I was born and raised in North Carolina. Raleigh, specifically. And maybe it was just the school I went to, or the neighborhood I grew up in, but most people I knew weren’t originally from North Carolina. Most of them moved down here from up North, and there wasn’t one person who had a single regret.

For most of my life, North Carolina has been somewhere I’m proud to be from, the perfect blend of Northern common sense and Southern culture. It’s a state where I can get both a quality education and a chicken biscuit from Bojangles. In most places, you can only choose one or the other.

But with the passing of Amendment One last year, North Carolina took a new position in the national spotlight. In a country that’s slowly but surely moving toward equality for the LGBTQ community, North Carolina managed to do the unimaginable. Not only did we forbid forward progress, but we doubled down on the inequality we already had.

But it’s only been this year that my home state has managed to make it onto the national news — and stay there. With a Republican supermajority in both the state Senate and House, North Carolina changed a lot, and fast.

While most of us were at home, on vacations, at internships or summer jobs, the North Carolina General Assembly turned the state upside-down in just a matter of months. And throughout the course of a single session, the North Carolina legislature has somehow been able to disenfranchise African-Americans, teachers, students and women.

One of the earliest warning signs this summer took place in June, when Gov. Pat McCrory repealed the Racial Justice Act, a one-of-a-kind bill designed to prevent African-Americans from being sentenced to execution on racial grounds. According to a recent study conducted by Michigan State University, blacks are 2.6 times more likely to be sent to Death Row if the victim is white, and black potential jurors are struck from the jury at twice the rate of white jurors in black murder cases. Despite this convincing evidence and national support for the bill, McCrory signed it away nonetheless.

This past legislative session has also taken a huge bite out of North Carolina’s already struggling education system. Public school teachers with master’s degrees will no longer receive an extra 10 to 15 percent pay raise, and it has reduced the number of teachers able to receive tenure to 25 percent of state educators. North Carolina already ranks 46th in the nation in teacher salaries and 48th in per-pupil spending. This is abysmal. For all of McCrory’s talk of caring about students, this past session tends to indicate quite the opposite.

[quote]North Carolina natives are watching their home slowly become a national laughing stock, on par with other Deep South punching bags like Alabama or Mississippi.[/quote]

Some of the most blatant abuses of power — and clearest partisan politics — have been the attacks on abortion clinics and women’s health centers. Regulations passed during this past session were able to close down three clinics in as many months, and double the number of state inspectors from 10 to 20. Prior to this year, only two clinics had been shut down in more than 10 years.

And currently on McCrory’s desk is what some are calling the most aggressive voter suppression bill since the Jim Crow era. House Bill 589 limits acceptable IDs on Election Day to specific government-supplied identification, ruling out the use of previously acceptable student IDs.

The bill also removes preregistration for high school students, cuts early voting times and eliminates same-day registration. Out-of-state students attending North Carolina schools are effectively barred from participating in the governing of the place they call home for four years of their life. While the bill has yet to be passed, McCrory has already publicly stated his plans to sign it.

A Google search of “North Carolina” used to yield results of tourism, industry, college basketball or beach getaways. Today, you’re more likely to find articles titled “The Decline of North Carolina” from the New York Times, or “North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory gives protesters cookies — seriously,” from the Washington Post.

North Carolina natives are watching their home slowly become a national laughing stock, on par with other Deep South punching bags like Alabama or Mississippi.

And as a lifelong North Carolinian, I can’t think of anything worse.