Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., on Wednesday asked Heather Heyer’s mother whether the Trump administration had deliberately downplayed the reemergence of white supremacy in America.
Susan Bro, whose 32-year-old daughter was killed in 2017 when an avowed neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during the unrest in Charlottesville, Va., appeared before lawmakers as part of the House Oversight Committee’s hearings on confronting white nationalism.
“Has this administration blatantly failed to acknowledge the problem of white supremacy and in fact made decisions to cover it up?” Tlaib asked the panel.
“I will not give you my personal opinion, but I will tell you what David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Matthew Heimbach, um Jason Kessler have all thanked the current administration for giving them support, for giving them a platform that they have been missing for many years,” Bro replied.
President Trump has faced backlash for saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville clashes. After 50 people were killed in the shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Trump received further condemnation for failing to say that white nationalism presented a growing threat. The White House has stood by Trump’s comments and the president himself tried to clarify his remarks regarding Charlottesville, arguing that he did not mean white supremacists were fine people. Rather he was alluding to those who were there simply to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee., he said.
Bro, who founded the Heather Heyer Foundation after her loss, used her testimony to describe her child’s death in graphic terms before calling on lawmakers to help the country “do a better job of reporting hate crime,” but also “preventing hate crime.” She additionally acknowledged that Heyer had become the face of the issue because she was “a white girl,” while chastising those who refuse to recognize the gravity of the situation.
“I say to them, ‘Get your head out of the sand,'” she said. “The fact that you can be unaware is definitely a form of white privilege. The key tenet of white privilege is that you don’t have to see it. We have to choose to see it. And as long as America chooses to be nonracist, we’re not going to accomplish anything. We have to be anti-racist.”
