Take the skinhead to the woodshed...

What I Saw in Charlottesville Could Be Just the Beginning

How a decade of war zone diplomacy taught me the danger of enabling a cycle of hate.

By BRENNAN GILMORE

In Charlottesville on Saturday, I witnessed a brutal, calculated act of terror. A young man fueled by hatred drove into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the white supremacist groups that marched through our streets carrying lit torches and armed with assault weapons. As one life has been taken, and many more injured, I am grappling with the fact that the violence was deeply familiar—and should not have been surprising.

I spent most of the last 15 years representing the United States as a Foreign Service officer, primarily in conflict zones of Africa. I have been in dangerous situations before, and I have felt the eeriness of a usually peaceful city succumbing to racial violence.

Nothing I experienced overseas, however, prepared me to witness it happen in Virginia. I grew up in Lexington, a small town about an hour away from Saturday’s protests, attended the University of Virginia, and I now live in Charlottesville. When I was in the Foreign Service, I would return to my Virginia home and joke that it was “back to the Shire after adventures in Mordor.”

It turns out the joke was on me.

The turmoil began in the morning, when I joined a group protesting the white supremacists who were ostensibly demonstrating against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. But after hours of protests had produced multiple rounds of fights between the two sides, pepper spray attacks by the Nazis and eventually a declaration of a state of emergency by Gov. Terry MacAuliffe, the crowds dispersed and I walked with two friends down a narrow side street, thinking the worst was over. A group of anti-racist protesters, in a celebratory mood following what we hoped would be the expulsion of violent hate groups from our town, made their way up the street in the opposite direction, arms touching arms, carrying banners and chanting slogans. As I filmed them walk marching up the street, I suddenly heard the squeal of tires and an engine revving. Whipping around, I saw a car barreling towards the crowd, their faces stricken in terror. That’s when I had the heart-stopping realization that the day was about to get much worse.

What we witnessed Saturday was the terrifying but logical outcome of our escalating, toxic politics of hate. I’ve seen it happen before. Serving in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2012, I saw political leaders use hatred and “othering” as instruments to gain political power. As a result, within months, Christians and Muslims, peaceful neighbors for decades, turned against each other. I saw the same thing happen when I served in Burundi, where Hutus and Tutsis made giant strides towards reconciliation after a horrifying history of mass atrocities, only to be manipulated, divided and turned against one another yet again.

America is not Africa. But watching this past election cycle in the U.S., my stomach churned as I saw some of these themes repeating themselves. Looking back now, I can see it was leading toward a cycle of conflict that, once started, is hard to break.

Many Americans like to think that this kind of thing can’t happen here—that American exceptionalism immunizes us from the virulent racism and tribalism that tear apart other countries far, far away. But we’re more susceptible than we’d like to think.

Communities of color know this well. They have lived with the intrinsic, gut-wrenching understanding of racial violence since, well, our country’s founding. The Virginia I grew up loving and the America I spent my career defending abroad have always been capable of both tremendous good and terrible evil. Virginia was the birthplace of American democracy, but it was also the capital of the Confederacy. There are people still living in Charlottesville who remember when the city chose to close all of its public schools rather than integrate, and when the schools finally reopened, they remember walking through the doors of Charlottesville High School while angry crowds yelled, “Nigger, go home.” In this state alone, 44 black men were lynched between 1877 and 1950, often at the hands of some of the same groups that marched through Charlottesville on Saturday.

For more than a decade, elected officials on the right have been flirting dangerously with these forces. They have tolerated and even embraced a movement to undermine our first black president by questioning whether he was born in America. They have implied that our economic problems are primarily caused by immigrants. They have also failed to vigorously denounce white supremacist groups. Tom Garrett, the congressman who represents Charlottesville, has met with Jason Kessler, who organized the white supremacist event. Corey Stewart, now a Republican candidate for Senate, almost won the Republican primary for governor by running a campaign that might best be characterized as pro-Confederacy.

As a result of this decades-long flirtation, we now have a president who has emboldened white supremacists. Many of the marchers I saw on Saturday wore “Make America Great Again” hats, and the KKK leader David Duke forthrightly said the purpose of the rally was to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” If Trump doesn’t want this kind of support, he needs to say so.

Some may say that what happened in Charlottesville was not a big deal because it was a relatively small-scale event. And that’s true: Of all the race-based terrorist attacks in recent history, it was neither the largest nor did it produce the highest casualty count. After witnessing Nazis, self-declared militias, and “private security forces” carrying assault rifles alongside state and local police (thanks to Virginia’s permissive gun laws), I can honestly say it could have been tragically worse.

But just because the white supremacists numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands, doesn’t mean the movement can’t quickly spiral out of control. As I saw in Sierra Leone, a small group of terrorists, in the right toxic environment, and with the right powerful enablers, can unleash unspeakable violence that can swallow an entire country.

It has been incredibly valuable for prominent Republicans to denounce this hate in absolute terms, a good example of moral leadership that can staunch the mainstreaming of hate. But the president’s refusal to specifically denounce the groups responsible for the violence, instead blaming it on “many sides,” is the kind of enabling that I have seen turn other countries into bloody warzones.

This violence will continue unless we commit universally to condemning and standing against it. I am confident that most of my neighbors in Virginia and the majority of my fellow Americans know that the side marching through my town carrying lit torches and assault weapons, mowing down peaceful anti-racist protestors, and espousing an ideology of hatred and bigotry, is wrong. But it takes more than just knowing. If Americans want the violence to end, we need to actively oppose those who seek to divide us along racial lines and demand that our leaders do the same.

In his book on the neurological bases of the good and bad of human behavior, the biologist Robert Sapolsky emphasizes that it is fundamental human psychology to create an “us” and a “them.” But, he writes, “If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a non-trivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels.”

That’s our charge. Whether it is in Bujumbura or Charlottesville, we all must be on the side of the angels.