The Northam’s only had two more days of Black History Month to go but it appears they couldn’t make it without another embarrassing racial gaffe. The Washington Post reports that Mrs. Northam handed raw cotton to a group of Middle-School-aged kids visiting the governor’s mansion and asked them to imagine being slaves. Only three of the 20 or so kids in the group were black and the mother of one of those girls is very upset:

Trained docents often lead tours of the Executive Mansion, which was built with slave labor in 1813 and is the oldest active governor’s residence in the country. In this case, Pam Northam — a former middle school teacher — took groups of pages to an adjacent cottage that had long ago served as a kitchen.

Before a huge fireplace with iron cooking implements, Pam Northam held up samples of cotton and tobacco to a group of about 20 children and described the enslaved workers who picked it.

“Mrs. Northam then asked these three pages (the only African American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” [Leah Dozier] Walker wrote. “I can not for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”

The governor’s office, which did not make Pam Northam available for an interview, said she simply handed the cotton to whoever was nearby and wanted everyone to note the sharpness of the stems and leaves on the raw cotton, to imagine how uncomfortable it would’ve been to handle all day.

It seems the parent’s letter partly mischaracterized what happened during the tour. A parent of one of the other kids present that day said his daughter told him Mrs. Northam did not single out the black children but handed the cotton out to everyone:

Sen. William M. Stanley Jr. (R-Franklin), whose daughter served as a page this session, was among the group that the first lady took to the kitchen. Stanley declined to make his daughter available for an interview, but said she told him that Pam Northam handed the cotton around to all of the students.

“The first lady’s intent was to show the horrors of slavery and to make sure everyone felt the pain they felt in some small measure,” he said.

There’s nothing wrong with telling kids about the experience of slaves on a tour meant to be educational. And it doesn’t sound as if the presentation itself was intended to offend anyone or single anyone out. That said, there were only a handful of black students there. So, of course, it’s going to be extremely uncomfortable for them to be put in this position in front of their peers. You can imagine dozens of pairs of 13-year-old eyes darting toward the three black kids to see how they would react to being asked to imagine being slaves. No 13-year-old girl wants to be in that position for any reason and no parent wants their kids to feel singled out like that.

The girl whose mother complained was actually pretty gracious. She wrote a letter to Mrs. Northam which offered to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“I will give you the benefit of the doubt, because you gave it to some other pages,” the girl wrote to Pam Northam. “But you followed this up by asking: ‘Can you imagine being an enslaved person, and having to pick this all day?’, which didn’t help the damage you had done.”

I would classify this not as racist but as insensitive. But given Gov. Northam’s yearbook photo, the Northam’s were already skating on very thin ice. This story certainly isn’t going to help them win back the hearts and minds or Virginia voters or the party officials who have already asked Gov. Northam to resign.