Yes, Virginia, Slavery Was Real

And yes, Virginia, your deeply entrenched legacy of racism is showing. It is ugly and the way you are addressing it (I’m talking to you, Governor Northam) is exasperating and shameful.

I am a Virginian. I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia; was (moderately) educated in its Hanover County public schools (Battlefield Park Elementary School, Stonewall Jackson Junior High School, and Lee Davis High School—need I say more?); and, I received my nursing degree from the Medical College of Virginia. Oh yes, and I was married and had my son there. I was a Virginia resident for the first thirty years of my life. I worked with former white (and blatantly racist) classmates of Governor Northam.

This past week I have had colleagues and even (non-Virginian) family members ask me if this whole “blackface and KKK garb” at college/medical school parties and even in yearbooks was really that widespread in the 1980s. Of course it was. Does that make it okay? Of course not. Everyone knew how hateful and racist it was.

Governor Northam is showing his true white male supremacist color in how he is handling the ‘outing’ of the blackface/KKK garb photo on his medical school yearbook page. Promising to read Ta-Nehisi Coates, as if that will provide the ‘magical negro’ cure for his own racism? Digging his heels in (because he can) and proclaiming, “I’m not going anywhere” and that he “has grown” over the past week of controversy? How he is acting now is the true measure of the man—and of the state of racism in our country.