Tag: blackface
Oust Ralph Northam? Most Black Voters In Virginia Wouldn’t

Oust Ralph Northam? Most Black Voters In Virginia Wouldn’t

 I have long loved the Commonwealth of Virginia, and everything else being equal might have chosen to live there. The sheer beauty of the state’s pastoral and mountainous landscapes soothed a New Jersey boy’s heart. Walking across the University of Virginia campus along the white-pillared porticoes on The Lawn afforded me a glimpse of an ordered life I’d hardly dared imagine.

And then I met this Arkansas girl at a reception in one of Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine-walled gardens, and never looked back. We went to hear Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys at a high school gym in the Nelson County boondocks. The music, see, bluegrass and blues, had drawn me southward. It would be years before the Arkansas girl confessed that she’d never really liked either one.

But I digress. “Mr. Jefferson’s academical village,” as it’s called, stands as a sort of eighteenth century theme park—a monument to a serene life its creator idealized but never lived. As a slave owner who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was one of the great men of the age; also among history’s great hypocrites.

Yet today, his white and African-American descendants—cousins all—meet yearly to acknowledge and celebrate their mutual heritage.

That’s Virginia.

So no, it’s not astonishing to me that a Washington Post poll reveals that Virginia’s African-American voters favor giving Gov. Ralph Northam the benefit of the doubt by 58 to 37 percent. They’ve been dealing with history’s brutal ironies for 400 years. Virginians overall are evenly divided at 47-47 percent about whether Northam should be forced to resign in the wake of that dreadful blackface/KKK photo in his medical school yearbook.

As an historical artifact, the offending photo is both sickening and absurd. Sickening in the unspoken assumption behind “blackface”: that African-Americans are essentially clownish and inferior, figures of fun. Also in the understanding that the Ku Klux Klan in their hoods and robes are an equally comical lot, socially inferior to very clever medical students playing dress-up at a Halloween party.

Absurd too in that as recently as 1984, intelligent white people would not only think it appropriate to wear such demeaning costumes, but to publish the photos memorializing the event. Amazing.

However, it was also amazing to me, as a Virginia grad student at the same age Northam was when the offending photo was taken, that just south of the James River, Prince Edward County closed down its public schools altogether rather than integrate. “Massive resistance,” they called it, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch was all for it. Most white Virginians were.

The way I saw things, it was a bit like living in a foreign country: not my responsibility. I do recall once making a remark in a class on Southern literature to the effect that I was getting tired of lamentations for the Confederacy. A high school teacher in the front fixed me with a glare.

“Ever since the war,” she began, “and there was only one war…”

She pronounced it “woe-ah.”

OK, enough nostalgia. The point is that Virginia has been a very different place within living memory. Actually, several different places, and the Eastern Shore, where Gov. Northam grew up on a farm outside the rural community of Onancock has never been a hotbed of social justice. Separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay, it struck visiting reporters from the Postlast week as “a place apart from the rest of Virginia, yet a place where the history of black and white is as painfully enduring as anywhere.”

But, see, there’s also this other yearbook photo of Ralph Northam, depicting him as one of two white players on the Onancock High School basketball team. When the local schools integrated during his sixth grade year, Northam’s family disdained the private seg academies that sprung up. Nobody there depicts him as either a saint or an ogre, but neither does anybody recall his using racial slurs—ever in his life.

No rebel flag for him, he once told a friend: Because that war is over.”

“Friends, neighbors and schoolmates—liberal and conservative, black and white,” the Post reported, “rallied around Northam last week, not simply because he is from their town, but because they believe he is not what his yearbook page implies.”

For the past 13 years, Northam and his family have attended a black-majority Baptist church down the highway in Capeville, VA. A pediatric neurologist who long volunteered at a children’s hospice in Portsmouth, Northam ran for governor on a platform of racial reconciliation and Medicaid expansion, issues that earned him 87 percent of the African-American vote.

Northam made an ugly mistake 35 years ago, and he’s made a downright hash of explaining himself. Even so, it would be heartening to see a seemingly decent man survive one of these made-for-TV festivals of recrimination that have turned American politics so ugly.

We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

February is the time for the ritual observance of Black History Month — a brief period when schools, government institutions and even commercial enterprises feel compelled to commemorate a handful of famous black folk who made substantial contributions to American history. It’s a gimmick, an awkward and superficial observance aimed at ameliorating the centuries spent dismissing black Americans as marginal or worse, and I don’t care for it.

But this February has been overwhelmed by some perplexing news events that give me reason to think that some black history lessons are in order. If white men in power are as cavalier about smearing black shoe polish on their faces to mock their fellow black citizens as news reports suggest, then we ought to have a serious discussion about history. Not black history, but American history. The sojourn of black people in this country is, after all, part and parcel of American history — not some footnote or sidebar that is separate and distinct from the story of this nation. And much of that story, if told accurately, must dwell on the brutality, oppression, and rank discrimination that black Americans have endured.

The popularity of minstrelsy and blackface in the 19th century came out of that era’s ugly insistence on white supremacy and black inferiority. In minstrel shows, white performers smeared their faces with burnt cork to lampoon black folk as lazy, stupid, libidinous and criminally inclined. As whites portrayed them, blacks were happily enslaved, desperately in need of the “civilizing” hand of their white masters.

Nor was this “entertainment” limited to the Deep South. A group of singing, dancing, strutting white men in blackface, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, first appeared at a New York City theater in 1843. The stereotypes endured long after the war ended.

And their success spawned many imitators. Frederick Douglass once called blackface minstrels “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

Perhaps the particulars of that history have largely been lost to many of the whites of our era who have found donning blackface funny. That group includes not only Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam but also Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who admitted, days after controversy engulfed Northam, that he, too, had donned blackface as a college student. It also includes former Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who resigned last month after photos emerged showing him in blackface at a Halloween Party in 2005.

But you need not know the particulars of history to know that this is a cruel form of mockery, a throwback to a time and place when black people were deemed inferior by law and custom. Ertel was certainly mocking the traumatized black victims of Katrina when he presented himself for a party wearing blackface and a shirt that read, “Katrina victim,” with fake boobs underneath. The party was held just two months after the massive storm that killed more than 1,800 people and devastated countless more. That’s funny?

Northam has, so far, refused to resign, insisting on presiding over a statehouse struggling in a tsunami of scandal. (Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would presumably take the office if Northam resigned, has been accused of sexual assault.) Indeed, after first apologizing for appearing in blackface in a photo in his medical school yearbook, he later said he wasn’t in the photo. (Northam did, however, admit to smearing black shoe polish on his face to imitate Michael Jackson during a college dance contest.) He plans to hire a private investigator, according to published reports, to solve the mystery of a how such a photo could have appeared on his yearbook page. In the picture, by the way, the person in blackface is standing next to someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, another costume meant to be … amusing?

It is hard to imagine that anything uplifting or inspiring can come out of these tawdry episodes, but perhaps a bit of commonsense instruction is enough: Blackface is offensive and suggestive, at the very least, of racism. That bit of history should be consigned to the dustbin.

Danziger: The Old Dominion

Danziger: The Old Dominion

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.