BLACK LIKE THEE

Outrage is an easy emotional reaction. It feeds on our easiest emotion, anger, to which it is too close kin. It stems from all the wrongs done to us in the past but hasn't a lot to say about the present or the future. We are, unfortunately, in a time where our outrage is far too close to the surface. The very words "President Donald Trump" outrage me. Practically everything he, his cabinet and his supporters in Congress say and do is an outrage and much of it a violation of either the Constitution, our laws and/or our social norms. With the daily, if not hourly, beat of new outrages coming from our neo-Fascist Administration, Fox News, Info Wars and scum like Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh we are rubbed raw. Even thick skins have grown thinner with those of continually oppressed minorities like women, African-Americans and our LGBTQ brothers and sisters being the thinnest of all. That isn't a fault but rather a fact. The women exploited and raped, the African-Americans subject to hate, fear and ignorance at every turn to say nothing of the violence visited upon them and similar discrimination against those in the LGBTQ community have more than a right to be thin skinned and to respond with anger of their own to their treatment. However, that an angry response is understandable doesn't also make it inherently justified.

Let's look a little more coolly at the current mess engulfing the elected officials in Virginia as an apt example.

Democratic Governor Ralph Northam got himself into some hot water with the anti-abortion fanatics recently. I am not going to deal with that controversy here but it serves as the seed for what has followed. His support for abortion brought Northam to the notice of some right-wing fanatics who started scrounging around for something that could be used against Northam. What they found was a personal yearbook page from Northam's Medical School, Eastern Virginia Medical School, from 1984 with a photo of two people, one in blackface and the other in full Ku Klux Klan regalia.

As Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show, were this a photo of an actual black person and an actual Klansman side-by-side, raising their drinks together at a party we would see it as a positive photo. It is not that. It is two white people trying to be funny and shocking while demonstrating only their cosmically great insensitivity.

Northam has not helped his case any either. First, he apologized for being one of the people in the photo. Then he apologized for the photo, claimed that he wasn't one of the people in the photo and claimed that he didn't know how it got onto his personal yearbook page. Then Northam, deepening the ineptitude, claimed that he thought that the person in blackface in the photo might have been him because he's worn blackface at around the same time when he'd impersonated Michael Jackson in a dance contest. Then to dig the hole for himself deeper, Northam's wife barely stopped him from moon walking in response to a reporter's question. I will acknowledge that Ralph Northam has dug this hole so deep that, if he can see over the rim at all, it's only on tiptoe.

The bad news for the militant right-wing extremists who want to bring down the Democrats currently in power in Virginia is that Northam's lieutenant governor can't be accused of wearing blackface because Justin Fairfax is black. Such a simple fact never stopped the right-wing fanatics before so they have defaulted to the strategy that proved effective in ridding them of Al Franken*. They found a couple of women to claim that Fairfax had sexually assaulted them at some point in the past. Let me backtrack slightly and say that the women's allegations may well be true but they require some very serious investigation before I will and many others should take them at face value. The women's allegations appear at a time that is a little too convenient for the Republiscum Party in Virginia and do not appear to have any prior history. Is it not a bit odd that these allegations did not surface in 2018 when Mr. Fairfax was running for lieutenant governor yet as soon as there is a possibility that he could succeed to the office of governor they appear?

The allegations against Fairfax and Northam bring into play the further constitutional offices that may fall in the line of succession. Thus Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring is forced to step into the spotlight as third in possible succession to the governorship and admit that he too once wore blackface at a party potentially disqualifying him for his current office let alone the office of governor. To Herring's credit, he got ahead of the right-wing fanatics and admitted this incident himself.

So who's next? If the three top elected Democrats in Virginia have to leave office we get down to Republiscum Speaker of the Virginia House, Kirk Cox. Speaker Cox, however, has his own problem since he was the editor of his yearbook at Virginia Military Institute and, mirabile dictu!, that yearbook is rife with blackface photos, racial epithets and other outright racist nastiness. Then again, wasn't this whole campaign against Northam, Fairfax and Herring designed to put a Republiscum in the governor's office?

Lost in all this recrimination and character assassination are some questions that the people outraged by Northam's, Fairfax's and Herring's past behavior should be asking: are these men racists or sexual predators? What are the motives of their accusers? Are they governing well or badly. Are they the kind of people today who would think and behave as Northam and Herring did some thirty-five years ago or as Fairfax is accused of doing fifteen years ago?

We used to have a concept called "consciousness raising". People who held awful, if traditional views, of African-Americans, women and members of the LGBTQ community, could question their beliefs, learn about the people for whom they held prejudicial attitudes and come to a higher consciousness that put aside those negative views and values emerging as better people. Today with our outrage rubbed raw by Trump and other neo-Fascists, by the murder of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille, or Emantic Bradford, Jr., (this list is foreshortened but already 100,000 times too long), by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and elsewhere, by inaction over gun violence generally and school shootings in particular, by rapists whose money, power or success in sports make them immune to prosecution certain offenses whose actuality may be questioned loom large, often larger than warranted.

The aphorism, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," is most often attributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma. It implies that if we take revenge for each offense done to us then the whole world will soon be engulfed in tit-for-tat revenge that leaves everyone wounded and no one whole or satisfied. That aphorism might well be applied here. Is it not possible that people who were either of stupid or actually evil intent thirty five years ago may have grown and become wiser and allied to good over that time? If you are an African-American living in Virginia today whom would you believe might better respect your rights and treat you are a human being worthy of respect? Would that be Ralph Northam, Mark Herring or Kirk Cox or any other Republiscum? If you are a woman, who would better respect you as another equal human being and respect your right to choose what happens to your own body, Justin Fairfax or one of the Republiscum who want abortion outlawed when a fetal heartbeat can be detected?

I am not proposing that we ignore offense for some pragmatic advantage. I am suggesting that offenses of the past need to be viewed in the context of what has passed between the offense and the moment we are in now. If Ralph Northam wore blackface in the past and would wear it now, that's one thing. He has renounced it now and denounced it too. If the man has grown and become educated to the offense and distress that such behavior causes over the last thirty-five years I do not see why he must resign his office. That is equally true for Mark Herring. If a full and complete investigation of the charges against Justin Fairfax establish that he sexually assaulted his accusers then he doesn't belong in his office. If, on the other hand, his accusers are shills for some Republiscum fanatics then they should be exposed and Mr. Fairfax continue as lieutenant governor.

Finally, all this is taking place in Virginia amongst Virginians. Is it really so hard to believe that a white man in blackface was abnormal in any state of the old Confederacy yesterday let alone thirty-five years ago? That isn't an excuse but it sure provides context. Where would we expect to find consciousness raised less, less frequently and most recently than in the states of the old Confederacy? One would always expect that racism and its cousin, racial insensitivity, would be rife in the states that fought hardest for the evil of slavery. I don't give a pass to Northam or Herring because they are Virginians but rather I'm sure that it took longer for them to learn and grow out of racism than it did for many others.

I appreciate the source of the outrage. I understand how offensive these men have or may have been yet it is also true that their offenses were from a then that is now long past. If they are no longer the men they were many years ago that must count for something. The present man should be evaluated in relation to his past but the past must also be judged in relation to the present man.


* Some stupid clowning on Sen. Franken's part not withstanding, we know that his main accuser of sexual misconduct is a long-time right-wing activist. We also know that the allegedly "unwanted" kiss during a USO tour was a part of the show and had been rehearsed before the tape that showed the alleged "unwanted" kiss was made. Al Franken was railroaded out of office by the same right-wing that delayed him from taking his senate seat until July, 2009 and by Democrats who were all too eager to appear on the side of women in general without looking too hard at this woman in particular. In that sense Democrats had trapped themselves by going to bat for women who are actually too often ignored or disbelieved when they have actually been sexually assaulted because truly investigating the woman's charges looks too much like the rampant and egregious disbelief that most truly victimized women face. The right-wing fanatics like to catch Democrats and other Liberals in traps they have constructed for themselves especially when Democrats have no idea how to get out of those traps.