Charlottesville, Virginia, feels enough like Eden that it’s always been easy to hide a certain amount of blood. The town is small—fifty thousand residents, without the college population factored in—and green and idyllic, a hideout of academic and historical reverence nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a running gag in Charlottesville how frequently the town is picked as the happiest place to live in America. It’s a community that manages to embody the honeyed ease of a small Southern enclave while modelling the progressive values and professional advancement of a liberal city. The idea is that there’s sophistication and dignity in Charlottesville—good food, tasteful living, and sun-dappled long afternoons. And there is. But, as certain reactions to recent events from white friends and politicians have reminded me, an air of enlightened blamelessness is more often concealment than it is proof.
Over the weekend, Charlottesville became the site of an extended white-supremacist revival meeting. On Friday night, like a nightmarish graduation procession, a few hundred white supremacists marched with torches down the long green lawn that leads to the Rotunda, the University of Virginia’s signature building. They chanted Nazi slogans in the open, undisguised, unafraid of being photographed, proud to be seen. They circled a statue of Thomas Jefferson and attacked a group of student counter-protesters who held a banner reading “UVA Students Act Against White Supremacy” at the statue’s base. On Saturday morning, flanked by militia men carrying automatic weapons, the white supremacists assembled in McIntire Park, with swastikas and Confederate flags fully visible; David Duke was there, along with other representatives of the Ku Klux Klan. The counter-protest had grown. Religious leaders had gathered at dawn to pray, and progressive and anti-fascist groups tracked the demonstration to Emancipation Park, which was once named Lee Park, after the Confederate general. There, the violence implied in a “white pride” protest erupted, and the rally was dispersed. As the counter-protesters moved on foot toward the adjacent Downtown Mall, a man who had come to town to show his support for white supremacy drove his car down a wide pedestrian alley, killing one woman and injuring nineteen people; he then backed out of the alley and drove away.
This wasn’t the first white-supremacist rally held in Charlottesville in 2017, and it likely won’t be the last. On Saturday, the self-promoting white supremacist Richard Spencer, a proponent of oxymorons (“peaceful ethnic cleansing”) who is also a University of Virginia graduate, filmed himself saying, “Your head’s gonna spin, how many times we’re going to be back here . . . We’re going to make Charlottesville the center of the universe.” The white supremacists have successfully pushed a narrative that they chose Charlottesville because it represents progressive values. Ostensibly, this is all a protest over the impending removal of a large statue of Robert E. Lee. Jason Kessler, the organizer of Saturday’s rally (and another U.V.A. graduate), calls Charlottesville a “very far left community that has absorbed these cultural Marxist principles advocated in college towns across the country, about blaming white people for everything.” In fact, Charlottesville, while it is home to many progressive people, skillfully models the exact sort of coercive propriety and self-exculpation from the legacy of American racism that has allowed white supremacy to publicly reëmerge.
In 2005, I moved to Charlottesville for college, and felt that I’d landed in paradise. Back in Texas, where I grew up, the captain of my cheerleading squad had a Confederate flag hanging in her bedroom; Virginia at first seemed very liberal to me. I had such low standards for moral decency that frat boys drawling about the “War of Northern Aggression” seemed innocuous, almost quaint. The University of Virginia fetishizes its past—people refer to Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder, as “T.J.,” and a popular dress code for football games was “guys in ties, girls in pearls.” The official culture of the school positions American history and institutional convention as deeply and exclusively charming, and it relies on a mask of gentility to keep this story up. There were blatantly racist incidents at U.V.A. shortly before I arrived and while I was there: two of the richest frats had “blackface incidents” in 2002; the next year, a black woman running for student office was attacked near the Rotunda by a white man who reportedly said, “No one wants a nigger to be president.” In 2006, a local establishment instituted a dress code with the intended effect of keeping black people out of the bar. But these things were played down as impolite and anomalous, with the same sort of “This is not us” language that’s circulating today. Charlottesville was a beautiful town full of good white people who believed in political progress, and if people of color could just hold tight and respect that, we wouldn’t have to make anyone uncomfortable. Everything would be just fine.
We are seeing now what emerges from the American fetish for tradition, which is, in part, a fetish for the authority of the rich white male. While I was at U.V.A., the fact that slaves had built the school was hardly discussed, and the most prominent acknowledgment that Jefferson was a slave owner came on Valentine’s Day, when signs went up all over campus that said “TJ ♥s Sally.” The town has been repeatedly, publicly wracked with awful tragedies—murders, kidnappings—centering on white female victims, but when the same things happen to black women in town, it barely makes the news. (In the exhaustive aftermath that followed Rolling Stone’s discredited story of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, hardly anyone thought to mention that the first rape known to have occurred on the campus was the gang rape of a seventeen-year-old slave.) There is a racial slant in Charlottesville’s policing: consider the department’s stop-and-frisk numbers, or the brutal assault by Alcohol and Beverage Control officers on a man named Martese Johnson, in 2015. And yet, for much of Saturday, as white men carried assault weapons and brandished symbols of catastrophic violence, the police stood by calmly; at one point, they retreated from the fray. In this respect, the spectacle succeeded in proving the ongoing reality of white supremacy in America. The message is sickening and unmistakable. Black demonstrators protesting the murder of teen-agers are met with tanks and riot gear; white demonstrators protesting the unpopularity of Nazi and Confederate ideology are met with politesse. Philando Castile, reaching for his weapons permit, could make a cop so scared that his murder is ruled legal; Richard Spencer gets pepper-sprayed in a nest of armed white supremacists and films himself saying, “I have never been this offended in my life.”
The white supremacists marching in Charlottesville were close to celebrating a hundred-year anniversary. The town’s Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1921: its members put on hoods and burned crosses at midnight at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s sprawling plantation and the site of his grave. “Hundreds of Charlottesville’s leading business and professional men” were in attendance, the Daily Progress, which is still the city’s primary newspaper, wrote at the time. “It is said that the reorganization of the Klan is proceeding rapidly throughout the State, the South, and the Nation.” The K.K.K. made a thousand-dollar donation to the University of Virginia; the school’s president at the time, E. A. Alderman, signed his thank-you note “Faithfully yours.” The belief that America is somehow better than its white-supremacist history is sometimes an excuse masquerading as encouragement, and it’s part of the reason the K.K.K. is back in business. What happened in Charlottesville is less an aberrant travesty in a progressive enclave than it is a reminder of how much evil can be obscured by the appearance of good.
