NAACP: Learn from scandal about blackface
Words and images have meaning. They have weight. And they have consequences.
In America, the most powerful and dangerous of these words and images were born in times of intense oppression and hatred. These racialized depictions and icons of speech litter our current political landscape in the form of seemingly innocuous rhetoric such as “build a wall” to yearbook photographs of figures in blackface.
Though Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and now Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, are at the center of this latest controversy, the true problem does not begin or end with these two men. It did not begin or end with Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile or the litany of other Black lives. It did not begin or end with the tacit endorsements of white supremacist violence from our nation’s highest office. None of these events caused the racially charged violence plaguing our country.
Instead, they are the consequence of our nation’s collective unwillingness to recognize that 400 years of dehumanizing language and imagery have a cultural impact that expresses itself through explicit and implicit bias.
One can reach back to imperialism, slavery, segregation or the Jim Crow era, but it is not necessary. Flashpoints exist as recent as President Ronald Reagan and his words in Neshoba County, Mississippi. His callback to “states’ rights” — an assertion historically associated with the perpetuation of slavery — made in a former Confederate state with a close and continuing relationship with terrorism and lynching, was an inconsiderate choice of words at best.
This racialized imagery resurfaced in the late 1980s during George H.W. Bush’s campaign against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in an ad featuring an intentionally menacing portrait of Willie Horton. The image was to tap into the cultural fears that previous depictions had established: that Black people are inhumane criminals.
President Bill Clinton fueled the fires of bias in the cultural collective with his 1994 crime bill. Ostensibly presented to keep communities safe from the “superpredator,” the bill, with its incentives for harsher punishments and its threestrikes mandatory sentencing, once again correlated criminal behavior with African-americans. Clinton’s words and actions built on previous “war on drugs” legislation, the already growing trend of mass incarceration and the criminalization of being born with black or brown skin.
The cold numbers bare this truth out. The 1980s’ “Tough on Crime” era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration. Of those incarcerated, African-americans are sentenced to correctional facilities at more than five times the rate of whites. The “war on drugs” only enhanced the effect as, from years 1980 through 2007, African-americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than whites.
As a result of the deliberate act to criminal people of color, by 2016, African-americans represented only 12 percent of the U.S. adult population but accounted for 33 percent of the prison population, while whites accounted for 64 percent of the population but only 30 percent of its prisoners.
This criminalization phenomenon is not a partisan issue.
Words and images have power, and they can and have been used to threaten the livelihoods of communities of color.
Derrick Johnson is president and CEO of the NAACP.