RENOUNCING HATE

On the evening of Monday, August 14, after a day full of training for my position as a Head Resident Advisor for Emory & Henry College, I went fishing, to wash away the day, and to take back the part of me that becomes diluted when I spend more than a few days in town and on concrete. The only difference between that evening and all the others I’ve spent doing the same thing, is that it immediately followed a human tragedy of the highest degree that unfolded in my hometown of Charlottesville.

    In the days following, I watched the documentaries and photosets and interviews that erupted around the explicit demonstration of violence-provoking white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies in town over the weekend, which resulted in the loss of Heather Heyer, and the injury of several others. I was initially thankful that I wasn’t local on the day of the protest. I then became somewhat hardened and disappointed that I was not local on that day, and in the days following, to stand with the shell-shocked and the threatened, those who know and love my home for what it is—a home and a community. I remain not frightened but appalled at the capacity for hatred in my fellow human. Perhaps I knew of the racial hatred that still lingers in the dark corners of our society. Perhaps I’d never known its true power.

    I call this a human tragedy of the highest degree because organized hate, when allowed to prosper and fester, leads to action. As it was demonstrated in Charlottesville, hateful action leads to murder and death. Genocide—and genocide is a human wound infected. Each is just a limb of the same sick, murderous beast, and should be identified and opposed, as such. 

    “We greatly outnumber the anti-white, anti-American filth, and at some point, we will have enough power to clean them from the streets forever,” said Robert Ray, a writer for the neo-Nazi publication, The Daily Stormer. “That which is degenerate in white countries will be removed.”

    On the day that I went fishing, I did so as a white person—a white, heterosexual male in the twilight of my college career. And so I went fishing safe. Not explicitly threatened by the agendas presented in Charlottesville on Saturday. My individuality—my ability to freely go fishing in America, to freely pursue happiness and comfort, and to freely exist as I was born—has not been held as an obstacle to the greater good. I am white. I am American. And I am proud of who I am. 

    And it is because of this identity—my racial identity—the same identity of those that stood on the side of hate and racism in Charlottesville, that I feel a burning and paramount need to renounce and condemn, with the utmost potency and sincerity, the evil, bigoted actions, beliefs, and agendas of the white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that revealed themselves in my hometown over the weekend. 

    My America, my Virginia, my Charlottesville is a place of inclusion and diversity, where a rich blending of cultures and understandings stands in favor over a homogenous, outwardly discriminatory and ignorant society. Despite my privilege, and my inability to truly sympathize with those who have had their identity and lives rhetorically threatened, I hold individuality as a unifying feature of our collective existence, as a country, a state, and community. For as long as one of my fellow countryman’s individuality and freedom is threatened, so will I consider my own. Much blood and sweat has fallen to place this kind of racist behavior in our past. We cannot regress now. We cannot.□

*Originally published in The Rural Virginian