letter to the editor
By Friday morning, I had finished my column for the Welcome Week edition of Technician. My final edits had been made on the piece and I was about to click send to shoot it over to my editors so that they could begin the publishing process. Then the horrific events in Charlottesville happened and I had to throw my entire column out the window.
The original piece told the story of a conversation I’d had with a tow truck driver who had expressed a lot of radical views to me when my car had broken down a week ago. Throughout the whole conversation, we had both remained composed and attentive of each other’s viewpoints, and so the piece had voiced my belief that having conversations with those holding radical views is the best way to help slowly change those viewpoints.
I had long believed that holding genuine, attentive conversations with radicalistic personalities could somehow affect these personalities and bring them into a less harmful, more middle-ground view — that talking with them could help them see the wrongs of their ways and lead them to reject those ways. But Charlottesville taught me one big lesson: I was wrong.
I was wrong to believe that holding conversations with people articulating radical viewpoints could help them see the wrongs of their views because this action accomplishes, in fact, the complete opposite. Holding conversations with the white supremacist, neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville wouldn’t have helped dismantle their beliefs, it only would have propped them up. Holding conversations with them only legitimizes their radical beliefs, telling the world that their beliefs are sane enough that people are willing to talk to them about those beliefs.
I was wrong to believe that compassionate listening and honest conversation could actually do something to topple the abominable white supremacist movement that’s still rearing its head across America today. I apologize for that.
Today, then, I am met with this truth that took me far too long to realize and I find myself asking if not that, then what? If conversations, I now see, fail to help dismantle white supremacy, then what instead can accomplish this tiring, but vital task? And so I turn to people far wiser than myself who have come before me. To the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Gautama Buddha who all preached love.
As we all embark on another year on this campus together, a campus, like every other college campus around the country, that has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight from the events this weekend we must remember one long-known truth. We must meet radicalism with compassion, white supremacy with kindness, and neo-Nazi ideals with love.
Love those who are the target of this vile hate speech, fight with them and let your collective voice drown out all others. A collective campus, united against hate can be the only response to white supremacy and perhaps the only way we can all begin to dismantle it.
It is, of course, hard for me to ask this of our campus when I am not the one who the hatred is directed toward. I can walk through these protests and not fear for my life, not be spit on and not have racial slurs hurled in my direction. But perhaps my realization of my erroneous thinking can become a small lesson, among the many thousands that are needed, to help cast white supremacy to the ranks of oblivion.
Creating conversation, I’ve now painfully learned, can never work, but having compassion and showing love in the face of hatred might just bring more light to a world that’s still embarrassingly overcast.