Mitch kupchak north carolina

Roy Cooper’s been waiting a long time for this. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law 13 years ago, and the Medicaid expansion that was central to the law still hasn’t been implemented in all 50 states. But we are seeing steady, if extremely slow, progress in the effort to give people who can’t afford private insurance but don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid access to crucial health services. The U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the ACA also made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Twenty-four states accepted the expansion when it became fully available at the beginning of 2014, and that number has steadily expanded, with the most recent burst of forward momentum coming from ballot initiatives in red states like Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. Now a 40th state is in the process of climbing on board : North Carolina. As the Associated Press reports , legislation is headed toward the desk of Governor Roy Cooper:

A Medicaid expansion deal in North Carolina received final legislative approval on Thursday, capping a decade of debate over whether the closely politically divided state should accept the federal government’s coverage for hundreds of thousands of low-income adults. …

When Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a longtime expansion advocate, signs the bill, it should leave 10 states in the U.S. that haven’t adopted expansion. North Carolina has 2.9 million enrollees in traditional Medicaid coverage. Advocates have estimated that expansion could help 600,000 adults.

So what changed? Basically, over time the fiscal arguments North Carolina Republicans used to oppose the expansion began sounding increasingly ridiculous. The AP continues:

GOP legislators passed a law in 2013 specifically preventing a governor’s administration from seeking expansion without express approval by the General Assembly. But interest in expansion grew over the past year as lawmakers concluded that Congress was neither likely to repeal the law nor raise the low 10% state match that coverage requires.

A financial sweetener contained in a COVID-19 recovery law means North Carolina also would get an estimated extra $1.75 billion in cash over two years if it expands Medicaid. Legislators hope to use much of that money on mental health services.

In other words, the GOP Cassandras warning that the wily Democrats would cut funding for the expansion in Congress once states were hooked turned out to be absolutely wrong. Indeed, the very sweet deal offered in the original legislation got even sweeter thanks to the above-mentioned COVID legislation. States like North Carolina appeared to be leaving very good money on the table for no apparent reason other than partisanship, seasoned with some conservative hostility toward potential beneficiaries. In this case, GOP legislators finally reversed course without much excuse-making. The AP reports:

A turning point came last May when Senate leader Phil Berger, a longtime expansion opponent, publicly explained his reversal , which was based largely on fiscal terms.

In a news conference, Berger also described the situation faced by a single mother who didn’t make enough money to cover insurance for both her and her children, which he said meant that she would either end up in the emergency room or not get care. Expansion covers people who make too much money for conventional Medicaid but not enough to benefit from heavily subsidized private insurance.

“We need coverage in North Carolina for the working poor,” Berger said at the time.

That, of course, has been true all along. Final legislative approval of the expansion was delayed for a while due to an unrelated dispute over health-facility regulations. And the expansion cannot proceed until a state budget is passed. But it’s finally looking good for Medicaid expansion in a place where Democrats and Republicans are bitterly at odds on a wide range of issues.

There remain ten states that have not yet expanded Medicaid; eight are Republican “trifecta” states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming) and two others have Republican-controlled legislatures (Kansas and Wisconsin). Perhaps the peculiar mix of stupidity and malice that keeps state lawmakers from using the money made available to them by Washington to help their own people will abate elsewhere soon.

North Carolina’s Republican-controlled House passed a previously vetoed proposal Wednesday to restrict how teachers can discuss certain racial topics that some lawmakers have equated to “ critical race theory .”

The House voted 68-49 along party lines for legislation banning public school teachers from compelling students to believe they should feel guilty or responsible for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex.

United in their opposition, House Democrats challenged Republican claims that the bill would reduce discrimination and argued that a comprehensive history education should make students uncomfortable.

Republican seat gains in the midterm elections give them greater leverage this year to override any veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who successfully blocked a similar proposal in 2021 and urged legislators this month in his State of the State address, “Don’t make teachers re-write history.” But Republicans, who are one seat short in the House of a veto-proof supermajority, will likely need some Democratic support for the measure to become law.

North Carolina is among 10 states currently considering such proposals, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen others have already limited how teachers can discuss racism and sexism in the classroom.

Gaston County Republican Rep. John Torbett said the proposal, which now heads to the Senate, will prohibit schools from endorsing controversial concepts, including that one race or sex is inherently superior.

“This great education state must have an educational system that unites and teaches our children, not divides and indoctrinates them,” said Torbett, the bill’s sponsor.

Several Democrats, including Reps. Rosa Gill of Wake County and Laura Budd of Mecklenburg County, raised concerns that the language is vague and does not outline clear boundaries for teachers. Budd said this “massive failure” places unnecessary pressure on teachers who may feel like they need to stifle productive classroom discussions to keep their jobs.

“The bill, on its face, is the obvious attempt to micromanage from the General Assembly into the classrooms,” she said during floor debate. “It’s overreach and will have a chilling effect on teachers and educators in curtailing what they think they’re allowed to teach.”

Republican lawmakers in committee had applauded the measure for “banning” critical race theory, a complex academic and legal framework that centers on the idea that racism is embedded in the nation’s systems and institutions that perpetuate inequality.

The bill does not explicitly mention the framework, but it prohibits teaching that the government is “inherently racist” or was created to oppress people of another race or sex. Its language mirrors a model proposal from Citizens for Renewing America, a conservative social welfare group founded by a former Trump administration official to rid the nation’s schools of critical race theory.

Republicans nationwide have spun the phrase into a catchall for racial topics related to systemic inequality, inherent bias and white privilege. While many K-12 public schools teach about slavery and its aftermath, education officials have found little to no evidence that critical race theory, by definition, is being taught.

North Carolina schools would also be required under the bill to notify the state’s Department of Public Instruction and publish information online at least a month before they plan to host a diversity trainer or a guest speaker who has previously advocated for the beliefs restricted by the legislation.

Cary mother and activist Michelle O’Keefe was among several parents who testified against the bill in a Tuesday committee meeting. O’Keefe said she doesn’t want her young child sheltered from learning about racism and other atrocities in history, as long as those lessons are age-appropriate.

“The best way to keep history from repeating itself,” she said, “is to know the history.”

Another mother worried she could be banned from speaking at her child’s school career day because she has a documented history of speaking out against social injustices. Democratic Rep. Julie von Haefen of Wake County expressed a similar concern that she might no longer be able to substitute teach because of her record on racial justice issues and gender equality.

Visitors to “Michael Richards: Are You Down?” at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh experience two exhibitions in one. All the objects remain the same. Their meaning, however, totally different.

The first exhibition is seen through the perspective of knowing how the artist died. The second exhibition is seen through putting aside that knowledge–if possible–and considering the work as the artist intend. Richards (1963–2001), of course, could never have anticipated the circumstances of his death and how chillingly resonate it would be to his artwork.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Richards was working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views studio on the 92nd floor of World Trade Center, Tower One . He often worked overnight , as he had on the 10 ^th into the morning on the 11 ^th .

He would perish there along with thousands of others, not yet 40-years-old.

Flight and aviation were central themes in his artwork.

Airplanes. Everywhere. Falling airplanes.

His iconic Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian (1999) sculpture, for which he used himself as the model to create the cast, a common practice of his, features planes piercing his body as arrows did the Catholic Saint. The unintended symbolism in seeing these artworks through the prism of his death literally churns the stomach. It’s almost scary.

“In light of the devastating circumstances of Richards’ passing, the afterlife of his artworks—especially those including airplanes, wings, and pilots—take on added prescience; the connections are astonishing, painful and powerful,” exhibition curators from its debut location, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Melissa Levin and Alex Fialho, told Forbes.com.

“If you know his story, I think it is impossible to separate the circumstances of his death from his work, but I think it is important to emphasize that for Michael, the work was about much bigger issues than his autobiography–social justice, racism, police brutality, history, and more,” Linda Dougherty, Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, NCMA, told Forbes.com.

For guests able to get past the ending of his life, the living of his life informs the second exhibition.

Ascension

Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Michael Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, raised in Kingston, and came of age between post-independence Jamaica and post–civil rights era America. He moved back to the United States to attend Queens College, where he earned a BA in 1985. He received an MA from New York University in 1991.

“I’ve been traveling since I was a child. I grew up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, and planes have always been a big part of my life. Pilots in my work function as a symbol—they are almost images of transcendence,” Richards explained to the ArtCenter/South Florida, now Oolite Arts, during an interview in the late 1990s. “They are these beings that go up into the sky that offer freedom, escape and coming to a new land—the yellow brick road and success and all of that–but you always come back to the ground.”

Richards explored the concepts of freedom and escape in his work using the language of metaphor to investigate racial inequity and the tension between assimilation and exclusion. Repression and reprieve. Uplift and downfall. Planes soar and plumet.

Duality.

“An examination of the psychic conflict which results from the desire to both belong to and resist a society which denies blackness even as it affirms,” his artist statement from the mid-90s read.

The Tuskegee Airmen

Richards was working on a series honoring the Tuskegee Airmen at time of his death. He devoted most of his career to sculptures and installations paying tribute to them.

The Tuskegee Airmen were America’s first Black military pilots. Flying fighter planes and escorting bombers over Europe in World War II, their success in protecting the larger planes was unmatched. Their contribution to the war effort was not officially recognized until long after the war ended.

They take their name from their training grounds in Tuskegee, AL at Tuskegee University .

“The dream of flying is ultimately a wish to defy limitations, and in Richards’s work, one sees the manifestation of that desire,” Dougherty explains.

In Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian , Richards–again, using his own body to cast the sculpture–wears a Tuskegee airmen flight suit with miniature P-51 Mustang planes flying into his body. The P-51 was one of many planes the group flew.

A version of the standing sculpture has been on continuous display at the NCMA since 2003 when the museum featured Richards’ work in an exhibition, “Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight,” in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The exhibition explored ideas of flight in art and included two pieces by Richards, one of which was Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian. Popular response had the museum work out a long-term loan of the sculpture from Richards’ estate.

“The Tuskegee Airmen are a perfect metaphor because they were considered race men and were working to overturn all the myths and uplift the race. You would work twice as hard and be an example to your race,” Richards said in an interview with the Bronx Museum of the Arts from 1997. “They were getting into those planes and flying twice as many missions as white pilots because they were standard bearers of their race.”

Richards finds in the Tuskegee Airmen a classic example of the duality his work examines, a duality he lived himself.

“It’s also interesting in terms of the interior psychological dialogue that must have been going on with them. Especially the fact that once they landed the planes and walked out, they could not eat in the same mess quarters as white officers. They had segregated barracks,” his interview with the Bronx Museum of the Arts continues. “Yet they were fighting for the ideals of freedom, justice and the American way. It’s a very complicated metaphor. It has a lot to do with my own questions about my place within society. Working within society, making art, and basically making the culture of the society.”

Richards’ Catholicism further informs Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian .

“The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes, but it also references the Black church, the idea of being lifted up, enraptured, or taken up to a safe place—to a better world,” he explained in the same Bronx Museum of the Arts interview.

Another powerful 1999 sculpture incorporating the Tuskegee Airmen on view in the exhibition is Are you Down?

“Consisting of three identical, downed pilots, cast from the artist’s body, Are You Down? is a complex homage to the Tuskegee Airmen. These heroes are rendered on the ground, and one has to look down, or get down, to engage them—in contrast to the majority of monuments, which are typically triumphant statues of white men raised on pedestals,” Levin and Fialho explain. “These pilots’ uniforms are tattered, ripped across the clavicle and at the knees, legs haphazardly outstretched, their bodies slumped, and their heads tilted downward in resignation. Parachutes conspicuously absent, they have each landed and are stuck, sinking in nearly identical plinths made to look like pools of tar.”

Franconia Sculpture Park, near Minneapolis, hosts a permanent memorial to Richards, featuring a large-scale, bronze recast of Are You Down? originally displayed during a 2000 fellowship there.

Michael Richards’ Legacy

At the time of his death, Richards’ career was soaring like one of the planes in his artwork.

He had participated in the famed Studio Museum in Harlem residency from 1995-96. Other artists to do so have included David Hammons, Titus Kaphar, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley. Superstars every one. That’s the course he was on.

He had been featured in prominent exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2000); The Studio Museum, Chicago Cultural Center and Miami Art Museum (2000); Bronx Museum of the Arts (1997), and at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut.

In 2018, Oolite Arts launched The Michael Richards Award celebrating a Miami-Dade artist who has created a recognized body of original, high-quality works of art over a sustained period of time and who, through their practice, is achieving the highest levels of professional distinction in the visual arts. He worked in residence there from ’97-’00.

“Michael Richards: Are You Down?” marks his first museum retrospective and the largest ever exhibition of his body of work, objects created between 1990 and 2000. The presentation at NCMA runs through July 23, 2023.