About 2,000 people were estimated to have attended the Charlottesville Gathers rally Saturday at IX Art Park.
Photo Ryan Jones
More than a million people showed up at Women’s March demonstrations Saturday in all 50 states, according to the New York Times, and that’s not counting the rallies in London, Paris, Berlin—and even Antarctica—in what was the largest public rebuff of a newly elected president ever. More than 500,000 flooded into Washington, the AP reports, and Charlottesvillians joined in the post-inaugural protest both here and in the nation’s capital.
At least 25 buses carrying 1,500 locals left Charlottesville early January 21, estimated Cynthia Neff, who was shepherding eight buses. And many others drove their own cars or took Amtrak to Washington. [Read Elizabeth Derby’s report of the march here.]
For those who couldn’t journey to the nation’s capital, a rally at IX Art Park drew at least 2,000, according to IX manager Brian Wimer, who said it was the largest crowd he’d ever seen there.
Mobility is an issue for Charlottesville Gathers organizer Gail Hyder Wiley that made a march in Washington difficult, and she wanted to do something to help those participate who couldn’t manage the D.C. trip. She was put in touch with collaborator Jill Williams, who had an idea to reach out to middle and high school students.
The multi-faceted event at IX from 9am to 1pm “totally exceeded my expectations,” says Wiley. “I think it showed Charlottesville at its best.”
The biggest problem was having to turn away people from UVA Women’s Center’s Claire Kaplan’s talk about active bystander intervention. The 300 spaces indoors “filled up much sooner than we expected,” says Wiley.
Jill York and Richmonder Woodie Sprinkel were many of the pussy hat wearers at the local rally in support of the Women’s March. Staff photo
Woodie Sprinkel traveled from Richmond to join her friend Jill York in Charlottesville because an issue with her leg made that easier than a trek to Washington. They joined the pink pussy power hat-wearing, sign-carrying crowd at IX.
“The future is nasty, the future is female,” said one sign. “This pussy grabs back,” read another, echoing a theme among the demonstrators stemming from Donald Trump’s boasts that he could grab female genitalia with impunity.
Mother Cipo Copity Sotelo and daughter Ayesha Gaona-Sotelo stood up for immigrants. Photo Ryan Jones
Cipo Copity Sotelo carried a sign that said, “Immigrants make America great” and also touched on climate change and women’s rights. She’s a journalist from Mexico who immigrated here “because they’re killing journalists in Mexico,” she said. She was joined by her daughter, Ayesha Gaona-Sotelo, who said, “I want to grow up in a country where we’re all equal, free and have civil rights.”
Juliet Trail and Laura Lee Gulledge decided to march in Charlottesville rather than Washington. Staff photo
Laura Lee Gulledge had thought about going to Washington. But she brought her “Girls just want to have fun-ding for Planned Parenthood” sign to IX instead with her friend Juliet Trail.
“We just needed to show up,” said Trail. “People are marching all over the country and we wanted to be a part of that.”
Charlottesville’s march circled the Ix property. Photo Ryan Jones
“It was magical,” says Wiley. And she says it’s not the last we’ll hear from Charlottesville Gathers—at least once she recovers from Saturday’s event.
Women's March on Washington events kick off near the U.S. Capitol on Saturday.
Photo Martin Falbisoner
Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the United States’ 45th president today, and hundreds of Charlottesvillians are heading to D.C., not to celebrate his inauguration but to protest it on Saturday at the Women’s March on Washington.
Cynthia Neff is organizing eight buses, and she estimates there are at least 25 buses leaving Charlottesville carrying around 1,500 people—a number that doesn’t include locals who are driving up or taking the train.
Neff’s eight buses were paid for by three local women and those rides are free. “We wanted to open it up to people who might otherwise not be able to afford to go,” she says. Demand for the 426 seats has been high, and Neff has a waiting list. “It’s been like herding cats,” she says.
The buses will roll out from the Albemarle County Office Building at 6am and park at RFK Stadium. From there, Neff has purchased Metro passes to hand out to riders to get to the Mall, where the program begins at 10am near the U.S. Capitol, with a march to the Ellipse at 1:15pm. She hopes to have all of her riders back at the buses to head home at 6:30pm.
Organizers of the march have a permit for 200,000, but D.C. officials are planning for as many as 500,000, according to WTOP. Neff anticipates there may not be cell phone coverage once in Washington, so she’s had signs made that say “Charlottesville Women’s March on Washington” to help participants find each other.
Protesters are being advised that no sticks or backpacks are allowed on the Mall, and some are seeking out clear totes. Neff was headed to Costco Thursday to stock up on power bars so no one starves if the food trucks are difficult to access.
Neff says Rally, an organization that provides transportation to events, has 10 buses that will be leaving from Charlottesville, as well as buses from Staunton, Afton and Waynesboro.
And other locals have buses. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church has two buses carrying 110 people, according to Christina Rivera. The Unitarian Universalist church has a social justice arm called Standing on the Side of Love, and some of the riders will be wearing those T-shirts and carrying banners with that message, says Rivera.
Julie Christopher started out thinking a small van would work and ended up renting a bus that holds 32.
Like many of those going, Christopher was disturbed at the tone of the election and wanted to celebrate this country’s diversity. “Women and minorities in particular were talked about in degrading and humiliating ways,” she says.
Florence Buchholz has 47 people signed up for her bus, which filled up in 24 hours. “After the election, I was very unhappy,” she says. “I felt undervalued as a woman. The next day I rented a bus.”
She says she’ll be taking a lot of people who have never gone to Washington to protest before. And they’ll be wearing pink pussycat hats.
For some people like Gail Hyder Wiley, mobility is an issue that made a march in Washington difficult, and she wanted to do something to help those participate who couldn’t go. At IX Art Park, where her rally to support the women’s march will take place, she was put in touch with collaborator Jill Williams, who had an idea to reach out to middle and high school students.
The multi-faceted event from 9am to 1pm tomorrow has speakers—UVA Women’s Center’s Claire Kaplan will talk about active bystander intervention—and music, including the Love Army Ukulele Brigade.
“There was a real incentive to me to do a rally, to do something more than a protest,” says Wiley. “This is not a protest event.”
And the community response has been “breathtaking,” she says. “It’s an amazing experience to see Charlottesville turn out in all its glory.”
Although Charlottesville has declared itself a Welcoming City, undocumented immigrants remain fearful of being deported from their new home, and others work behind the scenes to help them. Staff photo
The first time Maria’s husband was ticketed for driving without a license was after being stopped because of a broken taillight. The second instance occurred after he hit a deer.
Both Maria and her husband are undocumented immigrants living in Charlottesville. They settled here after fleeing their native El Salvador due to a civil war and the accompanying wave of gang violence that threatened their family’s lives.
In Charlottesville and Albemarle County, undocumented immigrants most often run into trouble with local governments over their lack of driver’s licenses. Absent a birth certificate, even the most competent driver cannot obtain a driver’s license in Virginia. This turns any minor traffic infraction into a potentially life-ruining event.
“I am always very scared, I live in fear every day,” says Maria. “Every day we leave the house, we don’t know what could happen.”
We all know Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States January 20. But since he was elected as president in an Electoral College win over Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory, communities across America have been divided by how best to protect their immigrant populations. During his campaign, Trump promised to round up undocumented immigrants and block Muslims from entering the country in a manner that Eva Schloss, stepsister of Anne Frank, compared in Newsweek to Adolf Hitler’s purge of Jews from Germany.
One often-discussed option is the idea of becoming a sanctuary city. Sanctuary cities officially declare their refusal to gather information about the immigration status of people through traffic stops and other routine interactions between civilians and city employees. But Trump has pledged to cut off all federal funding to communities that become sanctuary cities. What would this mean for Charlottesville?
According to Charlottesville City Treasurer Jason Vandever, in fiscal year 2015 the city received $24,083,689 from the federal government, “both directly and passed through state agencies.” Roughly $10,532,325 was provided by the Department of Transportation alone. The Department of Agriculture contributed $2,712,498 for food assistance, including the school lunch program. And millions more are provided by the Department of Education, including $100,000 for adult English literacy and civics education intended to prepare immigrants for naturalization.
No president of the United States has the sole authority to suspend allocation of money previously budgeted by Congress to municipalities, including Charlottesville. But Trump has nevertheless insisted he will do this. With his party in control of majorities in the House and Senate and an anticipated majority on the Supreme Court, it isn’t clear that any legal violations by the administration would be met with consequences.
Maria taught math and physics in El Salvador, but her certification as a teacher, and as a competent driver, is not recognized in America. Here, she cleans houses. And she takes the bus everywhere because she is afraid of what might eventually happen if she drives a car.
If her husband is stopped a third time and charged for driving without a license, he will be taken to jail, and his immigration status could automatically be shared with federal authorities. That can result in being deported.
The means of deportation after arrest for driving without a license would typically be an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainer. When a prisoner is about to be released from jail (after bail has been paid or the charges have been dismissed), federal immigration authorities are notified that an undocumented immigrant is being held in jail and will be out on a particular date.
Representatives of the Charlottesville and Albemarle County police departments have expressed in community workshops with Sin Barreras, a local nonprofit that provides services to undocumented immigrants in the Charlottesville community, that they do not want their officers to inquire as to the immigration status of people they come in contact with. But in practice, this unofficial policy has not always been followed.
“We know from the Hispanic community…there are officers who do not follow those informal policies and do ask immigration [questions] even though perhaps they shouldn’t,” says Frank Sullivan, a Sin Barreras board member. “We think it’s important, and we would encourage the city of Charlottesville, city managers and Board of Supervisors of Albemarle County that this will be a welcoming city, such as Santa Fe, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where police have a policy not to ask immigration questions.”
Some of these cities, including Santa Fe and New York, have been unabashed about declaring themselves sanctuary cities. But these are cities in states that do not have Virginia’s Dillon Rule, a set of legal precedents that prevents Virginia municipalities from passing laws other than those from a set of options presented by the commonwealth’s government. New York City can levy an income tax, or nearly any other source of revenue it wishes, to compensate for lost federal or state income. Charlottesville cannot.
Undocumented issues
Sin Barreras was created five years ago and operated until 2016 as an all-volunteer organization (it now has one part-time paid staffer). In its tiny office on the second floor of the Jefferson School City Center, its members advise immigrants about legal matters, access to health care and any issues they have while trying to adjust to life in an unfamiliar country with a government they find difficult to understand. It is the only organization in Charlottesville devoted primarily to assisting undocumented immigrants—in 2015 Sin Barreras responded to 1,600 phone calls, including emergency calls late in the evening.
One call was from a Mexican woman who explained through tears that her son was taken from a court appearance directly to jail and she didn’t know where he was. The nonprofit used its contacts with the police to locate him, and assured the mother her son was well and would be home in four days. And the group has helped more than 200 people who were brought to the U.S. as children receive DACA status, a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit, through an Obama administration policy.
But the group’s No. 1 issue is undocumented immigrants’ lack of access to Virginia driver’s licenses. The commonwealth does not issue licenses to undocumented immigrants, even if they can pass a driving test and provide proof of identity through documents such as birth certificates, passports or driver’s licenses from their home countries. The lack of a driver’s license means that a bad bulb in a taillight or a missed turn signal can suddenly turn an ordinary trip to work into a nightmare. Driving without a license is illegal, and multiple offenses will result in a trip to jail, where ICE might intercept and deport them.
“I know that our jail board has taken a position that they won’t hold people on ICE detainers,” says Kristin Szakos, a Charlottesville city councilor. “They don’t have to—after their time is up, they are released.”
This means that the local jail releases immigrants immediately on a judge’s order, rather than holding them until federal authorities come to get them.
The Charlottesville City Council issued a proclamation on October 5, 2015, declaring itself a “welcoming city.” The proclamation establishes no specific policy responsibilities for the city or its employees. Curiously, Charlottesville is not listed as a participant on the website of Welcoming America, a nonprofit that sets standards and guidelines for what are formally considered to be welcoming cities.
Charlottesville’s ‘Welcoming City’ resolution
Advancing equity and inclusion is critical to the success of our community and our nation. Our diversity is the source of our pride and our prosperity.
As political rhetoric on the national level has become heated and divisive, and with an increase in hateful and dangerous speech and acts locally and nationwide, many of our neighbors have experienced fear and anxiety.
At this time we must strongly reaffirm our commitment to diversity and to fostering an atmosphere of inclusion.
We reject hate speech, hate crimes, harassment, racial bias, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti immigrant discrimination, and harmful bias and discrimination in all forms.
We welcome all people and recognize the rights of individuals to live their lives with dignity, free of fear and discrimination because of their faith, race, sexual orientation or identity, national origin or immigration status.
We believe the public sector has a critical role in ensuring the public good and pledge to continue our work in making our services and programs accessible and open to all.
Even Welcoming America’s technical standards for a “welcoming city” are a bit hazy. The group calls for tolerance, access to local government services and a general feeling of inclusiveness toward newcomers. A search of its website for the words “ICE detainer” yields zero results. The phrase “driver’s license” only appears once in its digital archives. Welcoming cities generally seek to foster inclusiveness in their community but stop short of formally refusing to cooperate with ICE to provide information about the presence of immigrants. Sanctuary cities go farther than mere inclusiveness.
“One of the things we have done with our welcoming city declaration is just making sure that people understand that we value immigrants and [we] want to make sure that people feel safe and welcome here, but I don’t know that we have a lot of particular policies around that,” Szakos says.
Future concerns
The consequences of falling afoul of federal authorities for a minor offense are major. Fanny Smedile, a legal immigrant from Central America and president of Sin Barreras, has an adult son who remained undocumented. In tears, she says her son was captured by federal agents and deported to Panama, a country unfamiliar to him since childhood. She has visited him periodically in Panama since his deportation.
Maria says her children—only one of whom has technical citizenship— strive to be good citizens.
“We have a lot of gratitude toward the United States,” she says. “My children give back. They are volunteers. They are bilingual. They speak English and Spanish perfectly. They volunteer at hospitals. They actually volunteer giving out food at the church. I’m very proud of it. They speak for a lot of the Hispanic population that really has a lot of gratitude toward America and what they’ve done for us.
“My youngest child is actually American-born. A U.S. citizen,” says Maria. “However, it would throw things off tremendously if I were to be deported. Who would take care of this child? Would I have to bring him back to a culture of poverty and violence? If not, would I leave him here to be a ward of the state? It’s an impossible dilemma by not having legal status.”
She says that as a family they are already feeling the effects. Her 11-year-old hears comments in school about Trump. “Now he worries, ‘What are going to happen to my parents?’” Maria says. “‘Are they going to be deported?’”
“Our former mayor was an immigrant,” says Szakos. “This is a community that has 60 languages being spoken at home. …My daughter is a soccer player and one of her best friends is from Somalia. And it broadens the perspective of our citizens, and I use that ‘citizens’ [as] specifically city citizens instead of legalized citizens. It enriches us and gives us a broader global perspective.”
While Szakos worries about the children of undocumented immigrants, she also worries about other local residents who depend on some of that $24 million in federal funding to Charlottesville for social services that Trump has threatened to cut off.
“There are potential downsides. Technically, [being a sanctuary city is] not legal. And the president-elect has threatened to cut off all federal funding to cities that declare themselves welcoming cities. A lot of cities in the country are sanctuary cities by practice, if not by naming, so it’s going to take some work to figure out exactly what he meant,” she says. “…One of my concerns is that a lot of federal funding that comes into Charlottesville is used to provide programs that support our most vulnerable residents, and I don’t want to endanger that.”
The stakes might be more than just the well-being of vulnerable citizens—law and order is also an issue. A combination of the language barrier and fear of deportation makes many immigrants Smedile serves fearful of contacting the police to report a crime or seek help.
“They are afraid when there is a crime and they are witnesses,” says Smedile. “They don’t like to be involved because they are undocumented. They don’t want anything with the court or anything with the police. Sometimes they don’t say what did they see. In an accident or a fight or whatever it is. …Of course the police, they want to come talk to them and protect them, but it’s not easy.”
All of the immigrants and their advocates interviewed for this article agreed that getting pulled over without a driver’s license is the leading local cause of deportation. But data in government computers could theoretically be used to identify undocumented immigrants. Social services reports often include that information, and health records may also include clues.
Szakos thinks that federal law should prevent the city’s data from being taken by ICE and combed through for the names of immigrants.
“I’m not sure which laws are which, but HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] is one of the things that has to do with health-related data,” Szakos says. “There are various federal regulations that govern the privacy of data being held by social services agencies. So that individual records can’t be held by other agencies except under certain circumstances. …As far as I know there’s pretty rigid protections on the data.”
Asked what she would like from the city of Charlottesville, Maria had a quick answer through an interpreter.
“To give us a chance,” Maria says. “To have the rights that most people have in this country. We’re honest. We’re looking to work. We came from a culture of violence and poverty. We found refuge here in the United States and so have our children.” She also asked for the possibility of getting a legal work permit and being able to obtain a driver’s license.
To make ends meet, Maria also works a part-time job in a restaurant. On one occasion, a customer said, “What are you doing here? Go back to Mexico. This job belongs to someone American-born.” She wanted to cry. She lives in a neighborhood filled with other Hispanic immigrants. Her neighbors have told her they have experienced discrimination at work sites. American co-workers have said to them, “After the 20th, time’s up! You’re out of here!”
“That’s the time we need to be even more united, when we’re being ostracized,” Maria says. “To prove we don’t retaliate with violence. We go back to our foundation of Christianity and Catholicism and we rest on that and hope to turn people’s hearts by not reacting to the discrimination that we experience.”
The monetary price of resisting Trump’s demands in Charlottesville could be in the tens of millions of dollars. But when asked whether the dollar value is worth the effort, Smedile does not hesitate to answer.
“We are human beings,” she says. “That’s what we have to think about.”
The 1980s Republic Plaza on West Main has been brought to its knees over the past month to make way for luxury student apartments. By Christmas, a claw had relentlessly chomped away its top two floors. In its place will be The Standard, a six-story, mixed-use structure with 189 apartments and a 499-space parking garage.
More tweetstorm fallout
Photo: Mina Pirasteh
Beleaguered Bellamy resigned from his teaching job December 26 after going on leave November 29 when alocal blogger dug up vulgar tweets Bellamy made between 2009 and 2014 before being elected to City Council. Signatures are now being collected for a petition to remove Bellamy from City Council. Luckily for the vice mayor, Virginia does not make it easy to remove elected officials.
Turner turnaround
Dr. Rick Turner addressed the crowd at a rally in remembrance of Trayvon Martin. Photo: Annalee Grant
Little more than a month ago, Rick Turner fended off a challenge to his presidency of the Albemarle Charlottesville NAACP, a position he’s held for 12 years, and accused some white members of “deviousness.” He says he’ll resign December 31. “Now is the time for new and vibrant leadership!” he says in a December 20 release.
Trump’s migrant workers
Photo: Amanda Maglione
BuzzFeed reports Trump Vineyard Estates applied for six H-2 visas to bring in foreign workers to prune grapevines for $10.72 an hour. Workers are provided lodging at no cost, must be able to bend over for long periods, work in weather as cold as 10 degrees and lift up to 60 pounds, according to the application.
City staff swelling
Charlottesville hired its first redevelopment manager: Brenda Kelley from Clarksville, Tennessee. And at its last meeting of the year December 19, City Council discussed whether it should hire a city architect and a person dedicated to the arts community, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Good look at William Taylor Plaza
On December 20, the Board of Architectural Review approved most exterior design plans for a new 120,000-square-foot plaza located at the corner of Cherry Avenue and Ridge Street and named after—you guessed it—colonial landowner William Taylor. The board did, however, ask developers to revisit paint color options for the back of the building and said the rustic-looking garden element in front isn’t in line with the rest of the design. The plaza will be built in two phases: The first will include a Fairfield Inn by Marriott, and the second will include apartments and condos.
Quote of the Week: “I’m not leaving nor am I going anywhere, just starting a new chapter. We all need to use this time to think about how we heal, how we band together as a community, and how we create solutions to the issues in this community.” —Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy in his statement announcing his resignation Monday as a teacher at Albemarle High
Since the initial City Council meeting in which blogger Jason Kessler called for Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy’s resignation, he has spent time making YouTube videos explaining white identity politics and collecting signatures for his petition. Photo by Eze Amos
Jason Kessler, the previously unknown writer who last month exposed Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy’s racist and vulgar tweets from before he was elected, is now collecting signatures to remove him from office. He’s also made a video that elucidates some of his concerns about issues affecting white Americans.
“I’m closing in on a hundred,” says Kessler about his signature collection.
Virginia does not make it easy to remove elected officials, even convicted sexual batterers like former Albemarle supervisor Chris Dumler.
Kessler must gather enough signatures of registered Charlottesville voters to be equivalent to 10 percent of those who voted in the last City Council election, a number he’s pegged at 527. Once the signatures are collected, he says a special prosecutor will try Bellamy for “misuse of public office” for calling for the boycott of Doug Muir’s restaurant, Bella, after the UVA lecturer compared Black Lives Matter to the KKK in a Facebook post, and for Bellamy assigning his Twitter account the username ViceMayorWesB when it contained the older, “hateful comments,” says Kessler.
“There’s a pattern of bias, racial bias Bellamy has consistently shown since being in office,” he says.
Kessler has been busy on his blog, charting the times Bellamy tweeted while on the job as an Albemarle teacher, denouncing Mayor Mike Signer, calling out the local “biased media” and accusing Bellamy of using the Young Black Professionals Network of Charlottesville as a slush fund.
Says Kessler of his petition, “The local media is trying to suppress it because they’re shills for the status quo. They care about access to politicians.”
Kessler shared some of his thoughts in a YouTube video on Donald Trump and white identity politics.
In it, he denounces years of “racist, anti-white policies,” such as affirmative action, and the growth of social justice warriors—“blacks, Hispanics, gays”—for whom the culture is “so slanted in their favor that they have something magical called privilege…”
He blames media for “blaming white people for slavery, even though it was done by every race of people on Earth.”
He also notes “biological differences in intelligence” between races. “I don’t need to go into that because you already know which groups are not focused on intellectual attainment and their culture does not promote that,” he says.
“My greatest fear is we will become the new South Africa and there will be a white genocide,” which, he assures viewers, is being covered up by the mainstream media.
The video is no longer available online.
“‘Identity politics’ is a dismissive term, originally hurled by conservative critics to demean what we on the left call the civil rights struggle,” says Jalane Schmidt, a UVA religious studies professor who teaches classes on race and religion.
While the term “white identity politics” may be new, she says, “the ideas are quite old: using discredited biological theories to dismiss black intelligence and culture” and “propagating a falsehood of ‘black privilege.’”
Because conditions for working-class whites have declined, she says, those espousing white identity politics have turned their fire on “undeserving” minorities.
While Kessler had earlier aligned with the alt-right, he denies he’s a white supremacist and describes himself as “center left” on most issues.
Says Kessler, “In 2016, a lot of working-class whites felt they were being picked on by elites, academia and the media.”
And in his video, he says, “The white majority spoke. It wanted Trump. It wants to slow the brakes to being turned into an oppressed minority.”
Correction 12/21: The original story cited a fake video called “Party at UVA” that Kessler says he did not create. C-VILLE regrets the error.
A group of local teens traveled to Washington, D.C., a week after the election to lobby for refugees’ rights as part of Amnesty International. Courtesy photo
Elizabeth Valtierra was nervous.
Like many across the nation, the Charlottesville High School senior spent election night with her family, gathered around a television in the living room. As the earliest states were called for Donald Trump, her family made jokes and tried to laugh it off. They thought Hillary Clinton would pull ahead, as the polls had predicted—she had to. But as the night wore on and state after state went to Trump, the mood grew somber.
“When they announced the president-elect, we were shocked, disappointed,” Valtierra says. “We’re Mexican. We look Mexican. We were scared we might encounter people who might be bold.”
It didn’t take long for Valtierra’s fear to materialize. On November 11, just a few days after the election, she went to the McDonald’s on Pantops with her mother and younger siblings and cousins. It was a Friday, and the family was enjoying time together after a tense week.
Elizabeth Valtierra. Photo by Jackson Smith
The conversation turned to politics, as every conversation in the aftermath of the election seemed to. Valtierra’s young cousins began badmouthing Trump, repeating things they had heard adults say at home. Suddenly, Valtierra and her mother became aware that a nearby group of men was listening.
The women grew tense as the men fanned out, blocking each exit to the restaurant while staring the family down. One man stood directly behind the family’s table, which was out of sight of the restaurant’s employees. Afraid to leave or separate, the two women called Valtierra’s father to pick them up.
“We were pretty shocked,” Valtierra says. “Charlottesville is generally a safe city. You don’t encounter many racist people or intimidating people.” After the incident, her mother bought her pepper spray.
Atiqullah Mohammed Nasim went to sleep before the election results were announced. He hoped he would awake to find that the country had elected Clinton, but instead he woke to a text from a friend at 3am: “Bro, Trump won.”
Nasim’s father fled the war in Afghanistan in 2009. It took two long years for the rest of the family to join him in the United States, and longer still to adjust to life in a new country. Nasim’s schooling was interrupted by the war, and he arrived in the U.S. unable to speak English. In the beginning, he remembers morning bus rides to Charlottesville High School, when some students would mock his name. Though he never felt his safety was threatened, the taunts were emotionally taxing.
“If you can’t speak the language, how are you going to go and complain?” says Nasim, who graduated from CHS in 2016 and is now a student at Piedmont Virginia Community College. “I had friends who would say, ‘What can we do? This isn’t our country. We have to go with the flow until we know the language.’ Well, we are also part of this country now.”
Nasim found the suggestion of a Muslim registry, which first surfaced as a comment by a member of the president-elect’s transition team, alarming. He finds solace in the Quran’s teachings on nonviolence and finds a certain irony in threats to investigate mosques.
“The beauty of our religion is that we welcome people inside,” says Nasim. “We are not making bombs—we’re praying, and when we pray, we are all one race. Short, tall, disabled, all races—we are together.”
Atiqullah Mohammed Nasim. Photo by Eze Amos
Nasim says he is more concerned than ever about how Trump’s comments toward women could affect his sisters, who are 6 and 8 years old. “It’s going to be challenging for [my sisters] to wear hijab,” he says. Like Valtierra, he worries that his sisters will face harassment from Trump supporters emboldened by their win.
Valtierra and Nasim are linked not only by their experiences, but through youth lobbying efforts after the election, led locally by Kibiriti Majuto, a relentlessly energetic senior at Charlottesville High School whose family arrived in the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as refugees in 2011. In the weeks leading up to the election, Majuto devoted several hours to phone banking for the Clinton campaign.
“I was in grief,” Majuto says of the election result. “I wanted to turn back time; I could not believe it.” Although Majuto is 18, he will not be able to vote until he acquires citizenship in two years. Like Nasim, Majuto and his family are Muslim.
A week after the election, Majuto, Valtierra, Nasim and a few other students boarded a northbound Amtrak to Washington, D.C., where they joined forces with high school and college students from up and down the East Coast. On behalf of Amnesty International, they urged legislators to enact laws that would prevent discrimination against refugees. Through the years, bills supporting refugees have surfaced, gained support, failed to pass and surfaced again; on any given day, lobbyists from the International Rescue Committee and similar groups are on Capitol Hill tracking legislation concerning refugees.
Majuto, who is president of the Amnesty International Club at CHS, had first heard of the trip during a webinar for the group’s Virginia coordinators and members. He connected with Sam Steed, a William & Mary student currently serving as a legislative coordinator for Amnesty International, and asked if he could bring a group of students from Charlottesville along.
Valtierra says that Majuto didn’t ask her to come, per se. “He just told me, ‘Hey, you’re going to come with me,’” she says. “I wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into.” Nasim heard about the trip through another friend and was intrigued by the possibility of meeting Senator Bernie Sanders. (They did not end up meeting the senator.)
After the election, Nasim felt defeated and questioned whether he would follow through with the trip, but he had already booked his ticket. “Kibiriti is very passionate,” says Nasim, whose worldview skews toward pragmatism. He says that Majuto believes one person can change the world, but “if Gandhi was by himself, he would have ended up dying.”
As the group entered the Capitol Building, Valtierra’s heart pounded. The Charlottesville students were among the youngest people in attendance; other campus Amnesty International groups had arrived from the University of Mary Washington, University of Maryland and campuses as far away as Massachusetts.
The Charlottesville students were paired with students from Washington and Lee University, and Majuto, Valtierra and Nasim instantly connected with the older activists. Energized by a common passion for human rights, they met with a series of legislators, at times sharing personal stories to illuminate their message.
Of the legislators the group met with, most were receptive and friendly. However, all three students were quick to recall one woman in particular. Majuto had shared stories about his experiences as a refugee in South Africa when the conversation began to unravel.
“Some of the stories were very horrible and graphic,” Valtierra says. “He [Majuto] was beat up to the point where he had to be at the hospital for three days. The woman had the nerve to say, ‘Are you sure?’”
Prior to the trip, the students had prepared by studying materials Amnesty International provided. “They taught me to be calm,” Nasim says. “We learned how to talk to people [while] lobbying and how to control our emotions.”
Both Nasim and Valtierra also kept Michelle Obama’s advice from the Democratic National Convention in mind: “When they go low, we go high.”
Over the course of the day, Majuto noticed patterns at the Capitol Building. He saw far more men than women, and also noticed that many of the people of color were working food service or janitorial jobs.
But, ultimately, Majuto came away troubled by the legislators’ notion of compromise. Throughout the day, he heard variations of a certain phrase—that two sides should agree to disagree and respect one another.
“What do they do when they disagree based on ideology?” asks Majuto. “It left me wondering where other party members or constituents go from here.”
Kibiriti Majuto. Photo by Jackson Smith
On the day after the presidential election, neither Valtierra nor Majuto felt up to attending school in the morning. When they arrived at CHS in time for their afternoon classes, the campus was quiet. In Charlottesville, 80 percent of voters cast ballots for Clinton. CHS Principal Dr. Eric Irizarry characterized the mood at the school as shocked and disappointed, though he points out that the CHS community also includes students and staff who were pleased by the outcome.
Near the end of the school day, guidance counselors sent a note to all faculty and students. “On a day when many in our school are feeling a bit lost, perhaps wondering what comes next and how we’re going to respond, your counselors, your teachers, your administrators, and all the adults at Charlottesville High School who are about you want you to know something,” the note said. “You are not alone. Whatever comes next, we’ll face it together and we’ll do so with respect, mutual appreciation, and kindness.” The note went on to acknowledge CHS’ diversity and encourage students to talk to guidance counselors.
Valtierra found the note comforting. “I felt like, ‘Yeah! That’s my school,’” she says. Irizarry reports that an above-average number of students sought out counselors in the weeks following the election.
And as teachers guided classroom discussions, a student response to the election began to take shape. In a class called Becoming Global Citizens, Valtierra and Majuto helped design a project with the goal of creating a message to unify the CHS community. While searching online for examples to build from, Majuto came across a project from a school in Alexandria that featured posters that presented different identities. Soon, they got to work creating their own posters acknowledging differences represented by CHS students. Each poster began with the phrase “We are” followed by a broad range of identities.
The decision to use “we” rather than “I” came in reaction to the class’s observation that students unintentionally tend to segregate themselves—Latino students sitting together at lunch, or white students clustering together. There are more than 400 students in CHS’ English as a Second Language program, and they collectively represent 34 different languages, including Spanish, Nepali, Arabic and Swahili, the top four languages spoken.
“We are diverse, and we are proud of it,” Valtierra says. “Our identities are on the same level.”
Irizarry found the project to be constructive. “My sense is that the poster campaign went a long way towards shifting the mood of the school,” he says. “Though individually we may be white, black, immigrant, Christian, Muslim, disabled or more, we are all unified, together, proud, American, Black Knights.”
The response was in keeping with a core value CHS tries to instill in its students: That getting involved in the community and driving positive change are worthy goals. In a statement to C-VILLE, a spokesperson for Charlottesville City Schools clarified that although CHS does not encourage students toward any particular political affiliation or political goals, teachers and administrators hope to give students the tools to “develop the research, critical thinking, problem-solving and rhetorical skills to propose and advocate for improvements in our world.”
Beyond CHS, the larger Charlottesville community has shown support for refugees like Majuto, Nasim and their families. After the election, the International Rescue Committee received a flood of donations and volunteer applications. Seventy first-time applicants completed volunteer forms online in the first three weeks after the election, compared with 25 applications in October.
In addition to new volunteer applications, the IRC has seen an uptick in donations. Often, the amounts are small—between $10 and $25—but recently the surge in donations came ahead of the IRC’s annual appeal letter.
IRC Executive Director Harriet Kuhr says the outpouring of support has been remarkable. “We’ve been seeing it here, but it’s been happening in other cities as well,” she says. The total number of volunteers is already greater than the number of newly resettled refugees in Charlottesville.
Until the Trump administration is in place, the IRC can only watch and wait with the rest of the country. “We’ve been reassuring people that they’re here legally and they have protections,” Kuhr says. “They just need to do everything to keep themselves in legal status and do all the things they’re supposed to do with immigration. Anyone who is here on legal status has rights.”
Majuto, Valtierra and Nasim all say the trip to D.C. was energizing. They acknowledge that the movement to persuade people across the United States to embrace refugees and immigrants must operate in a time frame longer than a single election cycle or a president’s term.
Valtierra says the trip left her with a tangle of emotions, from exhilaration to discouragement to anger. “This was a life-changing experience,” she says. “I want to work behind the scenes and get involved.”
At one point during the day in Washington, Nasim said to Majuto, “‘Dude, imagine our dads seeing us [here]. They would be so proud of us.’”
Nasim, who is completing his general education courses at PVCC, plans to pursue a career in law. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of his father, who worked in the government in Afghanistan, and his uncle, a general in the Afghan National Army. After spending a day with students from Washington and Lee, he has his eye on the school as a possible place to transfer to pursue a juris doctor degree. Overall, he hopes to expand other people’s notion of what a refugee can achieve.
“I have to work hard, study more,” Nasim says. “My voice does matter.”
As for Majuto, the election result failed to shake his enthusiasm for analyzing politics. In addition to his classes and extracurricular activities, Majuto, who is CHS’ senior class president, has continued to devour post-election news from The Nation, MSNBC, NPR, Blavity and more. Although he doesn’t have any single political hero, he is enamored with the provocative ideas of political activists ranging from Karl Marx to Nelson Mandela.
“How am I going to deal with this when I one day maybe run for Congress?” asks Majuto. “How are we as a nation going to compromise for the common good?”
Even if Majuto doesn’t run for office, he plans to seek ways to create positive change. He’s troubled by the state of the American education system in particular. “The death of any superpower is the ignorance of the people if they aren’t well educated,” he says. “That’s what I worry about.” Women’s rights and improving the lives of the incarcerated as they re-enter society—particularly securing them the right to vote—are also issues frequently on his mind.
Majuto’s enthusiasm is infectious, his optimism seemingly unshakable. He thinks of elected officials as true public servants who should have to answer to the will of the people. When it comes to the president-elect, Majuto urges everyone to keep one thing in mind: “He works for us,” Majuto says. “We don’t work for him.”
Joshua Wheeler reminds Donald Trump that the U.S. Supreme Court has already given the green light on flag burning. Photo by Amy Jackson
President-elect Donald Trump, known for his uncanny ability to raise eyebrows with 140 characters or less, sent out this particularly scrutinized tweet November 29: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag—if they do, there must be consequences—perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!”
While one Virginia man voices the same grievance, another local would like to remind The Donald about U.S. Supreme Court rulings that declared otherwise.
In two cases—one in 1989 and another in 1990—the highest court in the nation ruled that the prosecution of people who burn the flag violates the First Amendment right to free speech and is, therefore, unconstitutional, notes Joshua Wheeler, the director of Charlottesville’s Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.
“It’s a little puzzling as to why politicians of both parties try to bring this up given that it’s not such a common occurrence,” Wheeler says. But, as a result of the tweet, he adds, a number of people have burned flags outside of Trump’s New York City abode in protest.
Wheeler compares the decades-old Supreme Court decisions with the recent arrests of 13 Black Lives Matter protesters who stopped traffic on Richmond’s I-95 and were convicted on the same day Trump sent his tweet.
“Unlike flag burners, the conviction of the Richmond protesters had nothing to do with the message they were expressing,” he wrote in a statement. “Their crime was impeding traffic. Had a similar highway-blocking protest involved the Ku Klux Klan, Planned Parenthood or the NRA, all would have been equally guilty of impeding traffic—a crime of pure conduct.”
And prosecuting someone for burning a flag can get sticky, he says, asking what exactly an American flag is. “Does it include a flag patch sewn onto someone’s jacket? How about a realistic painting of the flag? Or a button displaying only the U.S. flag? If you can’t burn it, can you also not step on it? Or write on it? Such laws are unwieldy, to say the least.”
The First Amendment “doesn’t mean citizens can say whatever they want whenever they want,” Wheeler says, but it is a limit on the government’s ability to restrict free speech. And while he doesn’t think flag burning is the best way to express oneself, he says he supports the right to do it.
“I am personally offended by it,” he says. “I think it is a deliberately provocative way to express something that could be done in a more respectful way. On the other hand, I believe more strongly in the right of free speech.”
But Jonathan Guy, a Chesterfield man who comes from a long line of family members who served in the military, feels otherwise.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” he says. “People stepping on the flag and burning them is a disgrace. …I’m looking at two folded flags in my window. One was my granddad’s and one was my dad’s. I cherish those flags.”
And he’s proposed a solution to the problem.
For offenders who weren’t born in America: “Send them back to where they came from.” But for natural-born citizens: “That’s a really tough question.”
Columnist Dan Catalano says every single person who voted for Trump voted to give a racist, sexist, anti-semitic, narcissistic demagogue the keys to the world’s most powerful democracy. Photo by Amanda Maglione
Just so you know, I had always planned to make this the final edition of the Odd Dominion column. When I first started scribbling this occasionally amusing trifle way back at the dawn of 2007, I assumed that I’d keep writing it until I ran out of jokes, or material, or both. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that, at times, the jokes have been pretty thin, but, as it turns out, the world of Virginia politics is a never-ending cornucopia of ridiculous shenanigans. And so, if I so desired, I could continue to crank out these little pearls of political punditry ad infinitum (and, I’m sure some readers would grumble, ad nauseum). But after nearly a decade of bi-weekly columns, I realized a few months ago that I was running out of steam, and that finding funny and/or insightful things to say about the current state of Virginia politics was getting harder and harder.
And then, of course, there was the Trump problem. Even before the unimaginable, horrific electoral triumph of that carrot-colored cretin, the task of writing about him—and what his success says about the state of American racial and gender politics—was almost too depressing to bear. See, when I started this column all those years ago, its main purpose was to make fun of pols who were as ridiculous as Trump, but nowhere near as duplicitous and dangerous. In fact, the impetus for the entire column was an event—now lost to the sands of political time—involving then-U.S. Representative Virgil Goode, who had written a constituent letter decrying the use of a Quran by newly elected Muslim congressman Keith Ellison during his swearing-in ceremony. “If American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration,” he warned, hilariously employing the third person, “there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office.”
The letter was obtained and published by C-VILLE’s Erika Howsare, and made some national news, as overt Muslim-bashing by politicians was still considered bad form back then. But here’s the thing: Goode, along with other early Odd Dominion targets such as George “Macaca” Allen and unrelenting ambition machine Eric Cantor, was at best comic relief, and at worst merely symbolic of how darker, nativist strains of political thought get woven into the fabric of our imperfect democracy.
But Trump is different. He is a true monster and a sociopath: an ignorant buffoon who has no driving force save ambition and no moral compass to speak of. I fully realize that his ascendancy to the presidency of the United States was supported by a large minority of American voters, and that many of those voters are hurting economically and feel culturally assailed. I realize this, and I do not care. Every single person who voted for Trump voted to give a racist, sexist, anti-semitic, narcissistic demagogue the keys to the world’s most powerful democracy, and by doing so has debased the very idea of America, and put the future of our great country in peril.
And yes, I got it wrong. I, who always prided myself on my peerless prognosticating ability, was absolutely certain that the country that I love could not possibly put a man as unqualified and destabilizing as Donald J. Trump in the White House. But you know what? I’m not embarrassed or chagrined about getting it wrong. I got it wrong because I believed in the innate goodness of the American people, and trusted in our collective ability to make the right choice, even if we were angry and in pain and felt like lashing out.
This time, however, we couldn’t manage to do that. Next time, I pray that we will. I won’t be around to write about it, but I pray that we will.
Odd Dominion was an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics. It was encouraged, crafted and whipped into shape by a truly talented group of journalists and editors, chief among them Cathy Harding, Graelyn Brashear, Lisa Provence and Jessica Luck. Thank you for reading.
Will Tom Garrett’s support of Donald Trump help him in his 5th District race against Jane Dittmar?
Although it seems almost impossible to believe, this is the final column we will publish before the awesomely epic election of 2016. Yes, we will pen one more before the last votes are cast and counted, but it will not see the light of day until the polling places have closed, and the new president and Congress of the United States have emerged from the bitter clouds of dust kicked up during this acrimonious election season.
This, of course, has put us in a contemplative state of mind. Not so much about the eventual outcome, which—at least at the top of the ticket—seems clear. No, we’ve been thinking more about what comes after, and whether or not this magnificent republic of ours can somehow find its way back to normalcy. Much of this depends on the actions and reactions of a small minority of politicians and voters—mostly elephants, but also amongst die-hard donkeys, as well.
First, a quick look at the state of play. As election day nears, it is increasingly obvious that Republican standard-bearer Donald J. Trump is courting a catastrophic landslide defeat. Will it be Goldwater ’64, McGovern ’72, Mondale ’84 territory? Perhaps not quite that bad, but definitely close. And this historic drubbing is certain to have a huge down-ballot effect, which is why Republican strategists are currently in such a panic.
The problem is that there’s no real solution to a problem like Trump. In Virginia, which the Trump campaign has essentially abandoned, Republican congress-critters have tried a variety of tactics, none of them particularly effective. Delegate Scott Taylor, who is running to replace the 2nd District’s retiring Representative Scott Rigell, has been a loyal Trump surrogate, and thus lashed himself to an immensely unpopularcandidate who, according to recent polls, is trailing Hillary Clinton by 12 points in the commonwealth. Conversely, in the more moderate 10th District, Representative Barbara Comstock has been harshly critical of Trump, and yet is still in real danger of losing her reelection bid due to disaffected Republican voters punishing her for her apostasy.
And here in the 5th District, state Republican Senator Tom Garrett—who has condemned Trump’s behavior but still supports him—has been caught flat-footed by Democrat Jane Dittmar, who has consistently out-fundraised him and was recently endorsed by President Obama.
It’s also here where some of the more malevolent forces at work in this election have unexpectedly erupted. The most prominent incident involved two Trump supporters who parked outside of Dittmar’s Palmyra office for 12 hours, openly brandishing guns and holding up Trump signs. When this threatening maneuver got national press, Dittmar’s Facebook page was so overwhelmed with abusive rhetoric that she had to temporarily shut it down.
Things got so nasty, in fact, that—in the wake of conservative bloggers posting documents purporting to show that Dittmar was convicted of a DUI in 1999 (she was not)—Garrett actually showed up at a Dittmar event on the Downtown Mall to join in her calls for greater civility (see page 12).
Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that civility is what we’re going to get in the wake of this unprecedented, frequently stomach-churning election. As long as Trump persists with his idiotic claims of a “rigged election,” and continues to encourage an army of poll-watching partisans to show up (armed, if possible) and confront non-white citizens as they arrive to vote, then the aftermath of this presidential pie fight could be even worse than the main event.
And in that case, we all lose.
Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.
Donald Trump now faces members of his own party, like Virginia’s U.S. Representative Barbara Comstock, calling for him to step aside.
Photo by: Amanda Maglione
Wow. Just wow. We have been following politics for a very long time (too long, perhaps), and we honestly have never seen anything quite like the insane gyrations currently rocking the presidential race. We always knew that the triumph of Donald J. Trump over a field of hapless Republican losers in the primaries was going to be the gift that kept on giving, but never in our wildest dreams did we expect things to get as truly unhinged as they are right now.
With so many choice events to choose from, it’s hard for us to pick our favorite recent political development, but there’s definitely one thing that perfectly encapsulated the volatile, unprecedented position the elephants find themselves in. It happened outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, where Trump’s Virginia campaign chair Corey Stewart recently staged a protest against the RNC for purportedly failing to support The Donald. The Trump campaign responded by immediately firing Corey Stewart.
Think about that. Trump’s state chairman actually organized a protest against his own party’s national committee, even though RNC chairman Reince Priebus is one of the few GOP talking heads still offering unqualified support for the unstable, foul-mouthed, misogynistic rage machine who sits hunched atop the Republican ticket like a coked-up King Kong, unwilling (or unable) to admit that he’s mortally wounded. And Trump rewarded Stewart’s initiative by throwing him off the campaign’s swiftly sinking ship.
Although we have never wavered in our conviction that Hillary Clinton will be our next president, we would be lying if we didn’t admit to a few moments of nervousness leading up to the first presidential debate. The negative narrative that the press has long loved to spin around Clinton seemed to be hardening, and Trump’s relentless hammering of her was dragging her down to his subterranean level.
But then came Clinton’s masterful debate performance. And Trump’s meandering meltdown. And his unhinged attacks on a former Miss Universe. And his 3am tweets telling the world to check out a fictional sex tape. And the leaked “Access Hollywood” audio of Trump bragging that he likes to sexually assault women. And the second presidential debate, which Trump kicked off by appearing with women who had accused former president Bill Clinton of sex crimes, and capped off by threatening to abuse the power of the presidency by sending his political opponent to prison.
The result? A stampede of Republican rodents fleeing the S.S. Trumptanic as fast as their little feet could carry them. It began as a trickle, with Virginia’s very own U.S. Representative Barbara Comstock, who is locked in a tight race to retain her congressional seat, taking to Facebook to urge Trump to quit the race in the wake of his hideous “locker-room talk” scandal. It swiftly ballooned, however, until even Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, in a conference call with colleagues, declared that he would no longer defend his party’s pumpkin-hued, presidency-seeking pustule, and informed members fighting for political survival that they were free to run as far and fast as possible from Trump’s dumpster fire of a campaign.
This, of course, sparked a huge backlash from Republican base voters who still love Trump, and think Clinton is the devil incarnate. And thus does one of America’s most successful and durable political parties find itself coming apart at the seams, with a monster dragging it steadily into darkness, and a horrified host of now-regretful enablers struggling fruitlessly toward the light.
But for Donald Trump’s Republican Party, that light is fading fast.
Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.
