My life, like all lives, is a series of fierce juxtapositions. When I heard what was happening in Charlottesville, I was both literally and figuratively far away. My friends and colleagues were all at a conference in Atlanta, focused more on Trump than his lemmings, and more on each other than our homes. Still, there was no escaping the jarring reality of seeing my home become a hashtag. My facebook feed filled up with high school friends in the streets, posting statuses of who was-and wasn’t- ok. I even saw a couple Nazi sympathizers. You’ll find them everywhere. Nowhere is safe.
What you need to know about the intensity of southern mythology is how very much alive it is. I was born in D.C., to a mother on the brink of medical school, who raised me with a set of solidly progressive values. Still, when we moved to southern virginia, I was in for a jarring paradigm shift. I’ll never forget- sixth grade- shouting at my friend’s high school aged sibling about the evils of the confederate flag. She just smirked at me, knowingly: “it’s not about slavery. It’s about southern heritage. You wouldn’t understand.”
And I didn’t understand. Until gradually, with a pre-teen’s tenacity, I tried to. Always a listener, I listened harder. I read Gone With the Wind, and fancied my mind expanded. I would always hate the Confederate flag, but I understood- or thought I did- the raucous pride that swept through Southern America. These are people who believe their heritage was taken from them- I learned to empathize with their sense of legacy; their love affair with ghosts.
What I couldn’t have understood in junior high school, however, is that my child’s sense was the right one. There is a great swath of America where pride comes violently being “other” than: from being not a yankee, not a Catholic, not a black. What you also need to know is that Charlottesville could have been anywhere. It is seductive- too seductive- to take the rationalizations of Civil War history, and believe this is legitimately a matter exclusive to southern nostalgia. If it is nostalgia, it’s not a nostalgia for an agrarian peace: it’s a nostalgia for an agrarian violence, and it lives anywhere violence and poverty ever lived in rugged tandem. When white men get on camera to shout down the dangers of globalism, they’re not legitimately concerned with globalism. They’re concerned with a globe they can no longer subdue.
My mom and I always travelled a lot together. Now I travel alone. I see the confederate flag in all niches of my silent country. I see it on the back of denim and pickup trucks. This is not the South’s goddaughter of longing- it is America’s goddaughter of hate. I see this flag anywhere anyone wishes to define themselves by demography, call it the name “heritage”, and define themselves by the oppression they’ve escaped by subtle accident.
At the end of the day, so much of what there is to say about Charlottesville must be said everywhere. I am sad and I am angry. I am proud of the heroes I grew up with, who put their bodies on the line during what should have been a normal Saturday. I am defensive against those who think they are immune to these problems, or who think these problems are small.
If we can learn anything from the great leaders who came before us- the Dolores Huertas; the Rev. Dr. Kings- it’s that social and political change are first won on inner battlefields. We can offload our white shame on towns like the one I was raised in- or we can know these tensions live in all of us. It is seductive, always, to remain complacent or binary in the face of suffering that isn’t explicitly ours; but what I hope we take away from this is that it is all of ours.
Heather Heyer was a white woman run down by racists. She was a beautiful woman, and a competent professional, and not included in her Nazi murderers’ list of rule outs. This hate is not explicit to those it claims to target directly. Hatred is not defined by its target, but by the person who carries it: so long as hate guided individuals are empowered by those with political power, they will continue to propagate their hatred. The target will grow and grow until it consumes all of us.
We must not cave into the temptation to discuss issues which are eminently personal, spiritual, and intimate in ways that are merely and distantly political. We must learn to look in our minds and hearts for the places that unconscionable forms of violence are romanticized and allowed for. At the end of the day, we all have within us a gaping need to feel valued, powerful, and adored. These white men have found an outlet for that need which left three dead and almost twenty brutalized. They are not alone, for people since the beginning of time have utilized brutality as a form of self worth.
This fight is multifaceted. It will be won on the streets, in the ballot box, and in our communities. Most viable, though, is the fight that will be won within ourselves- on the day when all of us, in all sincerity, can find peace with our own darkness, and not transmute it into the basest forms of cowardice, barbarism, and contempt.