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Chapel Hill candidate forum at Carol Woods Meeting Hall, 750 Weaver Dairy Road, Chapel Hill.

The Independent Weekly endorsements, often thought to be the most influential in Orange County races, came out today.

In Chapel Hill the Indy endorses Kevin Foy for Mayor, and Mark Kleinschmidt, Laurin Easthom, Will Raymond, and Bill Thorpe for Council.

In Carrboro the Indy endorses Mark Chilton for Mayor, and Jacquie Gist, John Herrera, and Randee Haven-O'Donnell for Board of Aldermen.

For the School Board it endorses Lisa Stuckey, Pam Hemminger, and Jean Hamilton.

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday October 22, 2005

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was a brief moment in which the long-neglected problem of environmental racism received some attention. Katrina exposed the racism in state and national efforts to aid victims, in who lives near Superfund sites, in who lives in the most vulnerable areas and in who has the means to evacuate.

It also laid bare the difficulty in disentangling questions of race and class particularly in a city like New Orleans. In the flooded Lower Ninth Ward, more than 98 percent of residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Katrina made manifest the nature of American poverty. Suddenly, we could see, as Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal put it, that the poor are "already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of financial limits, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect."