[For this year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!) anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
Five
pieces through which I’d chart my evolving, fraught feelings on my hometown.
1)
Talking
Points Memo (2015): I’d certainly written about Charlottesville here on the
blog before 2015, but it was with the violent
arrest of UVa student Martese Johnson in that year (also the origin point
for one of my favorite short
stories) that I really started to lean into public scholarly engagements
with race, community, and Cville, if in a pretty preliminary way at that time.
2)
Huffington
Post (2016): The evolving debate over Charlottesville’s Confederate statues
was a driving force in my continued thoughts, as reflected in this HuffPost
column—also the first time I started to more directly link, in my writing at
least, the city’s histories of segregation and racism to those broader
questions of collective memory.
3)
Segregated Cville
(2017): This Activist History Review article remains one of my favorite
pieces of my writing, not just about Cville but on any subject, and I’d ask you
to check it out in full if you read any one of the hyperlinked pieces in this
post. It brought together those two earlier columns, but also and especially deepened
my thinking about all the American histories and issues that Cville so
profoundly embodies.
4)
Saturday
Evening Post (2019): That’s one of a few Considering History
columns I’ve written about my hometown, but I’m focusing on it here because it
was the one in which I had the chance to write about the destruction of the
Vinegar Hill neighborhood, one of the most painful and telling stories from
Cville and any American community.
5)
Here
on the Blog (2020): Over the last five years I’ve returned many times in
this space to Cville, with updates on both its unfolding stories and my own
evolving thoughts. That’s just one example, and of course since 2020 my perspective
has likewise continued to shift. As I imagine it always will on my fraught,
frustrating, foundational hometown.
Next
love/hate place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?
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