Racism Tourism: Virginia’s small towns secret to revitalization.
Part One: On the sins of Fredericksburg’s past.
Olde Towne Butcher said the quiet part out loud: white business owners and non-profit agencies in Fredericksburg benefit from a form of economy and tourism that is based solely on racism.
(author’s note: there are links to every single one of the other racist businesses you should be boycotting along with the Olde Towne Butcher.)
Living in Downtown Fredericksburg or any small town USA and walking through the main streets you see the idea of Racism Tourism or the Racist Economy on an unashamed display that leaves you feeling like you are in a scene from They Live.
Yet white people walk around seemingly comfortable and unaffected…
It’s not really a secret: there was a whole ass badly disguised leather shop that truly served as nazi headquarters.
It’s always been a thing.
Fredericksburg: Timeless.
From a life-sized wood-carved “Tobacco Store Indian” to a brewery and book store willing to sell mediocre white people’s art passed off as Native and then silence, whitesplain and condescend those that brought these things to their attention, to the stories told when people visit the “Indian Punch Bowl” … and who can forget that down the road in Stafford County the slur Indian is also the mascot of their local High School. Anti Indigeniety in Fredericksburg is palpable and after exposing a white artist (whom ironically went to Stafford High) for cultural appropriation and stealing art, the white community in Fredericksburg did everything possible to ban me from the town itself.
If you venture into the antique malls ran by snow haired white women that follow you around the store you encounter stalls proudly displaying confederate coins and memorabilia, flags, cheeky racist figurines of all sorts and even shackles.
The natural shops offer every form of culturally appropriated, sacred practices from POC around the world, for a profit, with an assortment of white employees with dreads to sell your culture back to you to boot. The older Trump-hat wearing racists and local Blue Lives Matters types bigots congregate in cop-run businesses and breweries.
Downtown Fredericksburg is only a drive away from Falmouth where one of the several giant confederate flags that disgrace our state stands tall.
The Virginia flaggers leader lives in Fredericksburg and oftentimes picket the local court house on a sunny Saturday, harassing Black and Brown people driving and walking by, police only showing up when there is counter protesters.
Even venturing to a flower shop, coffee shop, art venue or any number of restaurants can leave a person of color susceptible to micro aggressions and other mistreatments.
These things are enough to make your stomach churn. They are enough to keep you home, if it weren’t for the fact that gentrifiers, racists both of the conservative and liberal ilk are constantly encroaching in the spaces that Black and Brown communities have carved for themselves amidst and in spite of the putrid white supremacy guised in Southern niceties via respectability politics and the white washed act of indulging in a-historical sentiment.
Romanticization per its definition is entimentalization, idealization, glorification or a portrayal of something as ideal, of genocide and slavery that has been the moda operandi in the South thanks to the daughters of the confederacy’s efforts during Reconstruction: erecting monuments and writing our history books from the point of view of ‘the lost cause’ forever warping the notion of the immorality of the existence of the CSA on the first place and re-framing slavery as an impermanent, necessary, Christian-like, benevolent institution. Thus “benevolent racism” was born, much like Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, wealthy, religious whites gave themselves a pass to enact unspeakable terror on People and Land that belong to no one but themselves.
Benevolent Racism has become synonymous with neo-liberalism in modern times and it is a preferred way to operate for profit in Downtown Fredericksburg non profit industrial complex.
The only shelter for victims of domestic and sexual violence, Empowerhouse for example makes jokes about Native women during thanksgiving whilst we (along with Two Spirits) are still the most vulnerable people in the States to become missing and trafficked, Empower House ignored any attempt to engage in restorative justice for their blatant racism with Indigenous Leaders. I know, they are hardly a staple of tourism, except when businesses partner up for mutually financially beneficial endeavors like fundraising pop-up events. The true behemoth of bigotry in the non profit world of FXBG is Moss Clinic whom are still refusing to address accusations that their nurse practitioner Judith Price is a white supremacists that targets Black Mothers and Latinx people in need.
If you are taking a stroll past the train tracks to gentrified Down Bottom, you can lay around Fredericksburg’s premier green space where rapists and the aforementioned racist white woman that turned the white bar hopping community into a call center to the FPD to complain on the only POC LGBTQ Safe Space in town anytime we had a show. A woman that worn blackface on the front page of the paper and a rapist were paid to re-invent themselves as community leaders by teaching black children to garden for profit. When Indigenous and Black community activist raised concerns they were served a barred notice on their own’s family neighborhood. This wasn’t the first time I tried to help them push past their white supremacy: I personally tried to work with Downtown Greens Inc since circa 2007 on a free food garden project and was told it’d be impossible to upkeep because “those people” (the Black and Brown community there) “don’t keep things clean” fast-forward to 2017 where most of their money that goes unaccounted for is coming from performative programs that exploit the community that is still there as their beautification projects continue to be the flagship for gentrification in a Historically Black neighborhood. We end this year with radio silence when asked to meet and resolve this matter as their bar notice is harmful and violent still and it is keeping me from my community in Fredericksburg.
I confronted all these places in particular for their racist praxis for over three years before they formed an alliance to report me to the FPD and have me charged and eventually removed from the City of Fredericksburg as a public nuisance for instigating racial violence. Since then, I have been blessed to move in and around different cities, counties and small towns throughout the South but specifically here in Virginia doing social justice teaching and community advocating and I see a pattern in practice, this weekend I will be publishing two pieces on what to look out for, why it matters and how we can fight back.
Reverend Doctor Leonina Arismendi Zarkovic crowned Mix Trans Latinx DMV 2020 is Politburo of the Virginia’s Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and Co-Director of Santos en Virginia, they are a language justice expert, award winning writer, poet and artist from Uruguay living in the US South.
Doctor Leo travels across the state teaching about Decolonization and fighting for immigrant justice in the South. If you like what you’re reading, consider donating $1 to ‘set the captives free’ through Santos en Virginia, a state-wide immigrant defense and bail fund (www.thesantos.org)
