Let me put this together to see if I understand.
On February 1, 2019, the Virginian Pilot brought to light a yearbook photo from the Eastern Virginia Medical School class of which Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam (D) is an alumnus. The photo, on his yearbook page, showed two young men, one in minstrel show style blackface and the other wearing a KKK hood.
Northam's immediate response was to admit that he was one of the two young men pictured. It was not immediately clear which one, but he was clear that he was one of them.
"I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo," he said. That wording doesn't leave a lot of room for misconstrual. There were only two persons who appeared in that photo. Thus only two people made the relevant "decision," and Northam was saying he was one of them. He doesn't say which one, but that mattered little given how offensive either of them was.
In the hours that followed, a number of important people, inside and outside of Virginia, inside and outside of the Democratic Party, gave notice that the apology was inadequate without a resignation.
In the evening of Feb. 2, Groundhog Day, Northam held a press conference. He denied at this point that he was EITHER of the figures in that photo, and gave inconsistent explanations of why he had cleary said otherwise the day before. And he refused to resign.
It was a deeply weird conference in a number of ways. Most markedly, Northam took a digression into talking about a dance contest at which he had participated (and won!) dressed as Michael Jackson. This was by way of admitting that he HAD once appeared in what one might call blackface, although far short of the full-on minstelry of the party photo under discussion, which of course he was saying WASN'T him.
In the Michael Jackson connection, the deepest two points of the deep weirdness here were as follows:
1) he said he used only a little bit of polish in two small stretches under the eyes, because shoe polish is very hard to wash off -- it seemed that he was conveying a hard-earned piece of empirical knowledge. No one pressed him on the experiences that had caused him to learn how difficult that was BEFORE the dance contest incident; and
2) he seemed seconds away from showing off the contest-winning dance moves, actually looking about the stage as if judging whether the space was sufficient. Then his wife in a stage whisper said "Inappropriate circumstances." And he gave up the idea.
Dayyum Governor Northam. Can't wives be spoilsports! Video of you showing off your moonwalk would have "gone viral" in seconds. It might have broken the internet for real.
It seems odd that Northam would use blackface to resemble Michael Jackson, when Jackson had bleached his skin white. Can we say that he used whiteface?
ReplyDeleteThat struck me also. If I understand correctly, Jackson had a skin condition, vitiligo, which whitened his skin in patches. He bleached it to make it more consistent. But the idea that someone would darken skin (ordinary Caucasian-pinkish skin) as part of a Michael Jackson costume suggests just how socially constructed our idea of skin color, as a marker of 'race,' is.
ReplyDeleteOr race is a socially constructed marker of skin color. That is, a person of the Negroid "race" is viewed as black even if he or she is white. I am reminded of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson," which is about two boys born at the same time who both look white and have the same slave master father, but one's mother is the slave master's wife and the other's mother is the slave master's slave, who is descended from a long line of slave mothers and slave master fathers.
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