Thursday, February 07, 2019
Political Mayhem Thursday: Seriously, Virginia?
Someone once criticized me at Baylor for posting the above photo because it depicted beer. (It also depicts Larry Bates, of course. And in retrospect that may be the most Texas-y photo of me ever). I felt sheepish and took it down.
That little scandal is nothing compared to the very serious impact some photos have had in Virginia lately. In a nutshell, both the Governor and the Attorney General of that state have admitted to wearing blackface in public in the 1980's as students (at Eastern Virginia Medical School and UVA respectively). Meanwhile, the Lt. Governor is embroiled in a sexual assault controversy.
As someone who was a student in Virginia in the 1980's (at William and Mary) I find myself both shocked and not-so-shocked by the blackface images.
When I got there, I was taken aback by the racism of the state, at least among some of my peers. Importantly, this is not to say that the community I left wasn't racist-- Grosse Pointe most certainly was-- but somehow I think I expected college to be different. I found some spaces where there was less of it. Classes, especially those taught by black professors like Dr. Joanne Braxton, were usually such spaces. So, perhaps surprisingly, was my fraternity, which had a significant black membership. That was unusual, and some other fraternities seemed to have express or implicit racial bars. I wouldn't hold out Theta Delt as a den of virtue, but we were relatively free of racism (and "relatively" certainly does not mean completely).
There were other places, though, where the kind of things that emerge in these photos certainly would have been more normal. One would have been Kappa Alpha, the "Old South" fraternity whose members would don Confederate uniforms for certain occasions.
I know that a lot of the people I went to college with view the Northam photo as a harmless prank. I disagree. It was wrong then and it is wrong now, even if you are elected to a high position. The racial harm in our country largely comes from decisions made in quiet corners where secrets are kept, and part of that realm is that things like blackface are seen as funny.
It seems that Virginia might have to start over again with a new slate of leaders.
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Even though I had lived in Virginia for almost 10 years when I reported to William & Mary in the late summer of 1978, I had not lived in "The South." And although W&M was certainly home to a significant percentage of fellow "Northern Virginians," we were constantly reminded by the students from the Richmond area and Hampton Roads, as well as other parts of the state that "NORTHERN Virginia," wasn't REALLY part of Virginia. The rest of "The Commonwealth" had a deeply ingrained set of traditions, accents, culture etc. And we did not fit in.
One of those traditions was institutional racism in the form of private schools. I was SHOCKED at how may of my fellow students from all over the state, but especially Richmond and Norfolk had gone to this or that "Academy" or "Preparatory School." And the interesting thing was that many of them had been pulled out of Public School in 1970... Why? That was the year the first Republican Governor in Virginia History, Linwood Holton, was inaugurated. He demanded that the school systems in Virinia Finally De-Segregate for real and stop their institutionalized separate but equal BS (Yes, in the olden days, the racists were the Southern Democrats/Dixiecrats-- in Virginia, the Byrd Machine). So what happened? Across Virginia white parents pulled their precious children out of public schools and put them in private, all-white schools.
Disgusting.
One of those traditions was institutional racism in the form of private schools. I was SHOCKED at how may of my fellow students from all over the state, but especially Richmond and Norfolk had gone to this or that "Academy" or "Preparatory School." And the interesting thing was that many of them had been pulled out of Public School in 1970... Why? That was the year the first Republican Governor in Virginia History, Linwood Holton, was inaugurated. He demanded that the school systems in Virinia Finally De-Segregate for real and stop their institutionalized separate but equal BS (Yes, in the olden days, the racists were the Southern Democrats/Dixiecrats-- in Virginia, the Byrd Machine). So what happened? Across Virginia white parents pulled their precious children out of public schools and put them in private, all-white schools.
Disgusting.
Living in North Carolina and Virginia much of my life means I'm not surprised at the blackface, either. But what's going on with Gov. Northam and AG Herring makes me really sad: it's more evidence that slavery is evil and has endless, lasting effects, 150 years after it officially ended. I wonder how much longer it will take in this country for the vestiges of it to disappear, and to stop affecting each new generation?
And, politically speaking, it would be interesting (well, really creepy and awful) to see how far down the chain of command in the Virginia House and Senate the admissions of blackface would go, if they all 'fessed up. I have no doubt that lots more white legislators from both parties have blackface in their past. Brrr.
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