After Charlottesville, what have we learned?

We were headed out that morning to move our middle son into his grad-school apartment. I sat down briefly to check the news and froze at the first bewildering image — who would try to burn down the Rotunda with tiki torches?

It quickly became apparent that was not the goal.

I had lived four years in Charlottesville and knew the University of Virginia’s Grounds as well as the neighborhood where I’d grown up. Think about the place you have felt safest in your life and then drop dangerous people doing horrible things into its center. Imagine if you live in Cary, and neo-Nazis marched down Walnut Street chanting white supremacist slogans and running people down with cars.

Gather yourself up. Remember to breathe through the disconcerting days, weeks, months that follow.

No, there were not “very fine people on both sides.”

Yes, Confederate statues are about far more than preserving history and honoring the war dead.

Apparently, white supremacist gangs take note and are emboldened when leadership at the national level minimizes black and brown people as less than human, refers to their ancestral homes of origin derogatorily, and, perpetuating one of the great sins of this country, continues to forcibly separate families of color. According to WRAL, the N.C. Department of Public Safety is not sure why hate groups are growing in North Carolina. I have my suspicions.

Charlottesville is not a perfect town, and the University of Virginia is not a perfect college, but they were formative for me. My love and my loyalty are fierce. Short of a loved one being among those killed or injured, I cannot imagine feeling more wrecked than I did a year ago.

I am also a pragmatist. We Virginians love our history. I was working at the newspaper in Norfolk when scientific evidence confirmed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children by Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman whom he owned. People were outraged. His life as a slave holder, to them, was anodyne, but they were appalled by the notion that he would father children with a woman of African descent.

Such reality stares some of us in the face on a daily basis. Blue and gray eyes show up in my husband’s family and my own, most recently in our youngest son. Those genes did not come from Mother Africa. Romanticizing our history does not change our reality.

Hate groups converged on Charlottesville last August after the city decided to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. They came even as there had been pockets of progress in my home state around the historical narrative on race. With much work still to be done, the experiences of enslaved people have increasingly come to be acknowledged in places like Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg, and Montpelier.

In Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, a commission has just completed a study on what to do about Monument Avenue — the downtown boulevard known for statues memorializing Confederate leaders. Among efforts locally, a committee of the NC Historical Commission is currently studying whether Confederate statues on the State Capitol grounds should be relocated.

I will be in Charlottesville this weekend for a visit with my college roommates. The timing is purely coincidental; we will be honoring our friendship where it started 35 years ago. It will be good to be back in a place that still feels like home.

Last year’s attack does not define the city for me, but if nothing is learned from what happened, if the tragedy is compounded by continued acts of racial hostility, then that may well define this nation.

This story was originally published August 7, 2018 at 9:38 AM.