One of the very frustrating things about what happened in Charlottesville is that we are just now having widespread conversations about white supremacy. Of course, it’s a great thing for us as a country to be talking about it. And it’s long overdue. But these conversations are occurring in the context of a very overt demonstration of white supremacy in which a white woman was killed. These kind of large-scale, visible examples of white supremacy are not the norm—but they’ve always been with us. Contrary to the belief of some, white supremacy is not new nor did it arise because of Trump. Just because white people are finally now paying attention due to the fact that it is now literally in our faces, doesn’t mean that black people and people of color haven’t been living with it for generations. That includes the black population in Charlottesville, who are not at all surprised at what’s occurring.
Black Charlottesville has dealt with racism, has been born and raised under statues of Lee and Jefferson, and has fought the Klan. And it has lived with—and lives with—white supremacy.
“It scared people that didn’t expect it,” [Dedric Cooke, a black Charlottesville resident] said. “I was raised by somebody who came through the civil-rights movement and saw the Klan firsthand. I didn’t think I would see it, but I knew people were capable of it. It’s not acceptable for blacks or Hispanics to act that way, but people accept this kind of stuff, because they’re doing it in the name of heritage or white supremacy.”
Virginia is still a state located in the American South. It may not be Alabama, Georgia or Mississippi but it is equally steeped in the history of slavery, segregation and racial inequality that is associated with the Deep South. Black people living in Charlottesville have experienced klan rallies, intimidation and systematic marginalization dating back to the 1900s.
In the 1950s, during and after the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, Charlottesville was a hotbed for “massive resistance” campaigns by white citizens against integration, which inevitably attracted the attention of white-supremacist leaders. [...]
In the summer of 1956, Washington, D.C., White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan leader Frederick John Kasper, along with Alabama Klan leader Asa Carter—who later co-wrote Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” line—led rallies of white supremacists in McIntire Park. The whites-only park was named after benefactor Paul Goodloe McIntire, who also donated the park and the Lee statue at the center of last weekend’s violence. [..]
Eventually white people simply closed all of the schools in Charlottesville instead of suffering integration, and created their own private school system. One of those schools was named after Robert E. Lee.
Americans have such a bizarre and disingenuous relationship with history and the truth. So many folks want to preserve the Confederacy as heritage and history we shouldn’t forget, yet fail to acknowledge that the overt racism and white supremacy of the 1950s and 1960s wasn’t all that long ago. Those KKK leaders and white supremacists who led rallies to intimidate and harm blacks in Charlottesville are possibly still alive. They had kids. They had grandkids. And they have passed down those hateful ideologies to current generations. While it’s tempting to assume these are fringe ideas and lunatics from other parts of the country, it’s ahistorical to ignore that those kinds of racists have always been right among us (and certainly in Charlottesville) and haven’t changed. Instead, their ideas have fermented over time, were revved up by the election of a black president and emboldened by the current president who has given them a large, public platform. But they needn’t march in public to let us know they are there. Their ideas are certainly in the current structures that exist and the deep inequality that is present as a result.
The proportion of black residents in Charlottesville is steadily declining, as is the percentage of black students enrolled at UVA. Black families make up barely any of the households in the city making over $60,000 a year, and according to [Deborah McDowell, a professor at UVA], few black employees of the university can afford to live in town, and many live outside the city in lower-income neighborhoods developing on highway corridors.
Even for those who manage to live in the city, black people make up 70 percent of all warrantless “stop and frisk” pat downs from police, despite making up less than 20 percent of the population. And despite living in an especially protected enclave, black students at UVA are not immune to that brutality, a fact illustrated in blood in 2015 when Martese Johnson was beaten by officers outside of a city liquor store.
The events in Charlottesville were a jarring wake-up call for many white people and some people of color who thought that we had somehow moved past our legacy of racism and white supremacy. But another word for legacy is inheritance. Despite claims that “this is not us,” this manifestation of bigotry and hatred is the country we inherited. White supremacy is a part of America’s DNA. It was founded on it. It thrives on it. When people say black lives matter, they are responding to that history. A history that black people in Charlottesville and other parts of the country have lived through, experienced and are very well aware of. If you think, this is not us—you haven’t been living in the same America that many of us have been. You haven’t been paying attention. This is most definitely us. We are just especially good at playing dress up when it suits us.