I remember seeing those grainy photographs with a sense of bewilderment. I was a young child entering my preteen years, flipping through chapters and quizzes of my American history textbook. In one photo, I saw people adorned in white garbs with pointed hats and cutouts for eyes, waving flags as they marched. In the other photo, I saw a house ablaze; victim of arson. We learned about the fight for civil rights and violent racism that grappled our country generations before our time. These were the bad guys; the KKK; and they wanted America to be white-only. As we learned about their ideologies and terrorizing actions, I surveyed the black and white photos for reason. My understanding of racism at the time was obfuscated by youth, and I didn’t understand why or how that could happen in my country. I looked at the photos as relics of the past, another dark and shameful chapter in American history closed, existing in perpetuity only in textbooks.
I remember standing in the street with hundreds of other Seattle neighbors across City Hall a few months ago. There was a white supremacist rally that day, with organizers attempting to mobilize the small crowd of white people from the region who felt that their values were under attack by a multiracial society—a crowd galvanized by the presidential administration. I stood on the other side of the police-guarded barricade with the counter protest, this one without any incidents of violence, drowning out their hate with a vociferous cacophony of love, acceptance, and solidarity. We carried banners, we blared horns, and we shouted “No Trump! No KKK, no fascist U.S.A.!” I looked across the divide at a white man taunting our counter protest, grabbing his crotch, pointing his finger at us, beating his chest, straining his neck as he screamed. His words were inaudible, but his message was clear. I remember looking at his face—at all the faces on the other side, some in their retirement years, others just teenagers. It has never been comfortable to look into the eyes of such raw and explicit racism, and there it was—there they were, pointing at us, shouting at us.
I remember seeing photos from Charlottesville for the first time this past weekend; white men marching with tiki torches, car plowing down the street, bodies contorted in anger and dissent. Unlike the ones in that childhood textbook, these were in vivid colors and high resolution. There is no excuse for what happened; no reconciling such egregious terrorism. It never went away—the insidious whiteness, the hatred, the racism—and it made its way to the pinnacle of our government that fails to condemn it, rather giving it an undeserving platform. White supremacy is lethal. Denying only emboldens; silence kills. We must not keep silent about this. And we must learn to love, not hate.