Racism Comes Home to Roost
Reflections on “Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.”
This is the first “dispatch” from New Ideas in American History, a new initiative from New American History featuring essays by historians about some of the most interesting recent books in the field. If you’d like to pitch us an essay about a book that you believe pushes our understanding of the past, you can find more information here.
America’s unwillingness to address its anguished racial history has resonated profoundly in the present. In recent years, social unrest and racial anxiety has become a fact of everyday American life. Its prevalence is also changing scholarship — the surge of open white supremacy has forced many historians to rethink and rewrite the continuity of American racism.
The Unite the Right rally on August 11 and 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia sounded the death-knell for post-racial America. White supremacists converged on Charlottesville to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in what is now Market Street Park. While public demonstrations around Confederate statuary are nothing new, many Americans were shocked to see white nationalists and antisemites descend on a college town that is frequently ranked as one of America’s happiest cities. They shouldn’t have been.
A good number of historians and scholars at the University of Virginia knew better. To mark the one-year anniversary of the violent rallies, University of Virginia Press published an edited volume that does more than delineate the long history of racial inequality in Charlottesville and at UVA.
Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity, edited by Claudrena N. Harold and Louis P. Nelson, forces us to think intently about two things: how scholars can help heal the scars of the long and tortured history of racism in higher education; and, more broadly, how the present continues to influence the ways historians write about the past.
This book’s delineation of the events of 2017 and their relationship to historical racism is at once past-dependent, present-centered, and future-oriented. And for that reason, it is an intensely useful education tool. Harold, Nelson, and an interdisciplinary assortment of UVA professors have set out to convince us that the events of August 2017 had deeply historical implications — implications not just for the university and the city it serves, but for the future of higher education more broadly.
Perhaps nowhere is America’s original sin, the paradox of liberty and bondage, more apparent than in Charlottesville. Jefferson’s slave plantation, Monticello, cast a long shadow over UVA (a university that Jefferson himself founded). We know now, thanks in part to this book, that UVA, for most of its history, was a veritable breeding ground for white supremacist thought and activity.
Two of the rally’s most prominent neo-Nazi organizers, Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, were graduates of UVA. In contemplating the legacy of 2017, Charlottesville 2017 ultimately asks whether Spencer and Kessler’s return to the city was an occupation or a homecoming.
The answer, as the 13 essays in this volume make abundantly clear, is indisputably the latter. UVA was not simply a seedbed for some of America’s most caustic ideas about race; the university’s promotion of race science helped establish the bedrock upon which justifications for Jim Crow segregation were built.
Throughout the 20th century, African Americans and their allies struggled against these ideas. Decade after decade, they were met with firm resistance. In 2017, that resistance culminated in what was, for all intents and purposes, a panic reaction to a diversifying university and a city that had finally turned the corner on public displays of Confederate iconography.
Spencer, Kessler, and the cult of the Confederacy, this book determines, set out to return Charlottesville and UVA to their roots.
The “wounds of history,” argue the authors of Charlottesville 2017, “run deep” in higher education, and many of them are still fresh. The volume’s editors believe that the events of 2017 “have occasioned critical and sober reflection on our individual and collective responsibility to advance the principles of democracy and justice…”. If there can be little reconciliation without recognition, this book recognizes that history might be used as a healing mechanism.
The volume is divided into four sections (“Remembering,” “Speaking,” “Listening,” and “Responding”) that very closely resemble the three phases of trauma recovery (establishing safety, retelling the traumatic event, and reconnecting with others).
The book’s first section, “Remembering,” begins by establishing the continuity of racism in and around Charlottesville, and by exploring how the notion of black inferiority was central to UVA’s founding principles. Jefferson himself had set the tone in Notes on the State of Virginia. His perception that blacks were inferior to whites “in body and mind” became a defining characteristic of Confederate iconography and UVA’s promotion of race sciences such as eugenics.
Next, the “Speaking” section contemplates how the law also brought us to now. The legal process eventually protected the types of hate speech cultivated on college campuses and consumed by white supremacists. In considering the limits of free speech, this section also contextualizes the types of legal protections that characterized the armed violence of 2017.
“Listening” then pivots toward the historical record itself. During the turn of the last century, Virginia’s professors and administrators spoke explicitly and comfortably about the intellectual merits of white supremacy. Pseudo-scientists at universities like UVA were at the vanguard of many of the ideas that came to define the rise of German Nazism. (These ideas, for instance, inspired the Commonwealth of Virginia to pass some of the South’s most draconian race laws, namely the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.) Only after UVA integrated, Harold explains in the volume’s ninth essay, did students push back against the perpetuation of these ideas.
With all this in mind, the final section begs readers to think about how scholars and educators might use this history as a healing mechanism.
It was no accident, Charlottesville 2017 concludes, that the “alt-right,” which considers itself the respectable, intellectual extension of neo-Nazism, converged on UVA. In showing UVA’s role in the perpetuation of racism and race science, and Charlottesville’s close relationship to the cult of the Confederacy, this book reimagines the legacy of higher education in America.
Even more importantly, perhaps, Charlottesville 2017 challenges us to reimagine how we read, write, and think about history. Implicit throughout this book is a belief that presentism — in this case, perspectival presentism, which interprets the past in light of contemporary and continuous racism — can be a useful analytical tool.
There has been, historian David Armitage argues, “a positive and productive movement to deploy historians’ analytical tools on contemporary structures and problems.” Prompts from the present can inform inquiries into the past. These prompts have proven to be absolutely essential in coming to terms with the contemporary implications of historical racism in America. We’ve seen this impulse at work recently in publications like the Washington Post’s Made by History and The Conversation. Ultimately, the steady supply of contemporary bigotry seems to be nudging a good number of historians off of the proverbial fence. That generations of previous scholars engineered some of this bigotry isn’t lost on many of these authors.
Charlottesville 2017, then, ultimately contemplates how history can contribute to human prosperity. It represents recent efforts by historians to help wider audiences unpack recent events and understand how history may have made these events more likely. It demands that we contemplate how the legacy of good and bad choices got us to now.
