“The Honors of Honor”: On White Silence and #DefendCville
You’ve likely seen this picture from Friday night hundreds of times by now, but it occurred to me today that spectators who are not University of Virginia graduates or close UVA in other ways may not understand the significance of the place where these men are standing.
The building behind them is called the Rotunda. Thomas Jefferson, the hypocritical slave owner and rapist who founded this school and penned the words “all men are created equal,” was also a deist and great lover of books and knowledge. When Jefferson founded UVA in 1819, universities were typically oriented around their chapels, but Jefferson decided that his university would center on its library instead. The Rotunda sat and still sits at the head of Jefferson’s “Academical Village,” a long green lawn bordered by two colonnades that house select classrooms, student dormitories, and faculty accommodations. The men in this photograph are standing on that Lawn.
The University has expanded in all directions since Jefferson’s time. This expansion has both driven and abetted gentrification displacing black Charlottesville residents, while the University itself has dragged its feet in the face of simple demands like a living wage for its largely black service staff. Despite this expansion, the Rotunda and the Lawn remain the symbolic heart of the University. Every year, entering students sit in rows of chairs facing the Rotunda as they are welcomed to the institution during convocation. We’re told that this symbolizes students’ entry into the world of scholarship.
When the time comes for students to leave the University, we assemble on the Lawn and then walk the same way the men in this picture are walking: away from the Rotunda, and through the Academical Village, to carry our learnings from the University outward and share them with the world. I made this procession myself in 2012.
All graduating students do this together. Most students consider “walking the Lawn” to be more important to graduation that the receipt of diplomas, which happen at much smaller ceremonies divided by department. Among Wahoos, it is known as “the honors of Honor,” to have walked the Lawn and graduated Virginia.
This University’s first black matriculants entered in 1950. The first full class of women entered in 1970. In 2016, black students made up just 6% of UVA’s student population. In recent weeks, the White House has spewed nonsense about affirmative action programs, which disproportionately help white women, but which racists prefer to mythologize as funneling undeserving black youth into our institutions, a description that only makes sense when turned on the prison industrial complex that has stepped in to replace plantation slavery in this country.
Most of the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville on August 11 probably don’t know about the Lawn ceremony. But Richard Spencer — noted neo-Nazi, much memed antifa punching bag, and Virginia man of the class of 2003 — does know this. He has walked this Lawn under different circumstances, and he has done just what we are told departing Virginia students should do: he has taken his ideas out into the world. Because not enough was done, at any point in his life or during his time within this University, to confront him. Because, more than likely, too many white students listened to his bigotry and they let it slide, when the answer should have been a pointed rebuttal or, failing productive discussion, another fist to the face.
And this is true of every man in this photograph. It is true of the man who sped his car through a crowd of counter-protestors on 4th Street yesterday, murdering one of them and injuring twenty others. None of these men were grown in white supremacist echo chambers, beyond the reach of anyone who could have challenged them. They all have regular jobs outside of the moment captured here.
You know somebody who watched this weekend happen and thought that these men were in the right. You know somebody who watched this weekend happen and thought that the counter protestors were only making things worse, that if good people just roll their eyes and don’t confront these men, they will go away, instead of carrying their ideas out into the world.
The University of Virginia, the city of Charlottesville, and Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello are only now just barely beginning the tremendously overdue process of reckoning with their history of slavery and discrimination, and its living legacy in racism and brutality today. Media reports have again and again characterized the Klan rallies this summer as being in protest of the removal of the Confederate monuments from recently renamed Emancipation and Justice Parks, but those reports rarely question why those monuments have loomed over this city, on the edge of historically black neighborhoods, since 1924. It is easy to treat this as an isolated incident, or to blame it entirely on Donald Trump’s election. It is harder to think about the ways in which every white person in America benefits from anti-blackness. It is harder to think about what ideas we, in our grandiose commitments to free speech absolutism and good liberal consciousness, allow to go out into the world unchallenged, to flourish.
Charlottesville has long enjoyed a reputation as a liberal island in the red electoral sea of Virginia, which only in 2008 tinted purple. The disbelief you hear from people, that this could not happen in our city, that this is antithetical to Charlottesville’s values, is, I believe, genuine, though deeply misguided and short-sighted. It is also utterly irrelevant. Friendly, non-confrontational liberalism has allowed this to fester, to go unchecked with dismissals of “ancient history” and “progress made,” all in the copper-cast shadows of slave-owners and Confederate generals.
Fellow white people, consider this yet another reminder that we need to be having the difficult conversations we would rather avoid with those in our lives who abide racist jokes, beliefs, and politics. Silence is complicity and violence. Because even if your father or uncle or sister or brother would never have been in that crowd, a racist idea shared with impunity once will be repeated.
On Friday night we watched a group of men walk our Lawn, threatening that they would take their bigotry out into the world, and they murdered a woman the very next day. Who knows how much blood is already on their hands — how many racist cops or judges or prison-pipeline school administrators or carceral state profiteers there were in that crowd. Talk to your people, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Our silence is deadly.
#DefendCville
#BlackLivesMatter
A medical fundraiser for counter-protestors harmed in yesterday’s events is currently active.
