The other night, as I was thinking about ideas for an article to write this week, I began watching the VICE documentary on what occurred in Chartlottesville earlier in the week. I couldn’t help but take notes as I continued to watch in shock and disgust as a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis paraded through the streets of Virginia while waving Confederate flags decorated with swastikas. But while I sat in my bed for twenty-two minutes watching white men and women whine about their lives, all I could think about was how easy it is for me to realize my privilege as a white person.
I am sixteen years old and I acknowledge my privilege, meanwhile people with graying hair have dedicated their whole lives to pretending that they’re being unfairly discriminated against. Newsflash: You’re not.
Since this seems to be too much for people to sink in, I’m going to do my best to make this simple by providing a short list of facts:
- Europeans stole the country from the Native Americans to begin with, therefore nobody “stole our country from us”. (Shocking, I know.)
- According to a report from The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, from 2008 to 2016, Far-right plots and attacks outnumbered Islamist incidents by nearly 2 to 1. (No, I’m not making this up, just Google it.)
Now I know that if any person with alt-right beliefs is reading this, those facts alone were enough to make them click off and type up poorly-worded death threats in my Twitter mentions, but if you passed middle school Social Studies, these things shouldn’t be so hard to decipher.
I would also like to take a minute to discuss the people who have taken it upon themselves to tell people of color not to fight back with violence, but with love. Take a step back and think of the Holocaust, you know, that time where Nazis were taking Jewish people, gypsies, homosexuals and many others from their homes simply because they were different? Well those disgusting humans, Nazis, were eventually defeated by many countries in what we call World War II. So in my mind, somebody saying that we should use love to fight back against literal Nazis is a little mind-boggling to me after learning about the Holocaust three years in a row at school.
Now I’m not saying that they aren’t allowed to voice their opinions; clearly our country is very lenient about the first amendment and who gets to use it as an excuse right now. I’m just saying we’re going to need a whole lot more than love and prayer circles to help. It is sad that the topic of Nazis is controversial, but that’s the world we’re living in right now and it is up to us to do something about it in order to save our generation and future generations.
