Oh, Virginia…

Virginia is a place of contrasts:

Home of both the Capital of the Confederacy and the nation’s first African-American governor, Douglas Wilder.

Birthplace and residence of Thomas Jefferson, writer of the words “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” who also at any given point in time enslaved around 200 people including Sally Hemings with whom he fathered several children making it undeniable that this revered founding father was also a rapist.

We are the northernmost southern state, with a nice tradition of Democratic governors and Senators and a statehouse that has been gerrymandered to be red for the foreseeable future.

We have mountains and the beach. Tobacco farms and a future Amazon HQ.

We aggressively seek the future while all the time wrestling with our past as the first place that enslaved people stepped foot on American shores in 1619 at Jamestown.

We are a microcosm of America as a whole, struggling between the idea of who we know we can be and the reality (denial) of our original sins.

As my son said when he was smaller “Virginia is the best state because we’re south enough to have good food like real fried chicken and biscuits but northern enough that we don’t have to look at too many confederate flags.” He’s not wrong.

With this podcast I hope to explore that push and pull between our past and our future and tell the untold stories of Virginia that make us who we are: stories of how power ultimately dictates who gets to write the histories that we read. Stories of crime and disenfranchisement and murder and theft, the theft of labor and of life itself, and of women and people of color and how both suffer at the hands of the powerful, the greedy, and the mean.

I really hope you like it.

Please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we’ll see you soon.

xoxo
Jenny