White Supremacy Didn’t Kill Heather Heyer; White Complacency Did
Note: This story originally appeared on my blog in August, 2017.
On Saturday, thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed at a counterprotest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia when a white supremacist drove his car through a crowd of people, injuring nineteen others. According to her mother and several others who knew her, Heyer, a paralegal, was an outspoken advocate for social justice.
What many people seem not to understand is that Heather Heyer wasn’t killed by a white supremacist. Yes, that deranged young man did subscribe to racist beliefs and he was the one driving the car that hit Heyer. However, the driver, a twenty-year-old man from Ohio, did those things during a retrenchment of white male supremacy in the United States, a retrenchment that has resulted in an uptick in hate crimes and a resurgence of hate groups. No, Heyer was killed by white complacency over the increasing levels of racial hatred.
Unlike Heyer and her fellow counterprotesters, many white people in America spend much of their lives insulated from racism and, consequently, fall into the trap of thinking that it’s not their problem to solve. While happy to pay lip service to the anti-racism cause and racial diversity, these white people do virtually nothing to actually assist it.
Heyer’s death is tragic. But what the people who are decrying Heyer’s murder are seeming not to understand is that their failure to take action when white supremacists intentionally targeted people of color for violence more or less guaranteed that a white ally to the cause would eventually be killed.
Until all white people acknowledge the fact that they directly or indirectly benefit from racism and white supremacy and until all white people acknowledge that the eradication of white supremacy is their responsibility, activists like Heather Heyer will continue to be slain.
