Among the lesser-recognized achievements of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s minstrelsy scandal is his deft ability to turn a rush to judgment into a rush in the right direction. When a photograph that appeared on Northam’s 1984 medical-school yearbook page surfaced last week, depicting a person in Ku Klux Klan robes standing next to a person in blackface, demands for the governor’s resignation came in rapid succession. The outrage, like arson, could be identified by its multiple points of origin. Progressives lamented that Northam had been a consensus candidate whom they had settled on, during the 2017 campaign, only after their preferred choice, Tom Perriello, a former U.S. representative, lost to him in the Democratic primary. If the photograph had emerged back then, they reasoned, it would have tilted the primary in a state where a fifth of the electorate is African-American. Conservatives, who in the Trump era seem to have installed spigots with hot and cold running indignation, seized on Northam as new evidence in their running argument that the Democrats are the real racists. That claim required great sums of temerity, given that the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2017, Ed Gillespie, ran an egregiously Trumpian campaign defined by nativism and a defense of the totems of the Confederacy. Donald Trump had tweeted that Gillespie “might even save our great statues/heritage!”
Others were drawn to more strategic—and darkly satirical—concerns. Northam’s resignation would result in Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, an African-American, being elevated to the governorship. The prospect of Virginia’s second black governor, after Douglas Wilder, coming to power as a result of his white predecessor’s being caught, however long after the fact, in blackface or a Klan hood seems like a lost scene from “Putney Swope.” That calculation became more vexing when allegations surfaced over the weekend that Fairfax had sexually assaulted a woman in 2004. (Fairfax has denied the charges, saying that the encounter was consensual.) Then, on Wednesday, Mark Herring, the Virginia Attorney General and the third in the line of succession to the governorship, confessed that he, too, had worn blackface, when he and some friends went to a party “dressed like rappers,” in 1980, when he was a nineteen-year-old college student. (Herring had previously called for Northam’s resignation.) Reckonings with history, both personal and societal, seem to be ricocheting across the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Yet there were other reasons that warranted taking a pause before calling for Northam’s resignation. The governor ran on a progressive platform that included free community college, greater access to health care, criminal-justice reform, a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, and a rollback of voter-suppression laws in the state. Every one of those things would have disproportionately benefitted the black residents of Virginia. The yearbook photograph is indisputably terrible. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a monument that commemorates the victims of lynching and racial terrorism in America, lists more than four thousand black people who lost their lives to recreational murder in the South. No person who has even the dimmest recognition of what happened to those victims could find humor in a Klansman’s robes. Yet the more salient question, one that could not be answered in the clamor for Northam’s immediate ejection, was how his moral sensibilities had evolved in the intervening three decades.
The odds are high that a fifty-nine-year-old white Southerner would have grown up in a climate of ambient racism. The odds are also high that such a person might never find reason to publicly renounce that past. There is, however, an important tradition of white Southerners—Lillian Smith, Harper Lee, Howell Raines, Diane McWhorter, and, more recently, Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans—publicly grappling with the racist legacy of the region and their own efforts to move beyond it to discover a broader recognition of humanity. (The late Robert Byrd, who served for more than fifty years as a senator from West Virginia, spoke openly about the wrongheadedness of his youthful membership in the Klan.) The example of Landrieu, a possible Presidential candidate in 2020, is particularly instructive. In 2017, he delivered a widely praised speech in which he not only called for the removal of racist monuments from city property in New Orleans but also explained the need to reject the warped view of history that had led to their erection in the first place. Northam’s situation was far more self-interested, but he nonetheless had, for a moment, space to address his prior actions in a way that might have at least been thought-provoking. But no. On Saturday, Northam held a press conference that was in equal measures bizarre and infuriating. After having apologized for appearing in the photograph—though he said he couldn’t remember which of the two men pictured he was—he backtracked, stating that he was neither the minstrel nor the Klansman, before confessing that he had, on another occasion, blackened his skin while taking part in a Michael Jackson dance contest. The problem, he implied, was not that he was being castigated for minstrelsy but that he was being castigated for the wrong instance of it. The governor’s wife had to all but physically restrain him from demonstrating his moonwalking skills.
It’s worth noting that, for all the fraught racial history in this country, there is no tradition of black college students gathering in drunken revels to perform chalk-faced imitations of white people. Or of feeling a need to whiten one’s skin on Halloween—because, otherwise, how would people recognize your Captain America or Daenerys Targaryen costume? The understanding is that the character that Chris Evans plays in “The Avengers” is named Captain America, not White Captain America.
Northam, with his admission to the Jackson imitation, almost seemed to be pleading to a lesser charge, but it was in itself deeply strange and disturbing. (Herring seemed to acknowledge something like this in his admission of his own behavior, saying, “It was really a minimization of both people of color, and a minimization of a horrific history I knew well even then.”) Jackson was probably the most famous man in the world in the nineteen-eighties, and, as a consequence, his outfits became a sort of iconography. A man wearing, say, a black jacket, a sequinned white glove, and high-water pants with white socks was not going to be mistaken for George Michael or Phil Collins. The need to darken one’s skin to complete the look suggests that Jackson’s race was part of the costume, that the darkness of Jackson’s skin was essential to his persona as a pop star. This is, of course, the exact offense of minstrelsy, the pairing of persona with pigment, the suspicion that one’s essence is epidermal. In that regard, it’s irrelevant whether the imitation is performed out of derision or as homage; the same damning assumptions underlie both instances.
Northam’s fiasco began on the first day of February, Black History Month. The celebration has its origins in the work of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a historian who was born in 1875, in the state that Northam now governs. Woodson’s parents were born into slavery; he worked in coal mines, and did not begin full-time high-school studies until he was twenty years old. Yet he managed to earn an undergraduate degree from Berea College, in Kentucky, and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, and to devote his life to using scholarship to assail the doctrine of white supremacy. In 1926, he founded Negro History Week, which was eventually expanded into Black History Month. In the most inept and absurd of ways, Northam demonstrated the ongoing relevance of Woodson’s idea. If the question at the beginning of the story was what had happened in the thirty-five years since that photograph appeared in Northam’s yearbook, the governor has delivered an unequivocal answer: not nearly enough.
