A reckoning about racism and sexual assault has left Virginia’s government in disarray, with the state’s top three elected officials—all Democrats—facing political crises that threaten to upend their careers and the state’s leadership. The controversy that has enveloped Virginia since Governor Ralph Northam admitted last week to wearing blackface took a shocking turn Wednesday, when Attorney General Mark Herring also admitted to wearing blackface at a college party. Just days prior, Herring—who is second in line for Virginia’s governorship—had called for Governor Northam to resign. The first in line, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, is also embroiled in scandal after a woman who’s accused him of sexual assault came forward Wednesday with details of the encounter. Governor Northam has refused to step down since a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook page emerged featuring a man wearing blackface posing next to a man wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit. If all three of the Democratic politicians resign, Republican House Speaker Kirk Cox is next in line to become governor.
Khalilah Brown-Dean talking:
It’s a really chaotic situation in my home state. I have a lot of family there. Virginia is near and dear to me, and it always will. But what’s happening right now is forcing people to really decide how much progress has been made in that state, whether it’s what’s happening at the University of Virginia, its long history of tension over issues of race and racial representation, or the latest allegations against the lieutenant governor. And it’s more than just about political party; it’s really about how the state continues to govern and move forward.
I grew up in a place called Lynchburg, Virginia, where those kinds of barriers, both physical barriers and perceptual barriers, were very real. My hometown had a number of public swimming pools. And after new legislation meant that those public spaces had to be integrated, instead of allowing black and white children to swim together, the city filled the swimming pool with dirt, and later with concrete, so that no one could be able to swim. There were entire school districts in the Commonwealth of Virginia that shut down for over a year rather than complying with the mandates of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to mandate integration of public schools.
But we don’t even have to go back that far, to the 1950s and the 1960s. This is a state where, two years ago, a group of white supremacists converged on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting, with tiki torches, “We will not be replaced.” So, that history, from the founding of the Commonwealth of Virginia to these more recent instances, show that issues of race, issues of discrimination and outright violence continue to be paramount.
Symbols are powerful. I spent yesterday at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and there is a poignant display there about the history of blackface, the ways in which theater performers used these exaggerated caricatures of black people to communicate not just their inhumanity or to deny their humanity, but to also convey stereotypes about blacks as being lazy, as being ignorant, of being lackadaisical and just happy to go around singing and dancing. That is damage, because when you make an entire group of people seem less than human, when you deny them the protections of citizenship, you create a situation where violence can fester, whether that is physical violence, whether that is the neglect of educational opportunities or inequality in the criminal justice system.
I think it’s good that AG Herring has admitted to his wrongdoing, but admitting to that does not mean that he shouldn’t be held accountable to not just his constituents, but to, really, the people that look to him for fairness as attorney general. They both need to step down. But beyond that, we need to start having real conversations and actions about blackface, about racial imagery. This isn’t just a Virginia problem. This is a national problem.
– there’s a long tradition, of U.S. elected leaders participating in or promoting blackface. a clip of Ronald Reagan introducing a white performer in blackface in the 1943 film This Is the Army.
I think it depends on who you’re asking about whether it’s remarked upon. You know, Spike Lee has a film called Bamboozled, where he traced the history of blackface, the ways in which blackface was used by performers of a number of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. To some extent, it was a way of them distancing themselves from the kind of discrimination that they faced. But it also was a very clear social indication of the boundaries of inclusion.
So, yes, you have Ronald Reagan introducing this performer. You have Ted Danson appearing at the Friars Club in blackface. And every year on college campuses, those of us who teach young people hold our breaths during Halloween and hope that someone is not appearing in blackface in a costume or posting on their Snapchat or Instagram some sarcastic remark that is actually dangerous because it undermines that safety. Look, people can learn, they can grow from those mistakes. They can become more aware of history. But that growth should not come at the expense of public safety of people of color in this country.
it’s the 400th anniversary, of enslaved Africans arriving on the shores of Virginia. We’re also in the middle of Black History Month. And what I think is dangerous is that too often people are willing to say this is a problem of the South. You know, I live in the Northeast, and I often tell people it’s really just “Up South.” People in the South may be more vocal about their views. They may be more direct in that. But we should not think that this kind of racial ignorance and racial animus is beholden to Southern boundaries.
At the museum I was at yesterday, they showed me a picture of a cross burning. And as people, you know, stood around this cross in their Klan hoods, that picture was taken in 1984 in Connecticut. So the same time that you see Governor Ralph Northam appearing in blackface, you know, in terms of his college picture, this is happening, the cross burnings, the racial imagery, the very clear boundaries of exclusion. Many of the ways that people targeted white ethnic immigrants in the North, coming from places like Ireland and Italy, that same kind of boundary gets replicated across the U.S. and has not been erased, even if people stopped talking about it.
– an old photo showing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell posing in front of a large Confederate flag has resurfaced—the photo first circulated in 2015—when he is getting some kind of honor from the Sons of Confederate Veterans event in the early 1990s.
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Khalilah Brown-Dean
associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University. She is from Lynchburg, Virginia, and a graduate of the University of Virginia. Her forthcoming book is titled Identity Politics in the United States.
— source democracynow.org | Feb 07, 2019