How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town

You have to say something. Your son sees that you’re not taking him to violin, and he knows you are supposed to go. He asked to take lessons, wanting to learn to play like Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Stanley. Your son is eleven with golden skin, and you are his mother, but your skin is dark brown.

Your husband, whose skin runs pale to pink, who has shaggy hair and a sloped English nose, has gone to his studio this Saturday morning to take photographs. His studio sits in downtown Charlottesville, a few blocks from Emancipation Park, where the Unite the Right! protest is slated to take place in the afternoon. At the center of the park, Robert E. Lee’s stone effigy sits high on a horse, no more than a mile from your home.

The protestors began to arrive yesterday from all over the country. They announced themselves with a spectacle of guns, swastikas, Confederate flags mashed up with Klan iconography, and makeshift military garb. At nightfall, they poured onto the University of Virginia campus, an orchestrated pre-demonstration. The images flooded your Facebook feed: droves of angry-looking men held up Tiki torches, their collars arched, their angular faces shiny by that flickering light. They chanted, Jews will not replace us! They chanted, White lives matter! to which you thought, They do. In videos, when counter-protesters arrived, skirmishes broke out. Those fiery poles were brought down with alarming force.

Today, protests are not scheduled to start for hours, but violence is already mounting again. Groups of armed alt-righters parade past stores and restaurants that your family knows well. These men are uniformly white, or rather: pale, and tan, and ruddy. They cover themselves in Klan robes, Nazi regalia, camo, business casual. They carry shields and flags and sticks and canisters of Mace. Too many hold up assault rifles: United, they say. Chests wide with pride, they raise flags that