The recent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in multiple injuries, and the death of thirty-two-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer, and it brought home to many Americans the deep divisions which currently exist in the country.  While the subsequent showing against white nationalists was swift and massive (a similar rally in Boston the following weekend resulted in tens of thousands of counter-protesters compared to a mere handful of white nationalists), in a country where many people have parents or grandparents who fought against the Nazis in World War II, the sight of Americans (mostly young, white males) marching through the streets with swastikas while chanting Nazi slogans was something they did not believe they would ever see on their own soil.  “This is not my country,” was a sentiment widely expressed in response to the rally and the carnage that ensued. “This is not America.” 

The rally in Charlottesville was allegedly organized as a protest against the removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee, and in the days and weeks that followed, a national debate broke out over similar confederate statues across the country.  Some, like those in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, were removed quietly in the night while others were scheduled for relocation to private cemeteries. But while an exact count is yet to be determined, the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified over 1500 Confederate symbols currently standing in public spaces.  And though most of these symbols and statues are in the South, they are by no means confined to that area.  Up until recently, a fountain memorializing the Confederacy could be found in Helena, Montana, an unlikely location for such a monument considering that Montana gained statehood nearly a quarter-of-a-century after the end of the Civil War (the fountain was removed following the events in Charlottesville). 

There are those who believe that the removal of such statues and monuments “sanitizes” American history, and President Trump declared the “removal of our beautiful statues and monuments” to be “foolish” and “sad.”  Many have argued that statues have little to do with history or people’s capacity to understand and remember it.  There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Germany, after all, and this has not hindered the collective memory of who he was or what he did. 

While this debate over the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces is both relevant and revealing (I will admit that up until recently I had no idea how many of these monuments existed), it is nevertheless derivative of a far deeper issue, the mere tip of the iceberg.  Anyone who has seen footage of the rally in Charlottesville is well aware that those marching with torches that night (many of them heavily armed) were not motivated by their love for a bronze rendering of a general who, more than a 150 years ago, lost a war.  What we saw in that footage was an expression of hate and violence, of racism and anti-Semitism that has throughout recent history lurked in the underbelly of our society but rarely dared to show its face so brazenly in public.  To witness this kind of hatred and racism bared outright was, for so many of us, shocking and sickening and deeply, deeply scary. 

It was also, potentially, the catalyst for a much-needed and long-overdue reckoning. 

The author, scholar, and research professor, Brené Brown, whose work in the field of social sciences has focused on vulnerability, courage, shame, and empathy, advises that for true healing from past trauma to occur we must “own” our story. In a statement regarding the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Brown explained that while we each have our own individual story about our own individual past, we also have a collective story.  “Our collective story in the United States,” Brown said, “is a story of white supremacy.”  And while there are plenty of people in America (particularly people of color) who live every day with the reality of this story, there are many who have but a vague awareness of it, who would rather not think about it or look at it or get involved in difficult conversations about it.  The near-total genocide of the Native Americans, the horrors of slavery—atrocities upon which the United States was founded and through which it grew and prospered—are, as far as many are concerned, confined to the past, irrelevant to anything that’s happening today.  But in the wake of Charlottesville, that disavowal is harder to sustain. 

If we don’t own our story, Brown says, our story owns us.  And we will continue to suffer because of it.  Though doing so may be painful, by owning our story, we empower ourselves to write the ending.  The events in Charlottesville were not the first to serve as a wake-up call.  Racism in America is as old as America itself, and it will continue to contaminate the well from which we all must drink unless we, as a country, are willing to face it, to own it, to atone for it, and to fight against it with everything we have. 

The impulse to cover our eyes in horror and grief may be powerful, but it is this very impulse to look away which has thus far allowed these poisons to persist.  For many Americans, the pervasiveness of white supremacy in this country is not unlike the pervasiveness of those Confederate statues, which should have been removed long ago, which should, in fact, have never been erected in the first place.  Now that we are newly awakened to their presence and their quantity and the malignancy they represent, we need to take a long, hard look at them.  We need to have conversations about how they came to be and how they came to last so long.  And then we need to wipe them off the face of this country and replace them with monuments not to those who have divided us, but to those who have endeavored to unite us.  The time has come to look plainly and purposely at who we are and where we live, to say out loud, “This is my country.  This has always been America,” and then to commit fearlessly and ferociously to changing it into the country it has such glorious potential to someday be.