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Farmer goes viral for reaction to Lee protests and racism in Charlottesville
ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (NEWSPLEX) — Racial tensions and emotions have been running high in the city of Charlottesville. It all stems from a torch rally over Confederate statues, led by a white supremacist in Lee Park.
An Albemarle County farmer reacted to recent protests on social media, shedding light on the racial divide and what it’s like being black in Charlottesville.
The Facebook post, called “A Message to Charlottesville About Lee Park from your Local Black Farmer,” has now gone viral. [note: that FB post is here, posted below]
“There’s a kind of discomfort that I discovered with blackness,” said Chris Newman.
Newman has his hands full at Sylvanaqua Farms in Earlysville. Each day he’s moving, feeding and providing water to animals, but found time to share his thoughts on recent protests at Lee Park.
“The thing that bothered me wasn’t so much the protest itself,” said Newman. “It was the back-patting that was going on afterwards, the ‘we confronted racism.’ There’s a difference between confronting racists and racism.”
Also, in the post, Newman shares the experiences he’s encountered as a local black farmer.
“The whole purse clutching, cross the street, sideways glance kind of racism that you encounter on a day-to-day basis,” said Newman. “I think they’re on the whole statistically, more dangerous than the Richard Spenser flag waving, hood-wearing kind of racism.”
Newman says it’s not Spenser calling the cops on him. It’s the people he refers to as ‘Nervous white women in yoga pants with the ‘I’m With Her’ and ‘Coexist’ stickers on their German SUVs.”
He says that reference to women is not a stereotype, and he’s speaking from real-life incidents that have happened to him more than a dozen times.
“She gave me that look,” said Newman. “Let’s start the countdown for when the cops show up, and low and behold that’s exactly what happened.”
He says he’s been racially profiled by these women so many times that he’s stopped making food deliveries in certain wealthy neighborhoods.
“You can tell they’re like does this guy match the description,” said Newman. “I know to smile and give them the non-threatening black guy kind of thing, but all it really takes is for one of us to have a bad day and I could end up another tragedy in the street.”
Having lived in several cities across America and visited numerous countries, Newman considers himself a well-cultured man. Through his many travels, he says in the Facebook post that “Charlottesville is by far the most aggressively segregated place he’s ever lived.”
“We’re at attaboy status,” said Newman. “They say we’ve confronted racism, no we haven’t! Especially in a city, a place like this, where you can just see the divide with your own eyes. You’re in a place where you don’t necessarily belong and that’s part of what I mean when I’m talking about segregation. When I’m in a certain neighborhood where the housing values are at a certain level, you just don’t expect black people to be there.”
He says there’s not enough mingling among races and part of that is because black people aren’t portrayed a “whole people.” He says the race as whole gets ‘pigeon holed’ into specific areas, like sports, entertainment, criminal justice, and single parenthood, which takes away from the whole-being aspect.
Newman admits he doesn’t have the magic answer to fix the problems, but his post has done some good. He says the feedback on his post has been overwhelmingly positive and that it’s forced people to have a ‘gut check’ and learn something. He adds he loves Charlottesville and is rooting for the city.
The post has received more than 7,000 likes and nearly 5,000 shares, as of last check Wednesday.
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from FACEBOOK
Sylvanaqua Farms
May 17 at 10:28am ·A message to Charlottesville about Lee Park from your local Black farmer:
I know some folks are really feeling themselves about this whole Love Trumps Hate counter-rally to Richard Spencer’s punch-worthy shenanigans in Lee Park. I’d like to appreciate it, but frankly I just don’t.
I’ve lived in several cities and visited many more before Charlottesville. I like this town for its natural beauty, it’s small size, the friendliness of its people, and its food. But folks, here’s something else: Charlottesville is by far the most aggressively segregated place I’ve ever lived in or visited. And that seems a strange thing to have to say about a town that hosts a public university.
I say “aggressively” for two reasons. One, because of how assertive police (and the citizens who summon them) are here with racial profiling. It got so bad in 2014 – 2015 that I stopped renting farmland on estates where I could be easily seen from the road, and I stopped making food deliveries into wealthier neighborhoods because of how often police would “happen by” and sometimes even question me five or ten minutes after I got a strange look from a passerby (usually someone jogging, but occasionally someone in a car). I’m not a paranoid kinda guy, but this happened way too often to be a coincidence.
It isn’t Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It’s nervous White women in yoga pants with “I’m with Her” and “Coexist” stickers on their German SUVs.
Second is the sheer degree of cultural appropriation going on with businesses in the city proper. It’s little things – e.g. shops and other businesses incorporating wide swaths of hiphop culture into their branding while having not a single Black owner, partner, employee, or vendor. And those businesses are KILLING IT here. This is a town where Blackness advances White-owned brands and subjects Black-owned businesses to inspection by law enforcement.
Do you really think that problem comes from people like Richard Spencer?
Check out C’Ville Weekly’s Instagram feed when you get a moment, and try not to notice that the few depictions of Black people are limited to sports, singing, criminal justice, or single parenthood. White people, meanwhile, are represented as political activists, chefs, cogs in the gig economy, musicians, dancers, people who get married, visual artists, songwriters, architects, landscapers, thespians, artistic directors, wedge-heel-wearing rugby players, dog lovers, farmers, firefighters, and people who play with their kids in cul de sacs.
Richard Spencer is not the editor of C’Ville Weekly.
Truth is, as a Black dude, I’m far less bothered by the flag wavers in this picture than this town’s progressives assuming its race problem has nothing to do with them. The former is a visual inconvenience. The latter could leave my daughters without a father.
So please, put down the candles and instead ask yourself: why is my city like this? Why is life like this for Black people in my wonderful city? The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park.
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