“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
Allen Buansi: The Progressive Choice to Represent UNC
A perspective from Simon Palmore
As students, we deserve a leader who’s worked his whole career to improve our lives, empowering us as students but also as residents of the greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro community. In the election for NC House, it’s clear that that leader is Allen Buansi.
While on the Chapel Hill Town Council, Allen fought for and delivered policies that tangibly improved the lives of students—in ways seen and unseen. Some of these include important policing reforms, including banning low-level traffic stops and funding more crisis counselors as first responders. In the wake of student activism here and across the country, Allen acted. He has worked to address Chapel Hill’s housing crisis and has made transit not only more accessible, but more environmentally friendly as well. Allen is a fighter; he’s not flashy, and he’s rarely the loudest voice in the room, but he delivers for us, over and over again.
Allen has empowered students to run for office as well. He created and ran an innovative workshop to help underrepresented groups, like students and refugees, self-advocate at the local level and even run for office themselves. One student, Tai Huynh, went through this program with guidance from Allen and, in a historic election, won a seat on the Chapel Hill Town Council. True empowerment is making space at the decision-making table for people that don’t usually have such an opportunity, and by encouraging, training, and supporting students running for elected office, Allen has empowered us in the most important way.
Additionally, if elected, Allen would be one of the only people of color representing a majority-white district in the state of North Carolina. After years of student organizing around racial justice in response to local and national events, electing Allen, a Black civil rights lawyer, would be a powerful repudiation of the Board of Governors, the Board of Trustees, and all the other forces that reject needed progress on campus and in our community. Allen knows the stakes of this fight firsthand: when he worked at the UNC Center for Civil Rights, the Board of Governors kneecapped the Center for political reasons by banning it from litigating. So when Allen says he wants to push back on the dark forces at work at UNC, his words aren’t theoretical: he has lived this reality personally.
Finally, Allen is, fundamentally, an organizer, and one who does his homework. As a civil rights lawyer, Allen organized working class and minority communities to fight for stricter regulations for industrial hog farms, and he was able to win substantial progress for these victims of environmental racism. In 2016, he served as the field director for Josh Stein’s campaign for NC Attorney General, and in that role, he was in charge of building a grassroots operation throughout North Carolina. In a year in which this state largely elected Republicans, Josh Stein won. We need an organizer who not only organizes, but wins.
As students, we’re all too familiar with the consequences of leadership that prioritizes saying the right things over doing the right things: we’ve experienced this time and time again in our own university system. That’s why, when it comes to our elected officials, we deserve someone who’s fought for us, and won, time and time again.
Ultimately, though, I’ll leave it up to Armando Bacot, and he pulls for Allen.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
I’m voting for the other guy. Never heard of Allen before.