North Carolina's Black Community Split In Support For HB2

The debate over House Bill 2 is now a national conversation. Among other things, the wide-ranging law dictates what bathroom a transgender person must use.

This week, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called it "state sponsored discrimination," likening it to the Jim Crow laws used to enforce racial segregation across the country until the mid-1960s, when they were overturned.

It's a sentiment echoed by many in North Carolina's black community. But the feeling is far from universal.

In April, a diverse group of more than 150 people gathered at a vigil in downtown Greensboro to show support for House Bill 2. High Point native Cassidra Cheek was there, carrying a candle. She says Republican Gov. Pat McCrory did the right thing by signing the bill known as HB2 into law.

"I don't want to go to the washroom and see anybody attacked, who's pretending," Cheek said. "You know if that's what you are that's what you are, but it comes back to me being able to send my granddaughter to the washroom and her being safe."

Cheek is black, and she balks at the idea that the law somehow divides her community.

"I know that people [came to the rally] for different reasons, but mine is not ever to hate, and never to discriminate," she added.

Hundreds of other HB2 supporters gathered in Raleigh last month. Among them was Dr. Gabriel Rogers, the pastor at Kingdom Christian Church in Charlotte. He says race is being used by outside interests to distract from what is fundamentally a moral issue.

"Very similar to what they tried to do with the marriage amendment, especially with black people [who] make it more about discrimination than what it was really about," Rogers said. "Bottom line, it was about moving forward the LGBT agenda."

Rogers says that agenda is calling for special rights, not equal rights.

"Some things shouldn't even be a discussion, like a man going into a woman's bathroom," he added.

Winston-Salem State University Dean Corey Walker says House Bill 2 is draped in the familiar language of security, religion, sanctity of the family, and all of the moral norms that guide dominant notions of American life, regardless of race.

"Theological and religious arguments inform our politics. So we should not be shocked that HB2 would then resonate in certain African American political circles," Walker says. "Just like in the 1960s, not everyone agreed with the civil rights movement. Not everyone agreed with Martin Luther King.

He says the wording of the law is coded, framed as protecting women and girls from harmful predators.

"It is the same language that was used to support the inability of individuals to marry across racial lines," he says. "It is the same language that is utilized to demonize African-American youth by calling them super predators in the 1990s."

The politics at play are as old as the south, according to North Carolina NAACP leader Rev. Dr. William Barber. But he believes HB2's so-called bathroom provision is also a red herring.

"They put bathroom in the title. That's the headline. That's the debate. And people run with it," Barber says.

Barber sees that headline issue as a tactic, a ploy to hide other things in the broad law that harm the working poor, like taking away local authority to set minimum wage rates, or the rights of individuals to sue over discrimination.

"Because what we've learned is that the devil is always in the details. And in the details, what this really is about is using the transgender community as a scapegoat to then do other things that fit in with this regressive and extreme economic mentality of the current legislators," he says.

But it's the bathroom provision that's caught the attention of the federal government. For Greensboro native and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, it's history repeating itself.

In a press conference this week, Lynch challenged the country to write a different story this time, one of inclusion and diversity.

"It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had other signs above restrooms, water fountains, and on public accommodations, keeping people out based on a distinction without a difference," Lynch said.

It'll now be up to the courts to decide whether or not the law is discriminatory.

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state after the Governor McCrory sued the federal government to keep House Bill 2 in place.  A judge could begin hearing arguments in the competing cases within weeks.