Our Thoughts on Charlottesville
Dear Friends,
The battle between the better angels of our nature and our worst impulses has been waged since our nation’s founding. We have aspired to the prospect that all people are created equal, broadening our understanding over our history that it is people, of all genders, sexual orientations, races, religions, nationalities, abilities and income, newcomers as well as native born, and not only white male property owners, who are created equal. Genocidal wars of aggression against the Native American nations who inhabited this land first, a civil war that freed African American slaves but left a legacy of racist systems and institutions designed to disenfranchise, disadvantage and incarcerate them, immigration policies designed to favor Europeans and exclude Asians, Latinos, other people of color for most of a century, the seizing of the Hawaiian kingdom and nuclear testing in the homelands of Pacific Islanders, and the culture wars between the dominant majority and others, are painful reminders of some of the worst of our historical impulses.
Racism, both personal and structural, has been present from our country’s very beginnings, and continues in the beliefs of many of our fellow citizens and in our nation’s institutions. The gathering of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white nationalists in Charlottesville was a visible and virulent expression of the less visible systemic racism behind the many negative disparities linked to the historical and continuing dominance of the white majority. Nevertheless, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who attended the rally, said our country is at a turning point, and spoke for the white nationalists attending, when he said they were “determined to take our country back.”
This is the heart of the matter, the belief that this country should belong to, and be controlled by, white men who profess to be Christians; a belief held not only by avowed white supremacists but also by many other Americans who live without challenging the assumptions and consequences of this paradigm. All Americans, in all generations, have had a choice to make, and in fits and starts, with three steps forward and two steps back, our country as a whole has chosen to move toward equality and away from the belief that straight white Christian men should own and control our country.
This is also the crux of the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic assaults, policies and proposed legislation. The shift in immigration policy toward family reunification in 1965 and away from race based quotas made large scale immigration to the United States from regions outside Europe possible, and it is not surprising that the majority of immigrants are now from countries in Asia, Latin America, and other regions of the world populated by people of color. The complexion of our nation is changing, and white Americans are expected to become a minority in this century.
The efforts to restrict immigration, to suppress the vote of people of color, and to defend white male privilege by white nationalists and supremacists and their more sophisticated fellow travelers, emanate from this central fact and fear. They have never accepted that American citizens from every nation on the globe is a strength, not a weakness, and that despite our long struggle with racism and other forms and systems of discrimination, our nation is bound by ideals of liberty and justice for all, not by the Nazi ideal of an Aryan master race.
The white supremacists’ violence in Charlottesville reminds us that there is so much more than Confederate statues at stake. Taking down memorials to leaders who fought to protect slavery is proving so difficult because they are merely the visible symbols of the deeply rooted and systemic racism reflected in the statistics and lived experiences revealing racial disproportionalities and inequities in all our major institutions.
We must say NO not only to the racism and other forms of discrimination that are plainly in our faces, thanks to the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and other racists, but also to the more insidious racism embedded in all our systems and the expressions of other forms of discrimination wherever they appear. We at ACRS stand with Heather Heyer, killed in Charlottesville by a white supremacist, and with her mother Susan Bro, in saying NO to the racists who converged in Charlottesville and to racists and bigots everywhere. We stand with all of you, in Heather’s memory and in memory of all who worked tirelessly, all who fought and died, over our nation’s history, for a more perfect union with liberty and justice for all.
Sincerely,
Diane Narasaki
ACRS Executive Director
