Charlottesville, One Year Later
What I learned from organizing the Asian American community at UVA and reflections for the road ahead
by Lauren Levan
August 12, 2017 began much like any other. Eyes still heavy from sleep, I unlocked my phone and started scrolling through social media. Amidst the barrage of photos of friends on summer travels before our final year of college began, advertisements for clothing, and Tasty videos for the perfect summer sangria, it almost became too easy to scroll pass the frozen screencap featuring angry torchlit faces marching along a red brick sidewalk. As the video began to auto play I remember thinking to myself, oh maybe Netflix is releasing a documentary on the Civil Rights Movement, and someone shared the trailer for it. This could be interesting.
Then the camera panned out to reveal the rotunda, the trademark building of the University of Virginia, the school I was supposed to be moving back to the very next day. The now infamous video footage revealed a barrage of overwhelmingly white young men trudging through the university’s grounds, down the lawn, and to the front side of the rotunda, chanting, “You will not replace us.”
I don’t know if I will ever truly be able to encompass how it felt to watch such an archaic vision come to life in the present. To watch, nauseated as a small army of khaki-clad, torch-bearing neo-Nazis and Klan members stormed the same expanse of grass that I spent countless hours spread out with iced coffee in hand writing papers, the same place where thousands of students sang Christmas songs together every year right before finals.
To know that you were sound asleep while a small gathering of students took a stand, holding hands around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, heads bowed and trembling under all that stood before them.
Then I got out of bed. From there on out, I can only remember the day as disjointed. Text messages from friends began trickling in, family checking to see where I was, mentors and peers sending their condolences over the violence that had been incited. I grabbed coffee with a family friend. She told us a car ran through a crowd of counter-protestors downtown. A young woman was killed.
I was told to wait to move back to Charlottesville until all the neo-Nazis left. I was added to at least five different group chats to organize collective action and initiate collaborative efforts in response to the rallies. We planned 11 p.m. conference calls. We released statements on behalf of our organizations. We held vigils. We made shirts and painted signs. We marched.
Looking back at it now, these meetings would go on to become striking and critical moments for my development as both a student leader and a social activist. The Black Student Alliance, with a well-respected history of political activism and well-established connection to the greater Charlottesville chapters of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter, was central to organizing and leading student response after the rallies. For the rest of us, our job was to be engaged and dependable allies. Beyond that, my priority was to mobilize members within the Asian Student Union and the larger AAPI community at UVA to become involved and invested in the reparation of our community and the fight for racial justice in Charlottesville.
As the president of the Asian Student Union this came with a few significant challenges. The first, being the sheer numbers. AAPIs are by far the largest minority group at the university, comprised of over 2,000 undergraduate students and 600 graduate students, making up just over 14 percent of the student body. These numbers lent themselves into the next challenge: the even larger spectrum of experience, ideas and opinions that existed with these students and the organizations they invested their time and energy in.
With just shy of 50 members, ASU was a smaller AAPI interest organization, but with an organizational focus leaning toward political advocacy and social justice, many looked to ASU to represent AAPI interests and presence following the riots. How was I as a leader, and how were we as an organization supposed to unite and engage with over 2,000 students on a topic few believed they had a vested interest in, and even fewer had experience engaging with? At the same time, as students, how were we to prioritize our already stressful academic careers, maintain our friendships and carve out time for mental health when something as pressing as the battle against white supremacy was quite literally knocking on our door?
Part of the answer came to me during one of my classes during the first week of school. My professor stared at us intently and said, “If you don’t start preparing for a crisis until it is happening, then it is too late.” His statement made me think. I thought about what had prepared me for this crisis, or how much of my life had been leading up to healing a community after a parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists stormed the lawn and inflicted such pain in downtown Charlottesville. What had drawn me into the world of AAPI advocacy, minority rights, and racial justice?
For me, it was always the people. It was people like my parents, who were always sharing their stories of escaping war and conflict, of growing up a minority in their hometowns and facing racial and gender discrimination at every major milestone in their lives. It was a childhood spent watching content creators like Wong Fu Productions and Anna Akana who showed me that AAPIs had opinions worth sharing.
It was through organizations that took a chance on me such as the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (CAPAL), who gave me my first internship in college and exposed me to the world of public service and the many inspirational AAPIs that dedicate their lives to that service. And it was through networks such as the one I found here at Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, who selected me as a participant in the 2016 Youth Leadership Summit and equipped me with resources, skills and knowledge to use my voice on Capitol Hill and beyond.
The people and the power they have to move one another is all that I had ever known when it came to advocacy efforts, and I decided to stick to what I knew. So, we pursued people.
We had conversations with student leaders from sociocultural organizations such as the Indian Student Association and the Organization of Young Filipino Americans, who already saw the importance of political identity within their organizations to increase cross-member organizing. We sought out passionate AAPI professors to host workshops and speeches such as “Why Should Asian Americans Care About White Supremacy?” We partnered with groups like the East Coast Asian American Student Union to host a campus tour on AAPI identity. We worked with academic departments to bring award-winning artists such as Thi Bui and Bao Phi, and envelope-pushing AAPI politician Delegate Kathy Tran to the university to share their experiences and to learn from their own relationship to activism. We tried to think outside the box, to engage different parts of the AAPI community, expose the greater UVA community to the vibrancy of the AAPI community and remind students within how much of the political overlaps with our own perceptions of the personal.
Since that infamous weekend in Charlottesville, I stand firm in my belief that despite the progress made within our community over the past year, Asian Americans at UVA need now what we needed a year ago in August 2017. We need now what we needed in 1992 after the Los Angeles Riots, and ten years prior to that, following the murder of Vincent Chin. We need to see ourselves as powerful, important, and sovereign members of a society that desperately needs our voices and experiences shaping the future.
We need a vibrant and active community. We need a pipeline of leaders inspiring others and young people learning all that they can. We need a myriad of advocacy groups performing outreach into local groups and student communities, and vice versa. We need exposure to role models, to see each other in positions of leadership and artistry, on the front lines of causes ranging from the defense of our country to the reformation of it. We need to hold one another accountable for the decisions we make (or refuse to make) in the pursuit of comfort and self-interest. We need to value and preserve our own collective knowledge and identity. We need the resources and the willpower to stand beside one another in our triumph and misery. We need to work alongside other communities of color and learn how vital it is to weave ourselves into causes greater than the sum of our parts.
On the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right Rally of August 11 and 12, I will be on a plane to South Bend, Indiana — 680 miles away from the university I called home for four years. I am not sure what the future will hold for me at Notre Dame, my alma mater in Charlottesville, or for the AAPI community across the country. But I hold all that I have learned as a student leader and a social activist on my back. I expect many of us who lived through that experience will carry the weight of it too.
The question is, what will we do as a collection of students, a community, and a country to fulfill the promise that love conquers hate? What will we do to honor the life lost in Charlottesville and beat back the hatred of that day?
Lauren Levan is an alumna of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC’s 2016 Youth Leadership Summit and a 2018 graduate of the University of Virginia.
