![]() ![]() It’s among black people’s worst nightmares, that our political allies may harbor unexamined cruel, even mocking thoughts about us. Of course, I understand why Northam’s yearbook photo, and the others, are so wrong. Anthony Sabatini, a state representative in Florida, dressed in blackface while in high school as a prank with a black friend. Tommy Norment edited a yearbook decades ago that included racist slurs and photos. Comedian Joy Behar wore makeup darker than her skin at a party long ago. The list of offenders is already lengthy. ![]() If we do, it may well be black people who suffer the most, because the superficial will have been conflated with the deep and pervasive, and the energy we should have been spending on dismantling mass incarceration and a legacy of segregated housing and education that still affects much of the country will have been wasted on blackface hunts. Though the blackface awakening is good and overdue, it doesn’t seem wise to “cancel” all past offenders. If this expanding purge of those who committed any racial sins in their past keeps engulfing more people, in a few years we could look back at 2019 as the year of dumb, destructive racial politics. Are we really focusing on the roots of America’s racial problems, or just working ourselves up over a single symptom? The rally was held to protest the removal of statues in a public square dedicated to men who seceded from the United States to create a new nation where white people would be able to continue to enslave black people.Īmid such a dismal state of racial affairs in the country today, one has to wonder if all the (justified) outrage over blackface is being aimed at the correct place. The Herring news happened in a state where a protester was killed during a rally of white supremacists and white nationalists in 2017. It’s the same Congress that includes a representative who recently defended the term “white supremacist” in an on-the-record interview with the New York Times. The Herring news came about 12 hours after Donald Trump, who had risen to national political prominence with the enthusiastic support of white nationalists, gave the State of the Union address before a still mostly white Congress. Other things were happening in the United States, too. (Northam has denied being either man.) The Internet was soon alight with 2020 Democratic presidential contenders calling for Northam to step down and an endless number of think pieces about blackface. Unless you’ve been living in an off-the-grid cabin, you know it was the second blackface incident in the state in a week: Last weekend, a Virginia newspaper published a photo of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page from the 1980s, showing two students dressed up, one in blackface and the other as a Ku Klux Klan member. Shortly after leaving the meeting, I came across the biggest news of the day: The Democratic attorney general of Virginia, Mark Herring, admitted to dressing in blackface in 1980 when he was a 19-year-old college student to portray iconic rapper Kurtis Blow. My job is to help the court understand he is more than one alleged act, even one as despicable as murder. He’s charged with the shooting death of a convenience store clerk. ![]() On Tuesday, I had a meeting with two women, one a psychologist, the other a lawyer, trying to keep a young black man I once mentored off death row. ![]()
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