What's more offensive: a racist yearbook photo or structural racism?
More than a week has passed since the discovery of an offensive photograph – featuring a man in blackface and another man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit – in the 1984 medical school yearbook of Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam.
The photograph set off a national firestorm, with a wide array of Democratic and Republican party politicians and high-profile activists calling on Northam to resign, declaring him to be unfit to serve.
Shortly after the scandal broke, I made the case in both a Quillette piece and on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show that Northam’s apology for a mistake made 35 years ago should be accepted. Washington Post polling of Virginians shows that I’m not alone in my argument – the state is equally split
on whether Northam should resign. Interestingly, 58% of African Americans say he should not.
Increasingly, parts of the American political left have developed a puritanical mentality of shaming individuals who are perceived to be racially insensitive. Social media mobs kicked up on Twitter have targeted everyone from 15-year-old teenagers on the National Mall to an autistic woman in Brooklyn. But no amount of naming and shaming individuals who on occasion have behaved in misguided or obnoxious manners will change the structures that produce inequality – just as giving lectures to gang members or publicly shaming thieves won’t alter the structures that produce those forms of antisocial behavior.
The North Carolina pastor and progressive activist Rev William Barber argued as much in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post. “Scapegoating politicians who are caught in the act of interpersonal racism will not address the fundamental issue of sys
temic racism. We have to talk about policy,” he wrote.
The work of civil rights in Virginia, where I live, is not just about ensuring public officials don’t cause racial offense. Almost a third of African American children in Virginia live in poverty. Surely the long-term developmental harm of growing up in poverty is far greater than the emotional harm Northam caused. If a photograph is a scandal, the conditions we are allowing our children to suffer in are a crisis.
Northam should commit himself to building a Virginia where everyone, no matter their race, can live a life of dignity and prosperity. His move last year to expand Medicaid, which benefits 400,000 low-income Virginians, about a third of who are African American, is a good start. But there is more to be done.
Barber points to the case of a gas pipeline project in a historically black community founded by freed slaves in Union Hill that many fear will exacerbate environmental and health problems. In addition to intervening in the Union Hill case, Barber advises that Northam and any other politician who has caused racial offense should be committing to “expand voting rights, stand with immigrant neighbors, and provide healthcare and living wages for all people”.
One thing I would add is eliminating Virginia’s prohibition on collective bargaining for public workers. The public sector has long offered better job security and benefits than comparable jobs in the private sector; it is particularly important in promoting racial equity because it has been an important source of employment for African Americans. But because of Virginia’s onerous anti-labor laws, Virginia’s public teachers can’t, for instance, go out on strike – an important tool that has helped teachers earn better wages, benefits and conditions for their students in other states.
Northam has appropriately apologized for his offensive yearbook photograph. But the poverty and environmental injustices that African Americans in the state of Virginia face are even more offensive. One question is whether he will now commit himself to tackling this far greater offense. A larger question is if the American left can show him mercy and compassion so he can be allowed to do that.
Zaid Jilani is Greater Good’s Bridging the Divides writing fellow