Against my better judgement I’m going to throw my 2 cents in as the parent of a current UVA student who loves the city of Charlottesville. Because it is relevant to the discussion at hand I am a white person with black, Asian, and mixed race siblings. In other words I experience the world fully as a white person but my eyes might be a teeny tiny bit wider open than some white people.
The heart of C’ville (including UVA) is a bastion of liberalness surrounded by a sea of conservatism. Driving to and from C’ville prior to the election there were Trump signs everywhere, some of them are still up months later. Confederate flags are also not an unusual sight.
I think the point of the article is to challenge the white liberals of C’ville who according to my daughter can be a smug self righteous lot (something you can say about many people on either edge of the political spectrum). It seems to me that the author is saying to those people who rightly reacted in horror to what looked very much like a lynch mob that their counter protest feels a bit hollow when his experience is that these same people like the idea of blackness but not the reality of it.
This is a fair criticism of many majority white liberal communities and isn’t unique to C’ville.
The challenge is what do we about that, not just in C’ville but elsewhere in the country.