Without forgiveness, we will all be doomed
Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny?
Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered: presumably that’s him in the photograph; no, on second thoughts, it couldn’t be. The photo quality is poor, and the two jaunty figures holding cans of beer are disguised — one in blackface, the other in Ku Klux Klan robes.
So at first glance, given the date — not 1864, but 1984 — that yearbook pic’s goofy caricature of bigotry appears tongue-in-cheek. It looks like a joke — if also a joke that, in a climate of supercharged racial sensitivity, today’s Virginian med students would be far less likely to make. The context of the joke has been lost. Given my patchy memory of my own twenties, Northam plausibly has no idea what that picture is doing on his yearbook page or what story lies behind it. This is sheer speculation, but the target of the jest could have been not black Virginians but white Virginians and their notorious throwback racism. But to entertain that conjecture, you’d have to give Northam the benefit of the doubt.
We can’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt, not anymore. Nor can we cut anyone a little slack because what he did wrong was ages ago, when he was young, callow and foolish. The generations who’ve grown up with the Internet are bound to discover that their every gaffe lives forever, and can always be dredged up to demolish their prospects in perpetuity. Without clemency, we’re all doomed.
Ironically, considering that the new pitilessness derives largely from the left, that damning yearbook photo was initially circulated by a right-wing website gunning for Northam because he’s prochoice. Meanwhile, thanks to #MeToo’s new rubric of “guilty until proven guilty”, Virginia’s lieutenant governor (who’s black — which is, er, awkward) is also being pressured to resign after two allegations of sexual assault, charges whose gravity is being widely conflated in the American press with tactless makeup.
Granted, by 1984 blackface had already become uncool. But the practice has since escalated from not-agood-idea to the Worst Crime in the Universe Ever, and it is in those hyperbolic terms that the yearbook photo is being denounced.
The other remorseless lesson this scandal teaches is that the sum of your mature good works doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if you ever get caught having done one wrong thing, even 35 years ago. With no other racist stain on his record, Northam is a liberal Trump nemesis who attends a majority-black church. Having won the governorship in a closely watched Trump-barometer election in 2017, he’s already expanded Medicaid, benefiting many poorer blacks. Little wonder that a majority of black Virginians — 58 per cent vs 37 per cent — want Northam to stay in office, while the state as a whole is evenly split. So it’s other white people who are unsparing, who don’t believe in the possibility of redemption.
The concurrent Liam Neeson debacle is depressing in a similar vein. Straining to establish a personal connection to the theme of vengeance in his new film, he confessed to having experienced several days of murderous intent towards any arbitrary black male after a friend was raped by a guy who happened to be black. With the painful earnestness only Hollywood can marshal — the not entirely convincing story seemed overegged for promotional effect — he made no bones about those feelings being wicked and horrifying.
I have to be pushed pretty far to resort to Bible verses. But given last week’s prevalence of indignant posturing over specks in the eyes of the prominent, the logs in the eyes of their accusers could fuel my wood-stove for months.