Don’t let Saturday’s violence define Americans or their history
I moved to Charlottesville, Va., several years ago to get my doctorate in American history at the University of Virginia. Telling family and friends back home in Canada that I’d done so often elicited a particular response.
The South, they’d ask, somewhat incredulously, is it racist? Can people carry guns? Do people have all their teeth?, they’d joke. These questions became more pointed with Donald Trump’s election, which led some people to simply ask me: what’s it like down there?
As events this past weekend clearly demonstrate, yes, there’s deep-seated racism. And countless episodes in American history, from massacres of Indigenous peoples, to the U.S. Civil War, to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, attest to the enduring influence of racism in American society.
Media headlines maintain that Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally was about debates over how to remember that history. Specifically, that it was about a statue to Robert E. Lee, a leading Confederate general in the Civil War, which Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove from a downtown park.
But the rally was about a lot more than the statue, for history is almost always about identity. Jason Kessler, a white supremacist leader who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009 and lives in Charlottesville, organized the rally. Kessler made a name for himself in late 2016 by opposing Wes Bellamy, Charlottes- ville’s first Black city councillor.
In Kessler’s own words, the rally was partially about removing Confederate symbols. But at the same time, it was also about “advocating for white people.”
“This is about an anti-white climate within the Western world and the need for white people to have advocacy like other groups do,” he said.
In Canada, we often define our national identity in contrast to that of the U.S. We maintain that Canadians are what Americans aren’t. This is understandable given that Canada shares a border with the most culturally, economically and militarily powerful country in the world.
But this generates gross generalizations, such as Americans are racist, while Canadians aren’t. Americans carry guns, Canadians don’t. I hear this again and again. This weekend on Twitter, some Canadians responded to news of the violence by maintaining that Americans should be ashamed of their country. Others responded with a popular jest that Canadians — not Americans — are the ones who should be building a wall.
Lest we Canadians get on our moral high horse, it’s worth remembering some important things. First, white supremacists live in Canada, too. Faith Goldy, a popular Rebel Media personality, for example, rationalized the Unite the Right rally. We also had our own act of white supremacist domestic terrorism at a Quebec City mosque in January, which resulted in the deaths of six innocent people.
But perhaps more importantly, many Americans know that the only way forward is to demand a more tolerant and compassionate world. Hundreds risked their lives over the weekend in Charlottesville to do so, while activists in movements such as Black Lives Matter work every day in cities across America to end racism.
It’s also worth remembering that a majority of Americans, including those in Charlottesville, voted for Hillary Clinton in November 2016. In the Democratic primaries, almost 7,000 Charlottesville Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders, whose progressivism far surpasses many of our own politicians.
We can learn a lot from Saturday’s events. But for Canadians, I hope that we won’t define Americans by this violence, or by their current president, who initially refused to denounce the white nationalist movement that supports him.
I’ve spent years studying American history. It’s a fascinating country in its complexity, which includes the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, but also the legacy of abolitionism and civil rights. And I hope that no matter what happens, Canadians keep that complexity in mind.
Many Americans know that the only way forward is to demand a more tolerant and compassionate world