My neighborhood in Chapel Hill is less a community than two very different societies living next to each other. On one side, my home faces new student housing, but on the other three sides, it borders low-income rental apartments.
I worry that our state is increasingly coming to resemble my neighborhood: separate and unequal.
Thanks in part to the courageous advocacy of Gene Nichol, poverty and inequality in North Carolina have been on the public radar all year. Still, his statistics bear repeating: 1.7 million Tar Heels live in poverty, including 40 percent of our children of color.
According to Robert Korstad and James Leloudis, historians at Duke and UNC respectively, if the 41 counties east of I-95 formed their own state, it would be the least developed in the country by almost every metric.
UNC’s approach to anti-poverty advocacy has been strangely bifurcated. On one hand, programs like Carolina Covenant have helped to make UNC one of the most economically diverse elite colleges in the country.
On the other hand, when Nichol and other advocates for those living in poverty spoke out about how poverty is created and sustained, University leaders failed to support them. This divide springs from the false belief that UNC should not be a political space and that its leaders should remain “neutral” in the General Assembly’s war on poor North Carolinians.
Until the University closes this artificial divide separating its responsibility to its students from its mandate to advocate for all Tar Heels, the real gap will continue to grow.
