Today, we offer a prayer. To our beloveds and our comrades in Charlottesville, who witnessed and fought against what too many of us have long known to be true –  that the racism, white supremacy, and white vigilante violence on which this country was founded and built on has been emboldened by current right-wing leadership that has ushered it in as the rule of this land.

This prayer is for our Southern kin – who we love, who we choose and those who have come before us. Traditions run deep here. Both traditions of repression, structural white supremacy and also traditions of collective resistance and resilience.  From the blue hills of the Shenandoah Valley to the waters of the Gulf Coast and to all of the land in between that has seen hundreds of years of white supremacy, conquest, rape, bloodshed, violence, chains, wickedness, and torches. But has also seen hundreds of years of resistance, struggle, burying of what is sacred, reading the stars, fists raised high, and clasped hands in the streets fighting for Black, people of color, indigenous, immigrant, Latinx, queer and trans communities to live in full dignity, to live free from fear.

A prayer for all those who have long recognized the shoes of white men under the hoods belonging to police officers, ICE agents, sheriffs, jailers, bondsmen, and judges who do the bidding of white supremacy each and every day in our Southern cities and towns.

And today, we offer once more a charge to our white Southern kin. We call to each other again as we did this past November when we said: We must atone for the terror of our ancestors. We must suck out the poison of white supremacy. We must earn the respect of future generations.

Who’s eyes must we be willing to meet, white kin? What are we willing to give and give up? Who are we willing to confront, to challenge, and to unseat from the halls of power? History will repeat itself. Until it can’t.

To all those who put their bodies on the line, gave their lives, organized for months to prepare a defense, you have our gratitude and we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you.

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