Angry white men holding tiki torches and shouting their throats raw chanting “blood and soil,” spittle hanging from their lips. Angry white men, arms outstretched in the Nazi salute. Angry white men playing soldier, heavily armed in public. Nazi flags, Confederate flags, American flags, “Make America Great Again” hats. Bodies clashing. A slate-gray car barreling into people standing up to racism. Bodies flying.
For the past week, I have seen hate thriving in plain sight. I am disgusted. I am angry. I am worried. And I keep thinking about how different things would be if Hillary Clinton had been elected president. I was, like so many of us, wildly overconfident about her chances. Her presidency was a certainty in my mind and in my heart. And then, it wasn’t.
Instead, it is 2017 and white supremacists no longer feel the need to wear hoods to hide their racism and anti-Semitism. I am a black woman and I live in a country where the president does not disavow racism. It is 2017 and we are having a national conversation about the resurgence of white supremacy, American Nazism and fascism, or perhaps more accurately, we are being reminded that this hatred has been here all along.
Throughout the 2016 election, I did not do as much as I could have done to support Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid. I contributed money to the campaign, but I didn’t volunteer or try to get out the vote.
Of all the men and women running for president, I found her to be the most qualified, comprehensive in her understanding of domestic and foreign policy, progressive and charismatic. I wanted to write about her and engage rigorously with her ideas far more than I did. But I didn’t. In part, I did not have the energy to deal with the inevitable backlash, from corners right and left. In part, I was trying to understand the popularity of Bernie Sanders because so many people I respect supported him and his ideas. And of course, there was that overconfidence, which, in hindsight, I am ashamed of. Nothing should be taken for granted in a democracy.
I don’t think that I, as an individual, could have swayed the election in a meaningful way but I know I could have done so much more and I did not. I hold myself accountable for that. I am increasingly concerned with accountability because our country is being led by a man who believes he is accountable only to himself and enriching his coffers rather than the more than 300 million people he was so narrowly elected to lead and serve.
It pains me to think about what could have been. It is even more difficult to face the way things are. Every single morning, I am tense as I check the news, wondering what the president has tweeted overnight. Throughout the day, my shoulders tense when I see a news alert about his latest misstep or his latest provocation to North Korea or his latest insult to the media whose adulation he so desperately craves.
Between the election and the inauguration, I tried to imagine what a Trump presidency would look like. I tried to prepare for the worst. What has unfolded over the past seven months is far more terrible than I could have imagined. Advances made during the Obama era are being dismantled. I tell myself to remain hopeful but struggle to find a reason. And then I struggle to remind myself that despair is a luxury we cannot afford right now.
A week ago in Charlottesville, Va., white men assembled to rage for a world long lost — one where their mediocrity was good enough. These were men emboldened by a president who shares their odious beliefs.
I’ve watched in horror as they’ve been energized by his campaign and his presidency. It’s possible that hate like this would have been on the rise anyway, given eight years of the Obama presidency and, animus toward Hillary Clinton. But now we don’t have hate on the fringe; we have it reinforced in the White House.
Most politicians, of all political persuasions, have released statements condemning racism and the violence in Charlottesville, violence that ended in the death of one person, Heather Heyer, and the injuring of many others. Even if these statements are political posturing, they must be made. Our leaders need to make crystal clear where they stand. Now, more than ever, everyone needs to be unequivocal about where they stand.
Unfortunately, far too many people are being equivocal, including, most alarmingly, the president. In the days following the Charlottesville unrest, we have seen Mr. Trump reluctant to disavow white supremacy. The president resents that he, as the leader of the United States, is rightly expected to condemn hateful acts and ideas. Mr. Trump and far too many others believe there is more than one side to the story of Charlottesville. The president thinks that leftist resistance is as culpable as far-right white supremacy. He has lamented the removal of Confederate statues, tweeting that it is “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” as if books and museums do not exist.
When you look at the sum of his behavior, it’s obvious that Mr. Trump is actually not equivocating. He is actively demonstrating that his loyalties lie with only some of the American people.
There are other forms of equivocating. Back in November, pundits began attributing Mr. Trump’s win to “economic anxiety,” because they were unwilling to face the blatant racism that fueled his popularity. Look where that thinking has brought us. Everyone who says, “This is not America” or “This is not us” is being willfully ignorant of both the past and the present. We all need to acknowledge that yes, this is indeed us, the very worst of us. There are people who think it is a problem that the white supremacists from Charlottesville are being publicly identified and fired from their jobs, as if those who would eradicate all of us who are not Aryan deserve empathy. They do not. A white newscaster cries because talking about race makes her uncomfortable because discomfort is most likely the worst thing she can imagine.
We cannot afford to delude ourselves about the state of things. We cannot mollify ourselves with some ideal of neutrality or objectivity as if white supremacy deserves anything but resounding contempt. Taking down Confederate statues is a symbolic but necessary gesture, but we cannot merely dismantle these markers of America’s painful past. We must work to dismantle the pernicious ideologies these statues represent. We must root out white supremacy, wherever it lurks, and call it by its name even when it makes us uncomfortable, even when the people we are calling out are those we live and work with, or consider friends and family.
We are on a precipice. What happened in Charlottesville is not the end of something but, rather, the beginning. And it is from this precipice that I am reminded of everything I did not do during the 2016 election. Hindsight reminds me that resistance must be active, and constant. Resistance is the responsibility of everyone who believes in equality and demands the eradication of racism, anti-Semitism and the hatred that empowers bigots to show their truest selves in broad daylight. I am reminding myself that I should never allow my fears to quiet me. I have a voice and I am going to use it, as loudly as I can.
