Login | April 25, 2024
Moving beyond Charlottesville
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: August 18, 2017
When I lived in Charlottesville during law school, we did not observe Martin Luther King Day. Instead, the state of Virginia celebrated the third Monday in January as “Lee-Jackson-King Day,” simultaneously “honoring” the great civil rights leader and two men who went to war to keep his ancestors enslaved.
As the events of last weekend unfolded, I thought a great deal about my time in Charlottesville. I made my first court appearance at the Albemarle County Courthouse which sits blocks away from the Robert E. Lee statue that drew white supremacists from around the country for the weekend’s demonstrations.
I’ve walked the same street that Heather Heyer and a group of counter protestors was walking when James Fields allegedly plowed his car into the crowd, killing her and injuring 19 others.
Most of the racists who gathered to march in Charlottesville were from out of town, while many of the counter protesters were native. Nonetheless, seeing those two sides facing off felt like an appropriate image to capture the contradictions that pervaded the town.
In many ways, it was a typical university town, but as a northerner I was regularly reminded that we were an hours’ drive from the former capitol of the Confederacy. The Confederate statutes whose proposed removal prompted the protests were part of a cultural backdrop. Like the vitiation of King Day and the places named for Confederate officers.
After all, Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence while being attended to by enslaved workers, glowers above the town. Jefferson’s complicated legacy of profound achievement sullied by his unambiguous endorsement of slavery tracks that of the town he called home and the nation he helped found.
At the time I lived there, American society sat at a point of racial equilibrium, where overt expressions of racial prejudice were generally deemed unacceptable, and we were cued to call that victory. But African-American leaders who pressed for more were often dismissed as angry malcontents.
The subsequent decades have seen that equilibrium disrupted. On the one hand, the next generation of African-American thinkers, writers and leaders has continued to demand more. Among other things, they demanded that the country truthfully confront its racial legacy and the continued price it exacts on black people. And they have demanded that white Americans take real steps toward repairing the damage.
In recent years, that conversation has included demands to dismantle public monuments to the Confederacy under the not unreasonable theory that the nation cannot be truly equal while public spaces honor the rogue states that sought to form a nation dedicated to the continued dehumanization of African-Americans.
But the equilibrium was disrupted, on both sides.
As a candidate, Trump said that he was running against “political correctness.” But we now understand that many of his followers don’t read political correctness as only a request to use a person’s preferred pronouns. The racist organizations like those that gathered in Charlottesville object to the consensus against public and uncoded displays of racism.
Trump’s rhetoric consistently relied on scapegoating groups as the source of our problems while stopping a half-step short of inarguably racist statements. That rhetorical strategy, along with his willingness to offer coded phrases embraced by ideological racists, has created slack in the societal taboo against overt racism. The result of that slack was seen in the marches last weekend.
And he continued in that vein over the weekend. The president’s statement after the violence, with his improvised proviso that he was condemning hate and violence “on many sides,” was rightly and universally condemned. That proviso implies that each of those sides is equally morally culpable.
By placing on equal moral footing those who work toward greater equality and white supremacists who march, chant and fight against it, he once again signaled his disinterest in improving our racial divide.
The unrest in Charlottesville resulted in three deaths--Heather Heyer plus two Virginia state troopers Berke M. M. Bates and Jay Cullen who died in a helicopter crash while monitoring the protest—plus numerous injuries both from the automotive assault and beatings by the white supremacist protestors.
If any good can be gleaned from their sacrifice, it is the light it cast on the choice we now face. We have passed the point where refraining from public racism will be enough. We will either continue to work toward real reconciliation with our past or we will give more space to those who wish to recreate it.
Every American is going to have to pick one of those sides. Choose wisely.