Political Mayhem Thursday: Seriously, Virginia?

Someone once criticized me at Baylor for posting the above photo because it depicted beer. (It also depicts Larry Bates, of course. And in retrospect that may be the most Texas-y photo of me ever). I felt sheepish and took it down.

That little scandal is nothing compared to the very serious impact some photos have had in Virginia lately. In a nutshell, both the Governor and the Attorney General of that state have admitted to wearing blackface in public in the 1980's as students (at Eastern Virginia Medical School and UVA respectively). Meanwhile, the Lt. Governor is embroiled in a sexual assault controversy.

As someone who was a student in Virginia in the 1980's (at William and Mary) I find myself both shocked and not-so-shocked by the blackface images.

When I got there, I was taken aback by the racism of the state, at least among some of my peers. Importantly, this is not to say that the community I left wasn't racist-- Grosse Pointe most certainly was-- but somehow I think I expected college to be different. I found some spaces where there was less of it. Classes, especially those taught by black professors like Dr. Joanne Braxton, were usually such spaces. So, perhaps surprisingly, was my fraternity, which had a significant black membership. That was unusual, and some other fraternities seemed to have express or implicit racial bars. I wouldn't hold out Theta Delt as a den of virtue, but we were relatively free of racism (and "relatively" certainly does not mean completely).

There were other places, though, where the kind of things that emerge in these photos certainly would have been more normal. One would have been Kappa Alpha, the "Old South" fraternity whose members would don Confederate uniforms for certain occasions.

I know that a lot of the people I went to college with view the Northam photo as a harmless prank. I disagree. It was wrong then and it is wrong now, even if you are elected to a high position. The racial harm in our country largely comes from decisions made in quiet corners where secrets are kept, and part of that realm is that things like blackface are seen as funny.

It seems that Virginia might have to start over again with a new slate of leaders.