I've
been struggling with what to say about Charlottesville. Usually when this
happens it's because something is more complicated than we want to believe it
is. That's not the case here. White nationalists held a rally to protect a
monument to a man who fought for the right to own Black bodies. The police took
an inordinate amount of time to act when these White nationalists and
counter-protestors came to blows. Repeatedly. These White nationalists had
brazenly and openly, without hood or cowl, marched through UVA with TIKI
torches and Nazi iconography, unashamed of their hate. A White nationalist
drove a truck into a crowd of people, killing one, injuring others, and
seemingly imitating one of the more popular forms of terrorist attacks in
recent months. This is really simple. This is, at best, repugnantly deplorable,
and at worst, sub-humanly monstrous. Either way, it's vomit-inducing.
But my
difficulty doesn't come from how clearly and quickly we all denounced these
acts as wrong, evil, hateful, and acrimonious in speeches espousing love and
goodness. That's good. That's right. That's what we should do. But it's how
quick we are to collectively distance ourselves from these people as if we have
not, as a society, contributed to and facilitated their growth, resurgence,
genesis, or whichever term you prefer. These are American men that we've somehow
lost, and I don't mean in the way the Democrats are trying to figure out how
they lost the rustbelt. These are lost souls.
These
twenty- and thirty-somethings are White nationalists, White supremacists, and
American Neo-Nazis. Let that sink in for a moment. This is not the proverbial
drunk uncle or drunk grandfather. This is the guy you went to high school with.
This is the guy you might have swiped right on Tinder. This is the guy who just
graduated from college two months ago.
We all
want to say it's entirely Trump's fault. We want to say that the election of
Donald Trump, who, when he was being subtle,
dog-whistled, and otherwise was flagrantly and openly racist during his
campaign, has emboldened this small band of men to be vocal, but otherwise the
main people who espouse these views will eventually pass away and everything
will be better for it. That's not true. Not entirely, anyway. While Trump's
existence has emboldened these people, they were there, have always been there,
and have been growing.
So we've
failed. America, we have failed. We have let these people grow in power, grow
in sway, strengthen their rhetoric, and continuously reach out to new minds to
corrupt. Because we, as a nation, cannot and will not reckon with our past.
Somehow, because we have to believe that America is largely infallible, we have
failed to reach these men before they've joined this cancer we've ignored for
years. What else was going to happen when we continue to say that Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings is one of the greatest love stories of early
America, despite the power differential between a master and slave? What else
was going to happen when we still teach people that the Civil War was simply a
war over States' Rights? What else was going to happen when things like
Japanese Internment are just a bad episode in the long running series that is
America? When the best of us believe these things, we have abdicated our right
to be shocked when we find that White supremacy is still active in American
society.
It's
high time we really grappled with our history. The bright spots and the dark
spots. If we want to stop domestic terrorism and we want to stop White nationalism,
it's time we do more than put gold leaf on America's incredibly complex and
fascinating past. The United States is an amazing country. It formed because a
bunch of disparate farmers and workers banded together, believing in the
necessity of representation, and defeated the strongest power in the Western
World. It has grown to be the dominant power in the world. But it has also
built itself on the systemic oppression of the other, whether that other is
Black, Asian, female, queer, non-Christian, or the myriad others who suffer.
This
history needs to be taught. It needs to be taught in our schools at all levels.
If we want to fight bigotry, then we need to do it with our brains, not just
our hearts. We need to understand why it exists, and we need to make sure our
children understand it. Our teachers need to be given the tools to accurately
teach our history, the good and the bad, and they need to be in positions where
their students can ask questions that don't have simple answers. We need textbooks
that tackle how Reconstruction failed and how much of what we deal with today
is a direct continuation of the failure of Reconstruction and the evolution of
Jim Crow laws. It needs to be clear that pride as a southerner is important but
doesn't have to be explicitly conflated with pride in the Confederacy. We need
to address the attempted genocide of Amerindians as something other than
"a thing that happened." This is just the start, but if we begin to
really educate ourselves about these facets of our history and not just the
great parts, then we can be better.
We can
no longer look at tragedies like Charlottesville and simply say "This is
not us" and wash our hands of those "damn dirty Nazis." We can't just condemn them and punish them and feel like we've done our part. If our actions stop there, if we do not address the root causes of these problems, America
will continue to fail. This is part of our history. This is us. If we accept
that, then we have no recourse but to act.
