And I thought Virginia’s first lady was the smart one. Shows what I know.
On Feb. 21, Pam Northam led groups of students who had served as pages in the State Senate on a tour of the governor’s mansion. When they reached the cottage adjacent to the Executive Mansion, Northam passed out samples of raw tobacco and cotton to the pages, including three African-Americans, and reportedly instructed them to picture what it would be like to pick the crop as a slave.
“Mrs. Northam … asked these three pages (the only African American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” Virginia’s Office of Equity and Community Engagement’s Leah Dozier Walker, who is both a Democrat and an African-American, said in a Feb. 25 note to state lawmakers and the governor’s office.
It added, “I can not for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”
Walker’s daughter, who participated in the tour, claims the black pages were singled out. However, the governor’s office and the parent of at least one other student deny this, according to the Washington Post. They say Northam addressed the group generally, adding that the samples were passed around to anyone who’d take them.
“The Governor and Mrs. Northam have asked the residents of the Commonwealth to forgive them for their racially insensitive past actions,” Walker’s letter reads. “But the actions of Mrs. Northam, just last week, do not lead me to believe that this Governor’s office has taken seriously the harm and hurt they have caused African Americans in Virginia or that they are deserving of our forgiveness.”
The governor’s office stresses Northam didn’t single out any black students during the tour. It also says the part with the tobacco and cotton samples was meant only to educate about the hardships suffered by the slaves.
“I regret that I have upset anyone,” she said in a statement provided to the Washington Post.
It’s okay, preferable even, to give Virginia’s first lady the benefit of the doubt. It could’ve all been a terrible misunderstanding. Perhaps she misspoke or made eye contact or any number of things that could’ve been misinterpreted by the offended parties.
But, my God! With everything else plaguing Virginia Democrats, you’d think the governor’s wife would be obsessively minding her Ps and Qs. This tour was just last week!
Her idiot husband, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, is still hanging onto office by his nails after a 35-year-old yearbook photo surfaced on Feb. 1 showing him dressed either in blackface or Ku Klux Klan regalia. He apologized for the photo, then denied it was him, then held a press conference wherein he revealed he donned blackface in 1984 to look like Michael Jackson for a talent show. Northam very nearly demonstrated for reporters that he can still do the “moonwalk,” but was advised against it by his wife. The governor’s staff has since hit on the idea of giving him assigned reading, including Alex Haley’s “Roots” and an essay written by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, to help him better understand the black experience. I’m not making any of this up.
Then there’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who is facing two (two!) allegations of sexual assault. Don’t forget Attorney General Mark Herring, also a Democrat, who revealed this month that he, too, donned blackface in his youth.
The sad thing is: All three men stand a good chance of surviving their respective scandals, as both their Democratic colleagues and the public aren’t pushing particularly hard to see them removed from office. The only thing that could end their tenures in office is a steady, unrelenting drum beat of bad news forces the state’s Democratic Party’s hand, things like Pam Northam appearing in headlines for reportedly handing out cotton to African American students.
