This is why it’s vital that students learn as much as possible about the many varieties of people who have lived, and died, on this land. To understand the experiences of a person in a fundamentally different time and place is to practice the skills you need to see your fellow citizens as equal people even when their lives are profoundly different and distant from your own. I think history education is one important way to build that empathy. We have to be able to see ourselves in one another to be able to see one another as political equals. To take discussions of race and racism out of the classroom would, in practice, make it impossible to teach Virginia state history beyond dates, bullet points and the vaguest of generalities.ĭemocracy requires empathy. Byrd), which controlled the state from the 1890s into the 1960s. Holton integrated Virginia schools and broke the back of the segregationist Byrd machine (named for the domineering Harry F. Linwood Holton, elected in 1969 as the state’s first Republican governor of the 20th century. Just this week came news of the death of A.
It is where, after that, English settlers developed an ideology of racism to justify their decision to, as the historian Winthrop Jordan put it, “debase the Negro.” It is where, in the middle of the 18th century, a powerful class of planter-intellectuals developed a vision of liberty and freedom tied inextricably to their lives as slave owners, and it is where, a century later, their descendants would fight to build a slave empire in their name.Īnd all of this is before we get to Reconstruction and Jim Crow and massive resistance to school integration and the many other forces that have shaped Virginia into the present. Virginia is where African slavery first took root in Britain’s Atlantic empire. Try to imagine what this would look like. In an interview with the journalist Alex Wagner, a leading Republican activist in Virginia said exactly this, asserting that it should be “up to the parents” to teach students about racism and condemning a school assignment in which a sixth grade student blamed President Andrew Jackson for violence against Native Americans. What this means, if the rhetoric of Youngkin’s strongest supporters is any indication, is an assault on any discussion of race and racism in the state’s classrooms. “A path that promotes conspiracies, hate, division, or a path focused on lifting up every single Virginian.” “We have a choice,” said McAuliffe at the same event. “I ran against Donald Trump, and Terry is running against an acolyte of Donald Trump,” said President Biden at a rally Tuesday night in Arlington. McAuliffe and his supporters want Virginians to feel that a vote for Youngkin is a vote for Donald Trump.
The battleground for this election, however, is culture, identity and the specter of the previous president. There are real, material issues at hand in Virginia, where I grew up and where I currently live, from transportation and housing costs to climate, economic inequality and, of course, the commonwealth’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Republican candidate is Glenn Youngkin, a private equity executive and newcomer to electoral politics. The Democratic candidate is Terry McAuliffe, who served as governor from 2014 to 2018 but was term-limited out of office. On Tuesday, Virginians will vote to choose their next governor.