Keep in mind Virginia’s First Lady did this after Governor Northam’s black face revelations. From the Washington Post:
A Virginia state employee has complained that her eighth-grade daughter was upset during a tour of the historic governor’s residence when first lady Pam Northam handed raw cotton to her and another African American child and asked them to imagine being enslaved and having to pick the crop.
“The Governor and Mrs. Northam have asked the residents of the Commonwealth to forgive them for their racially insensitive past actions,” Leah Dozier Walker, who oversees the Office of Equity and Community Engagement at the state Education Department, wrote Feb. 25 to lawmakers and the office of Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
“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,” she wrote.
Northam’s office and one other parent of a child who was present said the first lady did not single out the African American students and simply handed out the cotton to a group. But the incident highlights the scrutiny and doubt that envelop the governor as he tries to push past racist incidents from his past and ignore continued calls for his resignation. His first attempt at a “reconciliation tour” failed last week when the student government at Virginia Union University asked him not to attend a civil rights commemoration there.
As the article states, Mrs. Northam didn’t single out the black students specifically but instead handed the cotton to the group of students. However, after weathering the media firestorm that resulted after her husband’s college black face antics came to light (which, unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on which side of the issue you’re on – buried his God-awful statements in favor of infanticide), you’d think Governor and Mrs. Northam would do everything possible to avoid even the perception of racial insensitivities. Did no one on her staff suggest that handing out raw cotton and telling senate pages, some of whom they had to know were African American, to imagine themselves as slaves forced to pick it all day long isn’t a winning idea?
Good lord, the Northams are numbskulls. How did Ed Gillespie lose to these people?
