America’s Dirty Little Secret

America’s dirty little secret is White supremacy. There I said it.

As an African American woman in this country, it’s not safe for me to turn a blind eye to the climate of race relations and civil rights in America. We can no longer afford to pretend that racism isn’t weaved throughout the very fabric of America’s existence, and the march on Charlottesville is huge reason why.

Over the weekend, on the campus of the University of Virginia, we witnessed about a hundred or so white men and women march throughout the sleepy college town a night before their big “Unite the Right” rally. They proudly held up Nazi salutes with one hand and their now famed tiki-torches in the other. They chanted things like “blood and soil,” “you will not replace us,” and “White lives matter,” along with other reported racial epithets. It was like something out of the 1960’s. They confidently, no they angrily paraded throughout the campus and finally stopped under the statue of Robert E. Lee where all hell practically broke loose.

Photo courtesy of Vox.

There was pepper spray and chemical spray used amongst the protesters and counterprotestors…clubs and torches being flung. There were recorded fist fights and beatings. The news swept through Twitter like a wild-fire and took the world by storm. There were responses of sorrow, indifference, fear, anger…you name it, the world expressed it. The one emotion that annoyed me the most was that of surprise. Why are we surprised? Why are we now just getting “woke,” because it’s trendy? These people have lived amongst us, dormant, for decades. If you’re Black, you’ve likely experienced stories of these types of people from your family, friends, and community. They were our “Boogie-Man.”

African Americans have continuously rallied for support against these people for years but it’s almost been as if folks thought we were crying wolf – citing things like Black Lives Matters, Black on Black crime and drug epidemics as the supposed root of the problem. But the internet has ripped off the band-aides and rose colored glasses, and now here we are. These are your teachers, preachers, politicians, cops, doctors, nurses, lawyers, business owners. These wolves hidden in plain sight are the future of America and they hate all people who don’t look like them or represent their beliefs. They are domestic terrorist. You all are finally seeing “post racial” America for what it really is…a hot, disgusting mess.

Photo courtesy of Yahoo.

Writer for Vox, German Lopez, said it best when speaking to the fragility of these self proclaimed “victims” who marched at UVA…

[su_quote cite=”But they’ve seen their racial security challenged. They saw the first black president with Barack Obama. They see demographic statistics that show white Americans will no longer be the majority in the coming decades. They see all of this talk about Black Lives Matter and the importance of diversity, including through policies like affirmative action. They see recent moves to tear down Confederate monuments in the South. And they themselves may have been accused of racism at some point in their lives, perhaps after they raised concerns about any of these issues.”][/su_quote]

These folks are mad because they will one day no longer hold the majority of this country. So on Friday, August 11th, 2017, the pot officially boiled over .

Photo courtesy of Slate.

The next day, hundreds more of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members met for part two of their rally but something was a little different. The news had spread about the evening before and a larger group of counterprotesters and media outlets joined. It all ended with a fatal car crash killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer with 19 other people injured. The driver was 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio.

Photo courtesy of CNN.

There is still fallout happening after this whole debacle. The President made a statement that was actually applauded by the likes of David Duke, there’s been more criticism of the police, two officers actually died in route to the rally, the Republican party is scrambling, Deandre Harris has been talking about his beating, and the public is just stunned. It’s all so amazing to see unfold, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s insane, and all I can feel is interchangeable sadness and numbness. Most embarrassingly, the world is watching. Our dirty little secret, is secret no more. It’s just dirty.

Time to clean house. <3

-D.Wright