‘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...
Renee Sekel
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...
Parent’s Bill of Rights moves through legislature
The legislative session in Raleigh is approaching its end, but that doesn’t mean the work of lawmakers is slowing down. Over four months after the State Senate passed the Parent’s Bill of Rights piece of legislation, the House has taken it up. Renee Sekel was at the...
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...
It’s Black History Month and NC Republicans Introduced a Bill to Limit Teaching of Black History
Renee Sekel, a Cary mom who works for the NC chapter of Red Wine & Blue, a group that seeks to mobilize suburban moms to get involved in politics, also opposes the bill. “I think most parents—and most kids—want our schools to teach accurate and complete history. ...
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...