Unmasking the Illusion: is Charlottesville finally “woke” when it comes to discussing race and history?

Newly elected Charlottesville City Councilor Nikuyah Walker’s campaign slogan “Unmasking the Illusion,” no matter what you think of it, was a brilliant one, an antidote to “Make America Great Again” if ever there was one. When it has come to discussing race and history in Charlottesville, the tendency has always been to intellectualize it, to try to reason with it. Take, for example, this perfectly reasonable C-Ville Weekly story on our Confederate statues, “Monumental questions: Local statues are a lesson in history and a source of controversy,” published in June 2015. At the time, as the story points out, Charlottesville City Councilor Kristin Szakos’ now very well-known suggestion, during a 2012 Virginia Book Festival luncheon speech by Civil War historian Edward Ayers, that perhaps our Confederate statues should be removed or put in better historical context, was well-known back then.

“The reaction was both immediate and sustained,” says the C-Ville story about Szakos’ suggestion. …