When the past is truly prologue
God bless America! Somehow, we made it through the weekend without another blackface outbreak despite the fact that all elected officials’ high school and college yearbooks are being audited by the media for unconfessed Al Jolson moments.
Last week, Virginia politics was overcome by the spectacle of burnt cork on the faces of two of the state’s highest elected white officials and the stench of sexual assault accusations against the state’s black lieutenant governor.
Calls for the resignations of the top three elected officials, all Democrats, from the liberal base soon gave way to the realpolitik realization that Republicans would be the immediate beneficiaries. Even as the media became more invested in the absurdist elements of Virginia’s descent into “The Twilight Zone,” you could almost feel Democrats across the country lightly pumping the brakes.
Most of the announced Democratic presidential candidates who called for Gov. Ralph Northam’s resignation early in the week turned their fury to Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax once the second accusation of sexual assault against him surfaced. Suddenly, Mr. Fairfax was no longer a viable successor to Mr. Northam.
When Attorney General Mark Herring, next in the line of succession, also admitted to engaging in blackface antics while in college, Democrats realized that a zero-tolerance policy for racist foolishness would nullify the result of the last election and lead to a return of GOP rule.
It wasn’t as if the GOP was suddenly looking like the party of Lincoln in comparison. Virginia Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment Jr. admitted that he edited a 1968 yearbook that proudly showcased blackface and racial slurs. Mr. Norment’s defense was that he wasn’t in any of the pictures. It was beginning to look as if youthful idiocy and frat-boy racism were a non-negotiable requirement of being a white man in Virginia politics.
Even the threat to introduce articles of impeachment against Mr. Fairfax if he didn’t resign before the beginning of this week failed to materialize.
Polls emerged over the weekend and on Monday showing how Virginians — especially black Virginians — were recalibrating the cost of taking blackface insults too personally. While the moral authority of both parties had taken serious hits, the once odious Mr. Northam was looking a little more gubernatorial thanks to his miserable line of successors.
Mr. Northam began his apology tour by sitting down with CBS anchor Gayle King. Within minutes Sunday evening, Mr. Northam, newly acquainted with the concept of “white privilege,” exercised it aplenty by referring to the 30 enslaved Africans left behind by two Spanish slave ships as “indentured servants.”
This reflects the wishful thinking of “Lost Cause” historians who imply that the enslaved Africans who were sold to the Virginia Colony along the James River exactly 400 years ago were more like English-style servants than slaves in the antebellum sense. Never mind that none of these involuntary immigrants from Angola had signed contracts of indentured servitude or opted for one-way tickets to the New World, even though a few of them were given their freedom eventually. These were not folks overstaying their visas — they were enslaved even before Americanstyle white supremacy was born.
But before Mr. Northam could skate with his ahistorical reference to the “first indentured servants from Africa,” Ms. King insisted that he acknowledge it was “also known as slavery.” But even her correction allowed two vastly different kinds of oppression to be conflated. Slavery is slavery. Indentured servanthood involves a contract for personal services as a form of debt remittance, usually for seven years. It didn’t require the obliteration of the enslaved person’s humanity.
Monday, Mr. Northam’s office issued a follow-up statement. He referred to the men and women who arrived in Virginia in 1619 as enslaved, not indentured.
In what may be a sign that Mr. Northam will survive the blackface scandal, he expertly shifted the blame to the hack historians who have pedaled the trope that blacks were the summer help who forgot to go home: “A historian advised me that the use of indentured was more historically accurate — the fact is, I’m still learning and committed to getting it right.”
Probably the best thing about these cultural-political eruptions is that they are forcing Americans to take a look at our long and conflicted history, especially in areas of race and politics.
Since last week, every American who isn’t willfully ignorant has learned about the pernicious history of blackface, even when practiced by those who are ignorant of it.
We’re also learning that the cost of our continuing segregation from those unlike us explains our lack of empathy and our inability to see racial contempt for what it is. It isn’t just dumb bigots. We all have a capacity for cruel stupidity. American history proves it.