Book name- CHARLOTTESVILLE: A STORY OF RAGE AND RESISTANCE

Author- Deborah Baker

Published by- Viking

Price- Rs 1,299

Chaos foments around statues of supremacist legends. Two factions come to war. Those who want their present freed from the recurring taunt of such icons’ historic violence; and those who want that history to remain untouched, for what if that violence needs to be adapted to inspire actions against modern grievances like too many immigrants, too much reservation, too many women, too many queers? In The Psychic Lives of Statues, Rahul Rao clarifies that when attacks are launched on statues, especially in the Anglosphere that is littered with figures of colonialists and confederates, they become “salvos in the fight to dismantle white supremacy, not celebrations of its demise”. They are less about affirming, in some militant way, some kind of “regime change” and more about acknowledging how any change has, in reality, failed.

This is precisely the thesis Deborah Baker strives for with her sprawling study of the events that led up to the Unite the Right rally and James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi, ramming his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of Leftist counterprotestors on August 12, 2017. In Charlottesville: A Story of Rage and Resistance, Baker returns to the Virginia city she was born in to retrace the history of race wars that culminated in right-wing violence rearing its head, once again, amidst the election of Donald Trump in his first presidential term. At the nucleus of this war is the statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general during the American Civil War, in the city’s Market Street (formerly Lee) Park, which, as of 2021, has been removed, and, in 2023, melted down.

Vistas overlap in Baker’s Charlottesville. It is an anthropology of Alt-Right chatrooms in America and their resident trolls. It is a history of civic inequities that still plague its current urban planning. It is a lesson on the fragility of civil rights fought for, secured, and undone by vigilantes who are torchbearers of White supremacy. It is a reminder that American history volleys between liberalism and puritanism and anyone who makes a claim upon its must live through its wave of schizoid duality.

Baker’s lucid, accessible, narratorial prose is stuffed with a heady cast ranging from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement to a post-Trayvon Martin America. But it is, unfortunately for itself, undone by its own brilliant ambition. Baker moves relentlessly from one character study to another, leaping from the nefarious right-wing aspirations for a “white ethnostate” by Richard Spencer to the middle-school activism of a young Zyahna Bryant in the wake of Trayvon’s extrajudicial murder, to the rise of Wes Bellamy thwarted by the White supremacist jealousies of a Jason Kessler. The cast is capacious, sneaking up with its compact life histories that jitter the cadence like red herrings. The jarring nonlinearity of Baker’s presentation, a postmodern haphazard recall, is often a typical trauma response (what else can one call it when eight years of an apparently liberal Obama era shifts so gratuitously to public displays of swastikas and issues of the KKK in one’s city of birth?).

A notable aspect of Charlottesville is one of its early reprieves from the dense milieu Baker thrusts the reader into. What is called an interlude and titled “Heart of Whiteness” is a section on John Kasper in which the fascism of Ezra Pound and the antisemitism of T.S. Eliot hang like eerie spectres. This is where Baker shines with pithy, cutting remarks on contemporary White nationalists. She notes how they recruit their agents of ethnic singularity using half-baked Norse emblems and Celtic runes and Buddhist and Hindu symbols.

The irony of such syncretisms of White nationalists is funnelled through Baker’s cinching review of Spencer’s ethos. “For someone who had started life with everything America had to offer,” she writes of both Trump and Spencer, “but for whom that wasn’t enough? I couldn’t imagine a more forsaken existence. Nor a more American one.”

Charlottesville is an impressive, albeit overwhelming, almanack of an America that pauses and rehearses its violence over and over again in its annals. It is an inviting panoptic perspective, letting the world peek into America’s crisis, but also, sometimes, becomes quite provincial with the minutiae of its data and facts.