Head of School’s Statement on Events in Charlottesville

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Head of School’s Statement on Events in Charlottesville

As a school community, we express our mission and find great inspiration and hope from the very notion of enlightenment, illumination, and progress. We are proud that throughout our country’s history, schools have so often been the places where discrimination, hatred, and intolerance are exposed for what they truly are: violations of the human spirit, violations of the promise of our nation, and violations of religious principles of love, compassion, empathy, and understanding.

It has always been true that the forces of division, hatred, and supremacy never entirely surrender their dogma, dreams of recovery, and perverse passion for desecration and violence. For far too long in our nation’s history, this movement could turn words into action, into violence, into lynching. They await permission to try out their foul message again, exploiting complacency or more accurately, vulnerability in the national culture. They seek to capitalize on economic conditions or disruptions that kindle anger and suspicion.

We have seen this pattern over and over and over again, and each time the forces of hatred gather, we have to stand up and speak up for goodness, for human rights, for the dignity of all, for the power of what Bryan Stevenson calls proximity.

St. Andrew’s joins the unified voices all across the country and the world and from the political right and left in denouncing the message and doctrine of hate expressed by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Our response to this poison will be our 2017-18 school year.