J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
What Heather Heyer Knew
This is a great article about Heather Heyer and her background, worth reading the whole thing and doing so with the dismissive attitudes towards working-class people which proliferated in the wake of Trump's election, and Brexit, firmly in mind.
This is a great article about Heather Heyer and her background, worth reading the whole thing and doing so with the dismissive attitudes towards working-class people which proliferated in the wake of Trump's election, and Brexit, firmly in mind.
On the Friday evening when hundreds of white nationalists marched on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, a horrified Heather Heyer watched the videos that her friend Courtney Commander was broadcasting live on Facebook. Who were these legions of white supremacists and neo-Nazis openly giving heil salutes? Heather couldn’t believe their bold chants claiming possession of “Whose streets? Our streets!” or their declarations: “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!”
She heard Courtney exclaim in shock into the cell phone: “This looks like the ’60s — I wasn’t even alive then.” To older folks, it looked like scenes straight out of The Birth of a Nation. Next, Courtney moved closer to the goons, shouting back, “We will replace you.” She noted to the camera that the police were standing behind the counterprotesters, immobilized.
“Are you guys going to wind up doing something about this?” she asked the cops. “I’m really not trying to criticize you, but are we allowed to have torches out here?” She received no answer.
Justin Marks, one of Heather’s best friends, said that the videos scared Heather, and that after watching them they both decided not to participate in the planned counterprotest of Saturday’s much larger Unite the Right rally. “We thought it would be even more dangerous than the first night,” he said. A soft-spoken gay man, Justin stuck to his decision. But later Friday night, Heather texted him: “I feel compelled to go, to show solidarity.”
....
Heather Heyer did not fit the profile of black or Jewish radical that white supremacists tend to depict as their enemies. For one thing, Heather was a working-class, white Southerner. As a child she routinely heard storm winds rip the skirting off the single-wide trailer where she was raised by her single mom. Heat would begin escaping, pipes freezing, and wild animals could move in under their home.
Susan Bro told me she is often pigeonholed as a dumb redneck by visitors who turn up at that trailer, where she still lives to this day. “They’re wide-eyed when they hear me talk like an intelligent person!” Bro said, chuckling. Her grandparents were coal miners, but her parents and their siblings worked hard to go to college. Bro herself made it halfway through a master’s degree at the tony University of Virginia while Heather was a toddler and her son was repeating kindergarten. She supported them alone with a 20-hour-a-week work-study program, while carrying a full course load, which left her only three or four hours a night to sleep. She settled for a certificate that would license her as a teacher in Virginia’s primary schools. She desperately needed a steady job.
What kind of a daughter did she produce? A compassionate girl, Bro told me, but also one who was stubborn, opinionated, and not afraid to challenge others. Always, Heather looked out for the underdog. She would bring home castoff kids and tell her mother, “They need a place to crash.”
“I’d meet the kids and make sure they weren’t runaways,” Bro said, knowing that it was illegal to take them in if they were. (Not that she didn’t often do so anyway if she felt the child’s safety was at risk.) I spoke with Bro at the Miller Law Group office where Heather worked. It was only a week after she lost her only daughter to a white supremacist driving a weaponized car, and Bro’s words were alternately strong and brooding. She had lost ten pounds since Heather’s death. Her diabetes was severe. Due to fibromyalgia, she felt like her skin was stretched over broken glass. “But hugs don’t hurt!” she assured me, giving me one.
“You didn’t have much to share with those abandoned kids,” I remarked.
“No, but we had more than others. That’s family values where I come from.”
As much as Heather Heyer cared for other people, she seemed to have a hard time doing the same for herself. “She didn’t value her own work — she was a very good artist — or feel a sense of self-worth,” Bro said. Heather was raised a Christian, even though Bro had left the Evangelical church in which she was brought up. “The church didn’t have any use for single mothers,” she told me. Bro is as brutally honest about herself as she is about others. It always pained her to see Heather flinch whenever someone on TV made fun of “trailer trash.”
“I think when a child is from a single-parent home and when the other parent does not participate in their life much, that’s where the lack of value comes from,” she tells me. “Nothing you ever say or do really overcomes that.”
Heather fell into a state of despondency after finishing high school. It took a few years before she could bring herself to look for a job, convinced she had no skills. Bro told her that service jobs were a decent backup. Eventually, Heather began waitressing at a small local pub and moved on to be the bartender. Being Heather, she doubted she could handle the new responsibility — she didn’t know how to mix drinks.
How did she respond when you tried to encourage her to go to college? I asked. “She always said the same thing: ‘I’m not smart enough.’ It didn’t matter that she aced her tests. She was overweight. She grew up in a trailer. Daddy was not part of her life.”
After much cajoling and encouraging by her mother, Heather did try a few classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College and seemed actually to enjoy them. But her efforts petered out. I asked Bro what guidance she gave Heather over and over again as she was growing up. “Treat everyone as equal,” Bro said. “To me, whether you have God, or no religion, or whatever, you still have an obligation to be ethically and morally strict.”
That seems to have laid a base for Heather becoming a fighter for social justice. She developed into a progressive Democrat. By 2015, she became an avid supporter of Bernie Sanders. She, along with the majority of Charlottesville, voted for Sanders in Virginia’s Democratic primary. “When Bernie wasn’t the Democratic nominee, Heather didn’t even vote in the general election,” Bro told me.
But Bro remembers how “horrified” Heather was by candidate Trump’s “racist attitudes and policies.” A former co-worker heard her decry Steve Bannon as a white supremacist, and Bro recalls her daughter wondering aloud: “How does anyone like that get to be in power in modern times?”
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Heather’s close friend Carl Thomas told me, speaking about Election Night in November 2016, when he and his girlfriend, Lindsey Reisser — also part of Heather’s inner circle — watched the results at a townie bar in Charlottesville. As they watched, they texted back and forth with Heather. Until it was clear that Trump had won, the three kept trying to reassure one another that he could never be elected.
Heather had trained Lindsey as a waitress at Lord Hardwicke’s, a small local restaurant. They also worked a second shift together at the European-style Cafe Caturra. Sitting outside together at one in the morning after closing the café, Lindsey and Heather would talk incessantly while smoking cigarettes. Those were the good times.
“We were both kind of hardheaded,” Lindsey said. “We don’t really listen. We’re emotionally driven. Heather, being eight years older than me, was unapologetically herself 100 percent of the time. She really helped me grow into myself as an adult.”
Uh, no, I haven't claimed that at all. I've said repeatedly I am not condemning antifa in any shape or form.
