In a video posted online in the aftermath of the riots in Charlottesville, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally spoke directly to viewers, calling out to those watching from across the world to rally against those looking to persecute White people.
And as his voice rose, his defense growing more unhinged, I felt a growing urge to go home to Virginia, where the racists too felt so at home. I needed to make sense of things in the midst of separation and chaos. And so I did.
“Virginia is for lovers.” The state slogan beckons like the cool, blue waves that lap at its coastal edges in hot summer.
When George Woltz and David N. Martin worked up options for the state’s new tourism campaign in 1969—it would be the country’s longest running of its kind—the brief was to attract visitors. Younger ones. New audiences. New generations.
The visual language was graphic and youthful, white words in a serif font and a red heart, all on a black background. The ad team that worked on the campaign had considered qualifiers—“Virginia is for beach lovers,” “Virginia is for mountain lovers”—but ultimately decided the simpler road was the best. When some assumed the slogan was connected to the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which had legalized interracial marriage just one year before, the founders were quick to dismiss it. Though they did confirm the logo was meant to attract a young generation of visitors to the state—free-loving newcomers in search of adventure.
On the highways that rim the state and inside its airports that serve as gateway to the rest of the world, the logo invites you in, all warm hearts and friendly, slopey a’s and o’s. I have always loved seeing this sign upon arrival despite my home’s complicated past and my complicated relationship with it.
Virginia. The place where American slavery began. Home to the former capital of the Confederacy. A slice of North America between the Chesapeake Bay and Blue Ridge Mountains. The American South, with all its brutalities. When I went home and drove its highways to visit one family member after another, I was unnerved by how the Trump signs, American flags, and gun rights billboards seemed to appear in clusters on the backs of pickup trucks and in the windows of small shops. And yet there are few places I’d rather be than Virginia. That’s mainly because my parents created a different narrative for me there, one that was a safe space of love and family.
My childhood is not without the kind of stories that are commonly projected onto a young Black girl’s sense of self. When I was five, a classmate told me she was no longer allowed to trade snacks with me because her parents found out I was Black. Two years later, a White neighborhood playmate called me a n*gger. I grabbed him by both wrists, swung him around as hard as I could, and let go, sending him flying into a bush, the five or six other White and Black kids around me cheering me on. Because who wouldn’t want to be Black?
I would never experience discrimination verbalized in that kind of explicit way again. But I never quite lost my sense of preparedness for it, like an airbag tucked away inside me, ready to block any blunt force. And I lived in a part of the state on the coast by the Atlantic Ocean, relatively liberal compared to the parts further west, closer to Appalachia, where the politics and culture grew a deeper shade of red on the electoral map. No matter, those early introductions to racism didn’t dim my light. They didn’t make me feel lesser than but rather made me want to shine brighter.
When I was offered admission and an academic scholarship to the University of Virginia a decade later, I felt a sense of limitless possibility. It was a great school, the top-ranked public university in the country, with one of the nation’s best English literature departments, a course with faculty that included a US poet laureate and civil rights icon.
Beyond the academics, the school, now two hundred years old, is also famous for its storied past and picturesque campus in the rolling hills that approach the Blue Ridge Mountains. The school has the kind of classic beauty that makes it a hit with traditionalists; it’s ranked the most beautiful university in the nation and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and a National Historic Landmark.
While the college’s aim was to promote freedom of the mind, what wasn’t taught or discussed nearly as openly as the neoclassical architectural feats of the Academical Village or the high standards of Southern gentlemanly conduct was that Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves for his personal use, fathering six of his own, but also enslaved people to build his utopia. Or that following the school’s completion, roughly two hundred enslaved people worked on the university grounds. Or that within the school’s walls, researchers would build the nation’s most powerful eugenics program. “Even in Jefferson’s own imagining of what the University of Virginia could be, he understood it to be an institution with slavery at its core. He believed that a southern institution was necessary to protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North,” a report by the school in 2018 revealed.
Not that we needed a report to spell this out. Black students already understood this to be true. And the unspoken truth, only rarely touched on in the odd course here and there, created a general feeling of repression. Beneath the bucolic grounds, running through the raucous tailgate parties with the bow-tied boys and the girls in floral dresses, rumbled a tension between the school’s PR and its true history.
You had to work hard to find the Sallys, the women whose lives were swallowed up by the university. But there were many. I can remember days spent in the old library opening dusty slave narratives in search of evidence of what it must have been like to be a Black woman on those grounds two centuries ago. Many stories wouldn’t come to light until long after I left, many of them involving young Black girls: two students beat and raped a sixteen-year-old girl in 1826, an incident historians described as unremarkable for its day. In 1850, three students gang-raped a seventeen-year-old girl. In 1856, another beat a ten-year-old slave girl unconscious. Many of these students were men who grew up on Southern plantations, where violence was often considered the only way to achieve and maintain dominance. They carried that thinking to school.
Despite its history, my memories of UVA are largely good ones—a blur of raucous parties and close-knit friendship groups. I navigated the colonial buildings with a feeling that the school was mine just as much as it was anyone else’s, even if it was founded with people who looked different from me in mind. This was largely because of Sally rather than in spite of her. In my mind, the simple fact that my ancestors quite literally built the place fueled my sense of entitlement even when White students would wave the legacy of White supremacy like a flag. Sometimes they used an actual flag, the Confederate one, hanging it on a student’s wall, or once they draped it from a dorm window, prompting campus-wide protest from the Black student body.
Shortly after I graduated, a group of students wore blackface to a party, prompting outcry. A few years after that, a White student attacked a Black woman running for student council president, telling her “nobody wants a n*gger for president.” In the weeks before that, she had received threatening phone calls. None of these incidents ever changed the feeling among my network of Black fellow students and alumni that we deserved to be there just as much as our White peers. And none of these incidents seemed to prompt the White student body to consider why this was true. Throughout all the debate and town hall discussions that were the inevitable consequence, Sally remained on the periphery. The more we talked about race, the less we seemed to collectively talk about it. So many seemed willfully unaware of their unearned privilege.