“We Shall Overcome...Someday” is a piece that I originally felt inspired to write after I joined in the DC Women's March in January 2017, particularly in response to someone who wondered aloud why I (and thousands of others) marched. It is an attempt to begin to explain why I marched in January and how my reasons for marching continue to be relevant considering recent events. With the horrific march of neo-Nazis through the campus of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, over this past weekend and the subsequent clashes and death due to white supremacist ideology, I had to write something, even if it is not enough. My sentiment is heartfelt and sympathies are with those who suffered both directly and indirectly from the hate brought to Charlottesville, VA.
Sadly, the hatred and ignorance embodied by the white supremacist movement is not confined to the South, to Charlottesville, to the hometown of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer (who graduated from UVA a year after I did) in Whitefish, Montana; it, or at least milder versions of racism, are next door, down the road, in our coffee shops, schools, and homes in both subtle and overt ways. As a white person in the U.S., I could choose to escape from or ignore the racism that directly targets people of color on a daily basis; I could choose to hide behind and within my own white privilege. Instead, I choose to witness, name, and confront it. Although racism might not threaten my body in the same way that it targets a person of color’s, it terrorizes my soul and psyche, as it does the nation’s. I became an historian because I believe that understanding the past and questioning it matters, that probing the racial and gendered violence of an earlier era can help explain the hatred and structural inequalities that still plague our society. The blatant disregard for our common humanity on display in Charlottesville rightfully shocked the nation and the world, though the event did not arise spontaneously nor was it an aberration; it emerged, in part, from the racism that insidiously seeps into our society, that helps to shape policies that rationalize the hierarchy of a “deserving” and “undeserving” class, which is much more dangerous.
As I posted my original comments late on Sunday night, I saw that freelance journalist Amanda Sperber had just reported on Facebook that a swastika had recently been painted on a rock in a Highlands park, my neighboring town, and that at least one community member felt that his complaint to the police about this hateful graffiti had not been taken seriously. Whether it was a group of kids who thought it would be "funny" to paint a swastika and leave it in a public park, as reportedly presumed by the police, or whether it was an individual or group of white supremacists who left this token of terror in a public space, tolerating or dismissing such acts of hateful and terroristic vandalism is simply unacceptable. In fact, the idea that kids might be the vandals and that this would, perhaps, be more acceptable or explainable is frightening. It is our job as grown-ups, parents, teachers, and neighbors to lead by example, to speak out, even when we might stumble. Silence is not an option.