I am Charlottesville!
I visited Charlottesville last week on my way to one of my teaching gigs,
upstate. It was only two or three miles
out of the way, so I felt like I could do it.
Leaving town, the car I got was tuned to an AM station that played the
rightwing character known as Rush Limbaugh.
His discussion was upsetting calling the people that want the removal of
the confederate status worse than ISIS who are destroying the museums in Syria and Iraq. It was nauseating! No mention of course that a lot of these
statues were put up in the Jim Crow era, as a direct result of the voting rights act and the end of
school segregation in the 1960s. They
were a kind of “in your face” statement to the black community at the time. Here in Virginia, black kids have to go to General Lee Middle School every day; if that is not in your face!
Driving down Monument Avenue in Richmond for the first few
times I was in awe, the statues are beautiful and I did not really look at what
they depicted or stood for. It helped that I am a foreigner and was not really educated about the U.S. Civil War that
much. For us Europeans it was more about
the War of Independence, and living in Yorktown that is just amplified.
But I have become much more sensitive to the racial
relationships. I often jokingly call
myself the token or sometimes the only "real" African American. I was born in Africa and I am a U.S.
citizen. But I am as white as any other
full blooded Caucasian.
So why did I go to Charlottesville? I went for three reasons:
- To pay my respect to Heather Heyer and the spot where she was killed.
- To pay my respect to the town I like a lot, Charlottesville is a great, liberal town.
- For myself and to symbolically poke those KKK-ers, Neo-Nazis and Alt-Right criminals in the eyes and metaphorically kick them in the testicles.
This last point was particularly important to me after listening
to the radio and after a weekend of hearing Trump saying that both sides were
at fault and that what he called the alt-left were violent as well. There might have been a few, but the counter
protesters were resisting fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination
against women.
HBO was showing that the right wing groups were marching and
chanting the following three slogans:
- Jews will not replace us
- You will not replace us
- Blood and soil
The first and the third are direct quotes of slogans that
were chanted in the 1930s under the fascist Nazi regime of Hitler (anyone want to buy my tiki-torches? I am not sure if I can ever light them again without having to vomit). The result was the gas chambers. I had an uncle who died in a Nazi concentration
camp and a father who spent time in one.
That is why I stand with the people resisting the rightwing
wingnuts. We need to squash them and
that is why I dare to say that until Trump changes his tune, as a son of a
father who spend time in a concentration camp and a nephew of an uncle who died
in one, he is not my president.
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