Before and beyond the tragic events of August 11 and 12, 2017, the town of Charlottesville, Virginia has been best known as the home of the University of Virginia. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, the university is a UNESCO World Heritage site that possesses some noteworthy artifacts: Moses Ezekiel’s 1907 statue of Homer; a section of the Berlin wall with murals by Dennis Kaun; and the Rotunda, the architectural apex of the university’s grounds, designed by the founding father himself. A history of the commitment to classical ideas, political engagement, and civic duty is coded into its very landscape. It is known as a “public ivy,” a school whose prestige and renown rival the private ivy league, and its esteemed faculty have included philosopher Richard Rorty, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and astronaut Kathryn Thornton. Charlottesville, in a word, has been to the world a veritable leader in academic pursuits, its community and its campus embodying the highest order of strength of the intellectual spirit.
But on the evening of August 11, Charlottesville came to bear the symbols of an altogether different spirit. White supremacists, in a rally dubbed “Unite the Right,” marched in protest of the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park, just steps away from the University of Virginia. This removal, a gesture that many municipalities across the country have made towards a more honest recognition of the power of symbols within our nation’s troubled past, was especially hard-fought in Charlottesville, where the community has been grappling with Jefferson’s own fraught relationship with the institution of slavery and the democratic ideals of his legacy (indeed, what the university and white supremacists have in common is a shared reverence for Jefferson, the latter for his lifelong perpetuation of the lie of biological race, and the former despite it).
Such a reckoning with our history has concerned those among us who consider themselves maligned in the age of political correctness, identity politics, and globalization. The “forgotten men” made themselves known, illuminating their faces by the light of torches, and brought the rest of the country to recognize their insecurity and their rage. As a culture, we are already inclined to obsess over these displays of aggression, but the audacity of the protesters to stake the claim they did made our captivation absolute. Many of us watched in horror. Comparisons were made to Nazi gatherings, and their proclamations (“Jews will not replace us;” “white lives matter”) affirmed the motivations and disturbing intent of their action.
The violence, including rioting, beatings, and a fatality, took place within a larger mobilization of white nationalism since the rise of Donald Trump. White supremacists have made themselves more visible by the hospitality of the president’s own racist views. Since his election, white supremacist rallies, conferences, and online communities have become more prevalent, and Charlottesville has been their most arresting yet. Photos of the event were shared widely and capture the intensity and spectacle of the gathering: black men lie on the ground, beaten with flag poles and two-by-fours; Confederate and Nazi flags wave above the faces of young white men, distraught and anguished, wearing the signature red hat of the Trump campaign; officers in riot gear press their shields against protesters shouting chants and racial slurs; the flailing bodies of counter-protesters hang delicately in the air as a vehicle rushes through the crowd. Horror led to heartbreak when we learned that this particular action resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. The shock of these images is enduring, and continues to haunt us. We could hardly say we are finished coping with this event. We have barely begun.
Hence, we consider the importance of this book to be evident in, firstly, its robust consideration of the context and implications of this event and, secondly, in its timeliness. It has been less than a year since this event took place, and we are still absorbed in the problems it posed: how do we cope with the political culture that has bred these fraught conditions? How did this despairing ideology proliferate so assiduously? How deep are its roots and to where do they lead? We still seem to be pouring over the statements our political leaders have made, as when the president condemned the violence “on many sides.” However, our care to do so is not because such responses offend our delicate political sensibilities. Rather, the “Unite the Right” rally is the consummation of a long history of the systemic oppression of black and brown people; it is the resurgence of a form of hate and violence that finds its precursors in lynchings and in the public burning of crosses. Still, we must acknowledge, it was not a simple reenactment. It is a present day problem and it demands a present day solution.
If the challenges this event poses are numerous and diverse, our responses follow suit. Our deliberation on the organization of the book led us to realize that there was much to be said on topics related to the events of August 2017, and that the structure of this book might do well to divide the direct from the indirect. Thus, you will find that part one includes responses that take up the turmoil of the event explicitly, doing so from various approaches, and part two includes those that provide some context—historical, political, social, and cultural—for the event itself.
Part one begins with vice mayor of Charlottesville Wes Bellamy’s account of his experience during the violence and his role as a moral and political leader of the community. Jeffrey C. Isaac, writing in the very first hours of the aftermath, points toward the open question at the heart of so many of the arguments that will follow in this book. Namely, did Trump’s rise cause what happened, or was Trump merely an occasion for this hate? Jared Loggins builds on this problematic of white supremacy, asking how the events of Charlottesville signify a failure in the cultural imagination of white Americans. Leonard A. Williams examines how white Ame-ricans typically respond to such criticism through the rhetorical methods of “both-sides thinking” (which Trump was guilty of) and “whataboutism,” which appear logical on the surface but hide ideological biases. University of Virginia student Keval Bhatt writes that the covert ideology inherent in the reverence of symbols like Jefferson obfuscates the historical truth of slavery and colonialism. Michael Weinman, in his first of two responses, also observes that the role of slavery in American history is confused, forgotten, or misrepresented.
Following these, Andrew Boyer’s response takes up the relationship between violent political action and the slow degradation of our political institutions, demonstrating how habit and pluralism can overcome ideological difference. Isaac Ariail Reed considers the debates around statues, and the legacy of Jefferson in particular, as complex problems in the differences between worldviews, and not simply conflicting means and ends. Gordon Mantler uses two examples of memorials from Washington, D.C. as contrasting paradigms for our political and cultural relation to our fraught past: misleading paternal reverence and the heroism of activism. Laura Goldblatt interrogates how successful the university and police were in protecting the community, questioning who counts as a member of that community in an elite college town. In his second response, Michael Weinman uses Aristotle to help answer the question of whether those who engage in political violence, like the counter-protesters in Charlottesville, are “blameworthy.” Maria Bucur borrows from her family’s experience in Communist Romania to compare its similarities to authoritarianism and nationalism arising in America today. Part one ends with Reverend Marcus McCullough’s frank admission that what happened in Charlottesville was ultimately unsurprising. The United States has repeatedly failed to adequately respond to and account for its dark history of chattel slavery and systemic racism. A gathering of this nature was bound to happen.
Part two includes articles written before and around August 2017 that deal with the political and cultural landscape that led to the violence in Charlottesville. Drawing on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 sermon on the first black-owned radio station in America, Vaughn Booker begins part two with a denunciation of economic and ethnonationalism. Sanford Schram, sharing these concerns, takes a hard look at the curious ties between the Republican Party and the Russian government—and their shared responsibility for the rise of white nationalism. Public Seminar’s Publisher Jeffrey C. Goldfarb argues that “we are still in Charlottesville”: how our responses to events in Charlottesville are profoundly affected by the opinions of others in a mediated public sphere that makes us present for the action but isolated from differing opinions. Rachel McKinney analyses the premises of alt-right ideology, arguing that if students of color on American campuses are under increased threat from white nationalist groups, academics could do worse than to become familiar with their ideas. Public Seminar’s Executive Editor Claire Potter reviews the case of Corey Menafee who vandalized a stain-glass window at Yale University depicting a romanticized prewar South, and considers how Confederate public memorials sustain the vitriol of their intended audience. In a joint essay, Nicholas Baer and Maggie Hennefeld offer separate answers to the “post-truth” politics of Trumpism and the alt-right. Baer problematizes Richard Rorty’s prescience in the rise of Trump, while Hennefeld looks to Russian author and journalist Masha Gessen’s nihilism as a genuine response to the limitations of Enlightenment rationalism.
Melvin Rogers further considers social organization and politics as he examines white supremacy as the genesis of a general “crisis of legitimation”—the perceived failing of democratic institutions for white Americans—which lurks behind the motivations for the “Unite the Right” rally. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1890 speech on Robert E. Lee, whose statue precipitated the violence in Charlottesville, Neil Roberts regards America’s present dilemma, one precipitated by authority and authoritarianism. Michael Sasha King evaluates different forms of protest against racism and injustice, including San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s controversial decision to sit during the national anthem. Mitchell Kosters breaks down the constituent logics of white supremacy proper, and considers how they might be further clarified through the concepts of institutions, histories, and spaces. Mindy Fullilove and others take account of the significance of anniversaries, including the upcoming 400th anniversary of the first arrival of enslaved Africans in North America. In a fascinating and painful essay, Julia Ott offers the history of chattel slavery in American economics, from the investment banks like Lehman Brothers that kept the “peculiar institution” afloat to the practice of valuing black bodies as specimens of strength, dexterity, and efficiency. And finally, Eric Anthamatten ends our book with a powerful message about punching Nazis in the face—even if you are categorically against violence, you might still find room for one exception.
The diversity and complexity of these problems call for a reevaluation of our history, our vocabulary, and the terms on which we meet our disputants. We feel the urgency of this need in the daily volley of grim and unfortunate news, the conflicts of a nation still scarred by the stakes over which the Civil War was fought. Perhaps what drives us most to think and rethink through Charlottesville is the deep sense of collective moral failing, that the unbelievable achievements in the last century—including universal suffrage, equality in the workplace and the home, and equal protection under the law, for which lives were lost and ruined and heroes emerged—have been dispossessed by the forces of fear, ignorance, and intolerance. This event is a watershed moment for the apparent rise of white nationalism in America, and we have much to do in order to understand how this came to pass and what it spells for the future. Charlottesville has become a cultural touchstone for those of us who see the era of so-called populism as a threat to the lives of women, people of color, and democracy itself, and we hope to offer this book as one step forward in understanding what has happened and what might come next.