While being interviewed by a journalist concerning his latest charges of blackface/Klan Kostume racism, Northam casually referred to the 400th anniversary of slavery in Virginia as the first arrival of “indentured servants”. He was immediately corrected by his interviewer, and Northam agreed, but it reveals a little about the how the culture of racial superiority (perhaps “exceptionalism” is a more appropriate term) has persisted so long and insinuated itself into every aspect of society.

Indentured servants, were, of course, not slaves at all. They voluntarily signed a contract to be temporarily treated like slaves in order to pay off their passage to the New World colonies…much like a modern day corporate intern. They were also white.

Slavery was permanent, mandatory, racial, and violent, involving forced abduction, brutal discipline, repatriation, incarceration, and applied to your posterity–forever. Everyone knows this, except, apparently, Governor Northam.

Like many other Southerners (and I include myself), the Governor was the product of an educational system and a cultural indoctrination that endeavored to de-emphasize and cover up the sheer brutality and cruelty of the American slave trade. This indoctrination included the fictions about how slavery was not really “all that bad”, how slaves were valuable property and their masters were motivated to take good care of them, just like they did their livestock. I presume this extends to rape, considering the large fraction of Caucasian blood in most American Negroes. But it mostly ignores Black Betty, the bullwhip. Wham-a-lam.

My Spanish ancestors in Cuba also had African slaves, and also exploited and treated them brutally, but they never felt the need to justify it morally and intellectually to themselves after Emancipation. Of course, in Cuba, slavery was ended (in gratitude) after the Spanish Crown was defeated by revolution. the slaves had fought bravely alongside white Cubans to defeat the Spanish. In North America, slavery persisted long after Independence.

We were also taught how the causes of the Civil War were truly philosophical, cultural, economic and political, and that slavery had little to do with it.
Fortunately, today we have the Internet, and we can easily look up and read for ourselves the Declarations of Secession of the Confederate states and see what an outrageous and deliberate lie that is. In the brief (two page) South Carolina (where Ft Sumter is located) Declaration of Secession, the root word “slave” appears eighteen times. OF COURSE that is what was primarily on their minds, not philosophy, culture, economics or politics.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

Slavery made possible the immense fortunes of a tiny, land-owning elite and the modest middle class that helped them administer that plantation culture. The vast majority of poor, white Southerners were conned into thinking that they could get a piece of that action too. Greed and ignorance begets oppression and violence, same as it ever was.

Its sad, because Governor Northam’s political record has shown him to be genuinely positive on racial and rights issues, and he enjoys many black supporters. His costume excursions into Jim Crow were relatively harmless and occurred decades ago, and can (and should be) forgiven. But they are evidence of a sleazy history that extends way beyond him, to the society itself.

But these latest remarks do illustrate how the South has hypocritically rewritten history in order to cover up its cruel and vicious past. It all fit in with the Confederate flag, the singing of Dixie, the Rebel Yell, the Confederate hero statues, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the whole cringeworthy and corrupt edifice about History and Tradition and State’s Rights and Suthin’ Culcha. I know. I was force-fed that bilge all through high school, officially, as part of the Florida State curriculum, and I recognized it exactly for what it was back then. After 50 years I see absolutely no reason to change my mind about it now. I know I haven’t forgotten, and I’m white. I can see why blacks can’t.

That hypocrisy is the one single most hideous aspect to American culture, and progress and redemption will be impossible until is is revealed for the filth and horror it really represents. The slave-owning culture of the American South is our analog of Germany’s own Nazi past, the death camps, gas chambers and the ovens, it deserves the same history and memory and reverence.