We Can't Resist What We Refuse To Acknowledge

This week both Charlottesville and Albemarle High Schools were the target of online threats.  Parents were notified that the schools were taking precautions to keep our kids safe.  A spokeswoman for the city schools, "acknowledge[d] and condemn[ed] the fact that this threat was racially charged."  "Racially charged" does not begin to capture the truly heinous nature of the threat.

I submitted the following letter to the editor's of our local paper, The Daily Progress:

Whenever someone says, “Black Lives Matter!” you hear, “shouldn’t that be ‘all lives matter’?”  Yes … void of any context.  Yet we do not live in a world that is void of context.  This is a world where black and brown lives have regularly been, and are still, treated as mattering far less than the lives of those who identify as white.  “Race-neutral” and “color blind” ideals obscure the very real inequities still present in our so-called “post-racial” nation.  Yet simply choosing to pretend there is no monster under the bed doesn’t mean there is no monster.  It just allows me to feel safe beneath my covers, while allowing the monster unfettered freedom to do as it likes.

Parents were recently alerted to an online threat made against Charlottesville High School.  School officials wanted to assure all of us that they and the police took seriously their responsibility to keep all of our children safe.  What they did not want us all to know was that this wasn’t a threat of random violence, but violence directed specifically at children of color.  The anonymous poster was very specific, describing their intent as “ethnic cleansing,” using ugly racial slurs to describe the African American and Latinx students who would be their targets.  “If you white … you better stay home,” the post said. 

What was gained by the “whitewashing” of this pointedly racial threat?  Only the comfort of white folk in Charlottesville who want to keep saying that “all children matter,” so we can continue refusing to recognize the ugly reality that some of our children are treated as if they matter more.  Meanwhile, those African American and Latinx students and their families are left wondering if anyone really cares that they were the ones being threated, and only because of the color of their skin.  When those of us who are white refuse to affirm the racist nature of such a threat, we also refuse to affirm the importance of those who were being threatened.  That’s why we need to keep saying, “black lives matter” … until they do.

Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom

The signs outside and inside the congregation I serve have been up for years, and I hope will remain up until they are no longer needed reminders.

P.S. -- I am pleased to report that The Daily Progress is now reporting that arrests have been made in both cases, and are noting that the threat in the Charlottesville High case described "ethnic cleansing."  I believe that the point of my letter remains valid and worth saying.

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