Racial Terrorism: Experiencing the Unite the Right Rally as a Woman of Color

On August 12, thousands of white supremacists poured into downtown Charlottesville, Va. The much anticipated Unite the Right Rally had crystallized around the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park). In less than an hour, the Downtown Mall, a social hub for locals and members of the University of Virginia, was transformed into a scene of violence and terror.

As I made my way downtown at 11 am to meet a friend for the counter-protest, I had a strong premonition that I was walking into a vortex of hatred and anger such as I had never witnessed before — even as a millennial woman of color. I was aware that the emergency name and number Sharpied onto the back of my hand presupposed that, at some point, I may not be in a conscious state to tell someone whom to call. But I was strangely calm, even as I heard sirens and saw a chopper hovering in the distance.

I went in intending to be a person of color conspicuously occupying the protest space. A former professor concerned for my safety had tried to convince me to attend alternative diversity events in McGuffey and Justice Parks, away from the central rally.

But I was persistent. The 1960s and segregation were a thing of the past. No more could racism be allowed to dictate the movements of people of color, or their sense of security. I wanted to stand firm for all the people who had faced segregation every day of their lives, and had risked and lost their lives fighting for equality. I wanted members of white supremacist groups to see me standing in front of them, look into my eyes, and know that it was 2017, and there was nothing they could do to move or intimidate me.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed. My friend and I, armed with signs — hers “Alt-Wrong” and mine “My rights aren’t yours to take away” — faced a mob armed with wooden batons, smoke bombs, and machine guns.

A row of policemen blockaded the entrance to Emancipation Park. One of them was shouting through a megaphone, declaring the rally an unlawful assembly and commanding people to disperse. There were snipers on the roof of a funeral home next to the park, and a thick stream of people in costume was flowing out of the park and down the street between a double row of counter-protesters.

I had stepped into a nightmare. Men in helmets and masks, wearing black arm guards and carrying wooden shields painted with poleaxes, leered at me. One man screamed in my face, “You will not replace us!”

My friend and I linked arms with a group of counter-protesters chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Virginia is for lovers, not for haters.” A group of white supremacists in costume threw wooden batons at us, finding their mark on our shins. People shouted and tossed purple smoke bombs at our feet. A white man in camouflage began to point a machine gun in our direction, and my friend grabbed my hand and we ran.

In a YouTube video posted that night, Richard Spencer complained that he was maced by police for “legally and peacefully demonstrating.” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBo3x78gbTY> In reality, the white supremacist groups’ behavior was neither legal nor peaceful.

As an Anglo-Indian American woman born and bred in the U.S., racism has always been a periodic occurrence at worst. A man in Costco once slammed his shopping cart against my dad’s and spat out, “I don’t mix with your kind.” A taxi driver once, hearing my British-American accent, associated it only with the idea of foreignness (possibly due to my brown skin) and recommended that I “learn to speak English.” On the other hand, I have had quite a few people walk up to me and start speaking Spanish right off the bat.

But the racism I faced at the Unite the Right rally went beyond these incidental occurrences. The issue is no longer the Lee statue, but that it has become a condensation nucleus for racial terrorism.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this terrorism is that it pretends to victimhood and peaceful protest, and the status of an intellectual movement. The clean-cut business suit aesthetic of Richard Spencer is a far cry from the white hoods of the KKK. The Alt-Right even held a conference in Washington, D.C. last November.

But the people who jeered and assaulted me at the rally were not wearing business suits. Nor were they protesting peacefully or attending an intellectual discussion. They were costumed in full white nationalist regalia with firearms and white supremacist symbols, and they were hitting me and screaming racial hate speech.

Later, after leaving the rally, I heard ambulance sirens. I would later discover that they were rushing to aid more than a dozen victims of a car attack by a white nationalist.

There is only one word appropriate to describe what I witnessed: terrorism. I was later struck by the fact that Facebook’s Safety Check feature didn’t have an option to mark yourself safe for this event. It wasn’t a natural disaster or an attack by ISIS or al Qaeda. In fact, its source was much more sinister. It was a domestic terrorist attack.

I am an American woman of color, who had never been the target of physical racial violence or direct hate speech prior to yesterday. Nor had I ever been in close proximity to such intense hatred and violence, or felt it surround me so inescapably. I came as close as possible to the atrocities which so many people of color lived and fought against fifty years ago. And I am lucky to be alive.

But I find there is a deficit in our vocabulary and understanding. We need to rethink our freedoms, and whether they are serving us as they should. Too consistently in the recent past, racism has been protected by the right to free speech and assembly. Even the man who pointed his machine gun at me was technically protected by the right to bear arms, as long as he didn’t fire.

Throughout our country’s history more broadly, people have neglected to call racial atrocities what they are. Acts of terrorism are not confined to Islamist groups. The Unite the Right rally was the face of terrorism. We need to call racial violence what it is, and has always been.