to have this decentralized movement but
01:04:12
Speaker
I just like, I want to thank you for it. Like, if anything, this has inspired me because that's the thing like our work. A lot of times we have these conversations. We're having them next to each other sideways. You only see little microcosms.
01:04:27
Speaker
this time period of covid kind of brought us back to these squares and these rooms and that is what i wanted to do with the fine gentrification i realized like the way my work was going was not going in a way that i felt comfortable with i'm so happy to be back on the mic and i'm so happy that you got in on this series of episodes so
01:04:49
Speaker
What do you want to leave folks with as we kind of close out this episode? What do you want to leave folks with? What do you want to tell people? Anything else that I miss that you want to make sure folks know when they're listening back to this episode, whether it's this week or weeks into the future.
01:05:05
Speaker
Just thank you for having me. We're trying to spread the good word of community engagement and being engagement first. One thing I definitely want to mention is we're trying to get back to our roots. We're trying to get back to our Amplify days, the training, the education. The brand is called Civility Localized. We did rebrand in 2022. You can find us online at civilitylocalized.com.
01:05:35
Speaker
We are also launching a Civic Impact Academy. So that's going to be launching in fall 2024. And you can find out about that at civicimpactacademy.com. We're going to be launching a cohort of change makers, community change makers, and local government representatives. So we want to get both of these audiences in the room together to learn from one another and to do community engagement better.
01:06:02
Speaker
Please look us up and you can find me online. I hang out on Twitter. You can find me at Miss Edwards CLT. Yeah, so I hope to connect with you.
01:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for coming by and on the episode. And of course, we'll be back. I'm going to close out the episode like y'all know I like to do. And of course, this is the fine gentrification with Kristen Jeffers. Thank you for listening. And of course, Christine, thank you for coming by. Thank you so much.
01:06:36
Speaker
So yes, we have learned a lot today and I have one more book for you and I want to talk about Randall Canan's Walking on Water Black American Lives at the turn of the 21st century. Long, long time ago I worked for the NC Humanities at the time it was the full NC Humanities Council and
01:06:56
Speaker
I was building Black Urbanus up and I was looking for other books about this and this one just fell into my lap. I was like, oh my gosh. You know, we have The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabelle Wilferson, which is also in my bookshop store. But we have Walking on Water, where a North Carolinian later found out a queer male North Carolinian of a slightly different generation.
01:07:18
Speaker
went and traveled throughout the late 90s into the early 2000s and then they published this book about what it was like to be Black and live in America at the turn of the 20th century in the near past. I know for many of you now that's almost 30 years ago but the 90s were such a like a happy time and so you'll get this perspective and of course a wonderful way to honor the estate of the late Randall Canaan who I feel like did not get a chance to really
01:07:48
Speaker
There was the novels and everything, which are also set in North Carolina, like all of that. Anyway, bookshop.org slash shop slash Christina Jeffers. You can buy Walking in Water. You can buy Carolina Built and all the other books I've recommended. And now, let's end the show.
01:08:06
Speaker
So thank you so much, Christine, for coming. It was a pleasure. I needed that. I really needed that. If y'all couldn't tell that I needed that conversation in that tape, then I don't know what. Because clearly, my hot topic, I just, I'm so on fire.
01:08:25
Speaker
I'm speechless. But anyway, what I'm not speechless about is that this podcast, Defying Gentrification is a publication of Kristen Jeffers Media. I host this podcast. I produce this podcast. I find the guests. You can become a guest. You can find the archives of this show. Go to theblackrubberness.com slash blog. And so you can find my newsletters.
01:08:44
Speaker
There's a podcast newsletter that comes out when every episode comes out, and also you can stream these on YouTube. You might already be doing that, but we are absolutely on YouTube now, and you can watch all of our episodes. Right now, watching all my episodes and subscribing on YouTube is a major, major way that you can support this podcast, even if you're low on funds.
01:09:05
Speaker
And, you know, I'm also I'm still on all the socials at Black Urbanist. And if you want to get crafty with me, I'm at Chris pattern. I think you should. It's fine. And you could listen to me talk while you're doing your crafts. Anyway, until next time, do what you can to defy and gentrification.