February 3, 2019
On Friday, a picture surfaced from Governor Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook depicting two people side by side —one in blackface and the other in a full Klan uniform, including the hood. The yearbook is not from 1954 or 1964, but 1984, when Ralph Northam was a 25 year old fledgling doctor, (Source: “Virginia Governor defies national uproar,” by Laura Vozzella and Gregory S. Schneider, The Washington Post, 2/2/19). Northam’s reaction has been to play the befuddled country doctor, first apologizing, then denying he was in the photograph (the “Shaggy” defense), and then admitting he wore blackface on another occasion, in a dance contest where he impersonated Michael Jackson.
This would be comical, if the implications weren’t so grave. There is simply no excuse for an adult man in the 1980s thinking that dressing up in blackface and klan robes was harmless fun. Despite his denials, the presence of that picture on Northam’s yearbook page is a chilling window into, at the very least, what he thought of Black people as he was about to enter the medical profession. From James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” who experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia, to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which doctors employed by the federal government withheld treatment from Black male patients with syphilis and lied to them for forty years (!), to the “immortal” Henrietta Lacks, source of the famous HeLa cells which were harvested without the knowledge or consent of Lacks or her family, there is a long and sordid history in this country of experimentation and exploitation of Black people at the hands of white doctors. We have every right to say that the photo proves that Northam is unfit to lead the state of Virginia.
We need to understand that blackface and Klan images are two sides of the same coin, as both are rooted in a steadfast belief in Black inferiority. Blackface was born in New York in the 1830’s, using the mockery and denigration of Black people as a form of “entertainment” that would codify white supremacy across class lines (Source: “Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu).
Blackface caricatures depicted Black people as “ignorant, bumbling buffoons who were totally out of place outside of the South,” cementing the image of African Americans as “people who would rather play than work, rather frolic than think,” a pernicious legacy that we are still combatting more than a century later (Source: “Behind The Blackface, Minstrel Men and Minstrel Myths,” by Robert C. Toll, AmericanHeritage.com, April/May 1978).
As for the Ku Klux Klan, even the most right wing Republican acknowledges its history as a terrorist organization. It was founded by former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the aftermath of The Civil War, for the express purpose of preventing newly freed enslaved Black people from attaining political or economic power (Source: “Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism”, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC.org, 2/28/11).
There is no way that a Southerner would be ignorant of this history in 1984. In 1984 Jesse Jackson was running for President and on her sitcom, “Gimme A Break,” Nell Carter explained that blackface was tantamount to calling someone a “n—ger.” The fact that Northam didn’t believe that this was something he had to address until it was exposed, and that, even now, he is digging in his heels and refusing to resign, shows what he thinks of Black people. That is disqualifying enough. Northam must resign!
#ResignRalph