Poor Ralph Northam! Well, the “embattled” VA guv has put down the shoe polish and eschewed the moon walk, but he’s still having trouble with the indentured servant thing. See, Virginians of his generation (he was born in 1959) know that slavery was a bad thing, but the strategy appears to have been, not to confess the sin but deny its existence. “They weren’t really slaves! They were just, you know, servants! Very, very hard-working servants!”
Afterwords
Northam grew up on Virginia’s “Eastern Shore”, that oddly shaped peninsula which is “shared” by Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia and protects the Chesapeake Bay from Atlantic storms. The Eastern Shore is notoriously conservative—back in the fifties, Prince Edward County shut down its public school system rather than integrate it. Still, Northam came from a much less privileged background than many of the people criticizing him (see Wikipedia for more) and attended a largely black high school. However, somewhere along the line, he acquired a dose of post-segregationist southern double-think on the subject.
I grew up in Falls Church, Va., a suburb composed almost entirely of northern transplants (the one girl in our class with a southern accent was a source of great amusement for her “funny” way of speaking). I attended segregated schools until my senior year, 1963. Falls Church was in fact incorporated as a city (previously it had been an “area”) in 1950 with the explicit purpose of maintaining an all-white, or almost all-white school system even in the event of federally mandated integration, which people could clearly see coming. My seventh-grade Virginia history book, Cavalier Commonwealth, though not explicitly racist, did not think to explain away slavery, as apparently later became the fashion. Slaves back then were called slaves.
