Plots Tending Toward Fascism
The Charlottesville clashes aren’t about erasing history; they’re about finally acknowledging it
It’s hard to know what to say about events in Charlottesville beyond the blindingly obvious: that Tiki Nazi Klansmen are scum, that the events of the past 72 hours have been extremely depressing, that America has a long and sordid relationship with hate and white nationalism, that the head of state was more annoyed by his photo op being disrupted than by one of the citizens he swore an oath to serve being murdered by one of said white nationalist fascists.
And that it shouldn’t have taken Confederate flags and swastikas to notice the undercurrent of darkness or the broader systems of oppression and control hard-coded into US institutions.
The past can not and should not be denied nor should the present be placed on a pedestal. However, at a time like this, when it seems the country is devolving back into the same arguments it had a century earlier, it’s helpful to take stock of how much has been achieved in the name of justice — if only just to keep in mind how much there is still left to lose.
History versus Hagiography
Virginia — and the South — obviously have an ugly history with racism, institutionalized and otherwise, and it’s been a long road out of Dixie. Richmond, an hour’s drive from Charlottesville, was the capital of the Confederacy, while the slow process of black emancipation began on the coast with the Union occupation of Hampton Roads by Major General Butler and the Contraband Slaves freed at Fort Monroe.
Virginia takes pride in its history, though it often feels more like mythology or hagiography than real historical inquiry. Only in recent decades have historical interpreters at Monticello, Williamsburg, and elsewhere turned a critical eye on centuries of apartheid that reigned in the state.
Those who describe the removal of Confederate symbology as “erasing history” don’t have a firm grasp on the last 150 years, as opportunities to provide appropriate context were continuously passed over in favor of a steady stream of monuments and statues that honored those protrayed rather than actually provide historical perspective. These bronze and stone creations portray the struggle to preserve slavery as a gallant Lost Cause fought by both chivalrous cavaliers and good country people against the sooty hordes of the industrialized and immigrant-saturated North.
The Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee at the heart of the recent unrest is no exception.
Some background: the statue is associated with the late-19th- and early-20th century City Beautiful urban renewal project.
It actually commemorates no battle or war dead.
It was purchased by Paul Goodloe McIntire, founding donor of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia. (UVA is known for using pretentious substitutes for normal things. The Business School is instead the School of Commerce. Campus is actually Grounds. The Quad is The Lawn. You’re not a junior; you’re a Third Year. Etc. Etc.) The statue was unveiled — after being draped in a Confederate flag — to a parade and Confederate reunion organized by the Confederate Veterans, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the American Confederacy.
So let’s cut the bullshit: it is a monument idolizing the heroes of a dark Southern legacy. It is not about the horrors of war, the sacrifices of locals, or the institution of slavery and terror in C-ville. Because that would be history. The statue isn’t history. It’s the opposite. It’s a celebration that overlooks reality.
The Present Past
Ccommunities can figure out how to deal with relics of hatred and oppression — whether through removal or some form of contextualization — but this is ultimately about the living, both those for whom the Lee statue is a painful reminder of the toll of American history and those who see it is a celebration of their supposed just cause and rightful place atop the American hierarchy. The Civil War and its dark heart are, after all, still very much contemporary in Virginia. It’s no an accident that people still write into the local papers about the War of Northern Aggression rather than the Civil War.
The dark legacy of racial injustice and violence runs deep here. Jamestown was ground zero for the settler colonial project that became the United States of America. Actual genocide was compounded by administrative erasure when the first registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics Walter Plecker decided to eliminate all record of federally protected tribes in Virginia in the 1930s.
Likewise, the legacies of Southern reactionaries winning Reconstruction are baked into the landscape of public education across the state. Well-to-do white kids fled public schools for the sanctity of all-white private ones, many of which exist today under different management. High schools do little to explain the sudden mergers of public schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s — and why brown faces only start appearing in graduation photos around then.
The University of Virginia (a state institution where no blacks were admitted until 1955) is no exception to this tortured past, being founded by a slave owner who happened to be exceptionally bright. From his writings, he was seemingly aware of the evil of slavery but chose to keep his anyway, which makes his moral turpitude particularly cruel. He was also the intellectual heart of American democracy and the third President of the United States. These qualities aren’t really all that much at odds.
Today, Charlottesville is a progressive place by Southern standards. It’s a small, relatively cosmopolitan city embedded in rolling Virginia countryside and at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is as idyllic a place as you might hope to spend four years studying. But that exists atop still-present racial, gender, and sexual animosity.
A friend of mine who went there was physically attacked by “five Caucasian males” shouting anti-gay slurs. A half-decade later, when my sister was at the school, a black member of the Honor Committee nearly had his head staved in for allegedly trying to get into a club with a fake ID. And these are far from the first racist acts Charlottesville has witnessed — and far from the last homophobic slurs unleashed. Others who went there — including this site’s editor — recall racial epithets appearing on campus landmarks. Alumni from late in the last century can tell you about Plantation Parties hosted at fraternities.
And then there’s the finally quashed not-gay chants at UVA football games. After every home score, UVA students lock arms and sing the fight song (to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”). In the lyrics is the line, “We come from old Virgini-ay / Where all is bright and gay.” Students would then shout a hasty and enthusiastic “NOT GAY.” This has, with the exception of a few incidents, been shamed into submission.
Still, you can never quite keep down over-entitled douchebags, a staple of the the Cavalier scene. Take this freshman writing in 2007:
During the second half of the football season I have felt uncomfortable saying the “not gay” chant, not because of the content, but because of the stares and criticisms I receive after doing so.
Despite this discomfort, I will continue to press on as one of the last beacons of strength and morality. That may sound too pompous for the rather insignificant matter at hand, but courage on any level is hard to find these days. Political correctness, a weakening morality and lack of courage are suffocating our once-great nation. You have an opportunity to stop the suffocation. Promote the “not gay” chant.
One imagines he is staying strong still.
Not just a Southern Problem
Yet while recalling all this is good and necessary — anybody suggesting a white nationalist rally is out of line with Virginia history might want to check out, among other people, George Lincoln Rockwell—it is equally painful to see this written off by some friends and social media folks as The South. That this is somehow nothing more than a reflection of the enduring essence of Old Virginia reasserting itself. That somehow the faults and shortcomings of UVA make it unsurprising that Virginia should play host to such hatred.
There were no doubt plenty of locals and Virginians wielding tiki torches, but the hatemongers came from all over. I defy you to point to a corner of the country that lacks this kind of scum — I’ve seen the Stars and Bars fly in New Jersey and there’s apparently a Confederate monument in Montana (which only became a state after the war).
A militia unit from upstate New York came to provide security for the special snowflakes of the far right, whose tough-and-tested leaders crumpled at the first taste of pepper spray. Far-right celebrity loon Baked Alaska (hint: from Alaska) professed his love for the barrel bombs of Bashar al-Assad while Richard Spencer came in from DC and flounced about until the police shoulder-checked him to the ground.
No, the fire-and-fury crusade against “political correctness” (read: brown people, Jews, and those who don’t mind their company) came to Charlottesville because the city dared to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, a monument with no historical connection to the conflict or the man, just a fancy statue commissioned by a local dandy a century ago to pay homage to the Lost Cause of the Gallant South. But if there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that the white-hot rage is a reaction to the fact that Virginia has just begun to break free of the legacies of the past, causing those who want to keep huffing the hate-pipe to clutch onto any symbol of imagined greatness they can find.
It is also deeply painful to see this happen in Charlottesville, where friends, neighbors, and members of my own family have received one of the best public university educations the United States can provide. Not everyone can go to UVA. Even with structural advantages, getting into UVA is tough. And in Virginia, opportunity isn’t all that equally distributed.
Still, UVA and its peer in-state schools provide aspiration for plenty of folks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a town in the state that doesn’t know at least one favored son or daughter that attended Mr. Jefferson’s University. Many have gone on to become world-class physicists, musicians, government administrators, doctors. In other words, this reaches out to everyone in the Commonwealth.
Likewise, the town of Charlottesville is a warm and inviting place, having accepted thousands of Tibetan, Hmong, Burmese, and Syrian refugees over the years in spite of its struggles with oppression. What happened this weekend is emblematic of this conflict between decency and hate-mongering.
It’s a conflict that is being played out from Barrow, Alaska to Key West. When your uncle wants to talk about how this is all just the media or about violence on the left, acknowledge that a few punches were thrown by counter-protestors and then break out your phone and show him James Alex Fields, Jr. plowing into a street full of people. When your cousin wants to talk down Black Lives Matter as a bunch of hooligans, show her the pictures from Ferguson and ask if she wants to live in a police state — and why the police in Charlottesville managed to avoid any intervention at all. If your children start spouting bile that makes them sound like an extra in American History X, draw on whatever value system you have at hand to drill it into them that treating empathy as a weakness and bloodlines as a virtue is a one-way ticket to living a life that is nasty and brutish.
And in the more immediate term, there is plenty you can do to help, if you have time or change to spare. Sara Benincasa has a list of worthy causes to donate to here:
And in the mean time, it never hurts to learn about the shortcomings of our education system when it comes to race and class. Because at the end of the day, this isn’t about erasing history; it’s about the country’s failure to acknowledge it in the first place.
Andrew Leber is based in Boston.
