Your Safety Is My Foremost Concern
Lessons from Charlottesville on Vulnerability and Protection
The 2017 “Summer of Hate” that culminated in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12 served as a reminder (especially to many of us working within higher education) that racism’s violence, though somewhat different in its routines, has not been mitigated since the civil rights movement.
Indeed, the very form of that violence calls into question many commonsense notions of safety, particularly as our protection as citizens intersects with institutions such as the police, higher education, and domesticity. The increasing proliferation of home security systems in the United States and the call by Charlottesville’s city and university officials to keep clear of the “Unite the Right” march on August 12 suggests that safety is commonly defined as the ability to shield oneself in increasingly militarized ways—either behind locked doors or in various bucolic realms—from that which threatens us.
This idea of personal safety has a corollary in the ways that institutions, and for the purpose of this piece, the University of Virginia, have sought to securitize their financial investments and the groups they purportedly serve. But the weekend of August 12 showed us in terrifying clarity that this atomized version of safety only imperils us further. By looking briefly at the ways that events unfolded at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville, I intend to show that coming together, rather than retreating behind locked doors, is what actually keeps communities safe.
I. THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
On August 4, University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan sent an email to all members of the university community encouraging them to stay away from the “Unite the Right” rally scheduled to take place one week later in downtown Charlottesville, just over a mile from the University of Virginia campus (or “grounds” as students, faculty, staff, and residents have traditionally called it). Citing the “credible risk of violence,” Sullivan noted that “your safety remains my foremost concern” and argued that attending the rally, even as a counter-protester, would only “satisfy [the alt-right activists’] craving for spectacle.”
Instead, she encouraged the University of Virginia community to participate in a slew of events organized by UVA faculty and staff on grounds on August 12, including discussions on constitutional rights, a soccer game, and a sports-themed movie night. In contrast to the threatening tableau looming just beyond grounds, Sullivan offered two hallmark comforts of the residential university: debate and recreation.
In addition to the palliative effects of Sullivan’s offerings, her email message bears noting for several reasons. First, as an edict addressed only to those with a Virginia.edu email, Sullivan drew a tight circle around the groups whose safety were her primary concern. That community did not include the hundreds of service workers employed by independent contractors who labor every day to provide meals, janitorial services, and grounds keeping: tasks essential to the University of Virginia’s daily operations. Though ostensibly a public event, it is unclear how those Charlottesville residents not attached to the university would hear about the planned events and Sullivan did not suggest that the events were open to the public in her message.
Further, Sullivan’s version of “community” did not include the many Charlottesville residents who find themselves priced out of neighborhoods surrounding the university, as luxury student housing complexes raise property taxes and rental rates. This was, in other words, a community defined by exclusivity rather than inclusivity, and one only available in perpetuity for a select few such as tenured faculty members or highly compensated administrators.1 The remaining members of this community would eventually graduate out of it, or worse, find themselves on the wrong end of budget cuts and hiring freezes.
Second, Sullivan couches the workings of the University of Virginia as a safe haven, at least for those with access to its resources. But this vision of institutional harbor ignores the various ways that universities in general, and the University of Virginia in particular, imperil their surrounding communities as well as those within the university itself.
Most obviously, the “Unite the Right” rally that ended with the death of Heather Heyer was organized by two University of Virginia graduates: Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler. That the banal workings of the university—sports games and academic debate—were a part of the radicalization of two men who cite a particularly erudite (but no less horrifying) tradition of white supremacy, which claims Thomas Jefferson as one of its animating forces, was entirely elided in Sullivan’s missive.
Instead, Sullivan describes the world beyond the University of Virginia campus as vaguely threatening due to the ways that it differs from the grounds. If life within the university is defined by lecture, discovery, debate, and recreation, then the world outside it is rife with violent spectacle. Indeed, this vision of the University of Virginia follows a longstanding pattern of “protecting” the institution from external forces both through the proliferation of campus police and the incorporation of local police forces onto the campus. Though ostensibly present to protect students, especially female students from the threat of campus rape, the presence of armed police and guards on and adjacent to the university has instead resulted in the brutalization of black students, as I have analyzed with Lenora Hanson and Bennett Carpenter elsewhere.2 While this version of academic community ignores the routinized violence that occurs on the grounds every year—from racist and anti-Semitic graffiti to hate crimes against students of color—it also casts the University of Virginia as a safe haven only for those already protected by its various institutional privileges.
And yet, this version of safety, of putting up barriers to entry and retreating into routine, proved ineffective. Not only did white supremacist groups (predictably) march on campus wielding torches that they used to beat students surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s statue on the north side of the Rotunda on August 11, the events planned for the University of Virginia were all canceled on August 12 after the governor of Virginia declared a state of emergency.
Still, this ineffectiveness pales beside the risk that the university’s version of safety posed to the Charlottesville community as a whole. As I will show later, in casting itself as a shield against certain kinds of violence (and certain kinds of people), the University of Virginia merely redirected that violence against communities already vulnerable to it.
II. PUBLIC SAFETY ON AUGUST 12
Despite its violent and tragic end, the events of August 12 provide a different view of safety, one that suggests that joining together to protect the vulnerable is a more efficacious method, and a model to follow moving forward.
In this volume and elsewhere, many others have documented and written about the violent eruptions that defined August 12, from the parking lot beating of DeAndre Harris while police stood down and watched, to the shots fired on Market Street, to Heyer’s murder. What has received less careful attention is the violence that was avoided due to community defense.
In the days leading up to the rally, Brandon Collins, the full-time organizer for the Charlottesville Public Housing Association of Residents had asked the Charlottesville Police Department to block off street parking in the areas adjacent to public and low-income housing complexes in downtown Charlottesville. As evidence, he cited online threats against public housing made by prospective attendees of the “Unite the Right” rally, as well as recent precedent.
After members of the Ku Klux Klan were escorted from the park where they held their rally on July 8 in Charlottesville, those attendees drove around and through public housing complexes in the area, strewing trash and shouting slurs at residents. Collins noted that the “Unite the Right” rally posed a unique threat to these communities: the organizers of the rally could, after all, read maps and, given the extensive planning that had gone into the event and its aftermath, might very well have plans to once again terrorize poor communities of color in the area. Collins reasoned that while parking prohibitions could not forestall the entirety of the threat, such regulations would at the very least provide a buffer between alt-right activists and extremely low-income residents of Charlottesville. Collins’s request was denied.
Soon after the governor declared a state of emergency and officially shut down the “Unite the Right” rally, anti-racist protesters heard that a group of alt-right activists were on the march to a low-income housing complex to menace—and perhaps maim—residents. The anti-racists organized quickly, and began marching towards Friendship Court, the threatened complex. They arrived to find a group of sympathizers who explained that they had heard the call earlier, banded together, and successfully expelled those wishing to do harm to the community. While one group stayed behind to keep watch over Friendship Court, another marched back towards the downtown mall to spread the good news. They were celebrating this victory of community care and defense when James Fields drove his car down Fourth Street, killing Heyer and injuring thirty-five others. Fourth Street, one of only two places to cross Charlottesville’s pedestrian mall, was supposed to be closed for the day. In another institutional lapse, the road had been opened to vehicles.
There are two key lessons to draw here. The first is about the failures of various institutions—the University of Virginia, the police—to protect the groups they purport to serve in the face of both spectacularized and bureaucratized violence. As we have seen through numerous examples over the past several years, most recently the police killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento, policing does not protect the many people of color murdered by police or the communities subjected to relentless and unnecessary harassment and surveillance.
Likewise, the university does not protect those paid as little as $7.25 per hour to keep it running, those saddled with unpayable debts upon graduation, or those gentrified out of their homes due to the university’s expansion into surrounding neighborhoods.
But the second lesson to take away is the lesson about what does keep us safe: protection through solidarity with our most vulnerable communities. If our current institutions have failed us, then the case of August 12 gives us a roadmap to what institutions we should build to replace them: institutions that seek to work with and safeguard those most vulnerable to violence. August 12 teaches us, among so many other things, that locked doors don’t make us safe. What will make us safe is stable and suitable housing, living wages, effective healthcare, and nutritious food built and advocated for through solidarity and partnerships.
Laura Goldblatt is the global studies postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.
1 According to the University of Virginia website, UVA employs approximately 16,000 faculty and staff, not including the health system. In contrast, nearly 100,000 people live in Albemarle County.
2 Bennett Carpenter, Laura Goldblatt, & Lenora Hanson, “The university must be defended! Safe spaces, campus policing and university-driven gentrification,” In/Security. Special issue of English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016): 191–198.