The proposed audit, presented to the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners on Jan. 17, would look at whether the city and county are complying with “federal and state laws, regulatory bodies, codes of conduct, court orders and consent degrees,” with a focus on damage caused to the Black community by noncompliance.
The Community Reparations Commission, tasked with developing recommendations for Asheville and Buncombe County to address the impacts of systemic racism, currently consists of 25 members and seven alternates but has no youth representation.
The eighth annual African Americans in Western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia Conference, presented by UNC Asheville, will examine both local and national reparations Saturday, Nov. 6.
Huge spreadsheets containing academic testing results for each public school district and individual school for the 2018-19 school year became available online in the first week of October. But when Xpress tried to use that information to assess Asheville City Schools’ recent progress in addressing huge disparities in the academic performance of white and black students, things got … complicated.
“Our data tells us that we are doing a disservice to our black students, and you can’t say it any plainer than that,” said Shaunda Sandford, chair of the Asheville City Board of Education.
Asheville has gotten whiter over the past two decades. The proportion of African-American residents in the city dropped from 17.6 percent in 2000 to 12.3 percent in 2016, a change city officials attribute to a combination of white influx and black exodus. For the people of color who remained in Asheville, 2018 proved a mixed bag.
Local tourism operators are sensing a shift in the racial makeup of visitors to the Asheville area. Though the data don’t definitively support that conclusion — at least not yet — efforts to make Asheville a more welcoming and inclusive destination continue, as do fledgling initiatives to give minority tourism entrepreneurs a bigger piece of the industry’s pie.
The African Americans in Western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia Conference will take place Oct. 18-20 in Asheville. The theme this year is “Making the invisible visible.”
The Buncombe County Board of Commissioners gave unanimous approval to a number of projects, including investing in at-risk communities and pool renovations for Warren Wilson College, during its meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 22.
The quest for affordable housing: an introduction to the essay project and the Bowen study showing the problems Asheville and surrounding communities face on the affordable housing question, by Tracy Rose. The following essays are part of a series in which local experts were asked: “What would it take to solve the Asheville area’s affordable […]
How does Asheville, one of the busiest tourist hubs in the state — a place where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a chef or a farmer — have so many people lacking access to good food or outright going to bed hungry?
UNCA political science Professor Dwight Mullen spoke tonight at MAHEC, providing the annual “State of Black Asheville” address that kicks off the YWCA’s Stand Against Racism project. Read more of what Mullen had to say, compiled from Xpress contributing reporter Michael Muller’s live coverage via Twitter.
