CNN — Waves of emotion washed over DeJuana Thompson as she stood in the convention hall in Chicago last month watching Vice President Kamala Harris become the first Black woman nominated for the presidency by a major political party. Battleground North Carolina In...
North Carolina
Women’s Rights Rally at Dowdy Park
The Hear Us Roar in ‘24 rally in Nags Head concluded on a powerful note as nearly100 participants gathered at Dowdy Park to advocate for women’s reproductive rights on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision reversing a woman’s constitutional right...
On the one-year anniversary of NC’s 12-week abortion ban, women ready for November
Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the passage of Senate Bill 20, legislation that banned abortions in North Carolina after 12 weeks. Robinson said in 1975, when she was just 15 years old, she endured a “back-alley abortion” when she was growing up in rural...
Wake school board backs LGBTQ, diverse books grants. But the vote comes after a fight.
‘Matters of life and death’ The debate at Tuesday’s school board meeting highlights the ongoing cultural wars going on across North Carolina and the nation. It led to state lawmakers adopting the “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” The law’s provisions include barring...
North Carolina School Privatizers Are Subverting Democracy
North Carolina was one of the last states to expand Medicaid, delaying for nearly a decade after the federal government made expanded coverage available under the Affordable Care Act. Finally, in 2023, the General Assembly opted North Carolina into the expanded...
New NC parent activist group wants to focus on real issues — not ‘manufactured’ ones
When North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a rare state of emergency for public education in May, it revved teams of parents across the state. They, too, wanted to push back against the impacts of what Cooper called the Republican legislature’s “schemes” to expand...
Petition launched for Rep. Tricia Cotham to resign
“We know that constitutionally there’s no way here in North Carolina constitutionally to recall an elected official,” Robinson, the Red, Wine & Blue N.C. program director said. “But we decided, you know, we wanted to make sure that voters in her district, really...
Op-Ed: How in good conscience can Rep. Tricia Cotham deny NC residents the abortion access she had?
Republicans in North Carolina have passed a sweeping abortion bill that further restricts access to abortion care — a bill filled with medical misinformation, misdirection and false narratives about abortion. In practice, it will ban medication abortion after 10...
GOP bill to limit topics of discussion in public schools wins state House approval
A controversial bill that would restrict how the state’s public school teachers discuss race, gender and sexuality was approved by the state House by a 68-49 party line vote on Wednesday, and is now headed to the state Senate. Several Democrats from the state’s urban...
Transgender youth: ‘Forced outing’ bills make schools unsafe
When Renee Sekel’s nonbinary teenager first requested a different name on their Christmas stocking, she responded with “absolutely not” in what she now considers “the wrong reaction.” The mother of three and local activist in Cary, North Carolina, said she took about...
Recent Posts
Watch This: Learn How to Spot Soft Censorship
A lot of people are talking about freedom of speech right now. As Americans, it's a right that has always defined us and that we all hold dear. That’s why the majority of us oppose book bans and censorship. The rise in book bans over the past few years has been well...
Read This: The Quiet Danger of Soft Censorship
We’ve been fighting the explosion of book bans since Red Wine & Blue started. PEN America reports 16,000 book bans in public schools since 2021 — a level not seen since the 1950s during McCarthyism. This increase has been driven by organized groups with a...
Okay, But Why is Gerrymandering Legal?
Lawmakers in Texas made headlines for leaving their state to protest the unfair re-drawing of district maps, known as gerrymandering. Almost all Americans, regardless of political party, are against gerrymandering. But over the past few decades, it’s gotten worse and worse.
So… what exactly is gerrymandering? Why is it legal? And how do we get back to a fair system where all of our votes matter equally?
Okay, But Why Were The Suburbs Shaped By Racism?
We know that the suburbs have been diversifying over the past few decades, and today “suburban woman” is no longer code for “white woman” – no matter how much the media tries to simplify us. But there’s no denying that the suburbs have excluded families who aren’t white for most of their history, and if we’re not careful, they will again in the future. So why – and how – did the suburbs end up so white for so long? What happened to make them more diverse, and why are some people worried that we’re reversing that progress?
Do This: Start Talking About Racism
Anti-racism is not just a state of mind, it’s an active way of living our day-to-day lives. It’s the intentional practice of taking ongoing steps to confront racism in an effort to end it. Sometimes that might mean calling out overt examples of racism when we see...