Cousin of woman killed in Charlottesville: We have not eliminated racism

The cousin of Heather Heyer, who was killed last weekend amid racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., expressed her disappointment over the lack of attention on racism in the U.S.

“Why is it that the death of a white woman at the hands of a white supremacist group has finally gotten the attention of white folk? Why have we been turning our heads the other way for so long? How many black families, Latino families, Asian families, Native-American families before us have been left broken from this ugly vein of hatred in our country? Too many,” Diana Ratcliffe wrotein a CNN op-ed on Saturday.

Ratcliffe uses the op-ed to go after white supremacists, saying society has allowed them to accumulate too much power.{mosads}

“The so-called ‘alt-right,’ or the white nationalists, have no place in America, and they don’t deserve a place on our political spectrum,” she said. 

“We elected a black person, we made friends with some minorities, and we patted ourselves on our backs, saying, ‘Well done self, we have eliminated racism,'” she continued. “Clearly, we have not. It’s been lurking in the shadows, waiting in the spaces of the words we say and the words we don’t say. The actions we take and the actions we don’t take.”

Ratcliffe’s comments come exactly one week after her cousin was killed when a car drove through a crowd of demonstrators who were counterprotesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. 

Heyer’s mother made headlines on Friday when she ripped President Trump’s response to the racially charged violence, in which he said “both sides were responsible. 

“I’m not talking to the president now. I’m sorry, after what he said about my child. It’s not that I saw somebody else’s tweets about him. I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters, like Ms. Heyer, with the KKK and the white supremacists,” Heyer’s mother Susan Bro told ABC’s “Good Morning America.“