Something Rotten in the State of Virginia

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The state of Virginia has a problem.

Last week, a photo emerged from Governor Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook.

In it are two people at a party in 1984.

One is dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The other is in blackface.

Northam first apologized, then said he wasn't in the photo, then said he once wore shoe polish to dress up as Michael Jackson.

Calls for Northam's resignation have come from basically everyone, but thus far the governor has refused to step down.

And then this Wednesday, Virginia's Attorney General, Mark Herring, announced that he too had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.

Herring apologized in a statement that also noted his work to address systemic racism.

What is happening in Virginia, and what does it tell us about racism in America?

This is Radio Atlantic.

So why do we keep talking about Blackface?

Joining me now are Van Newkirk, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Adam Serwer, also a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thanks for joining me, guys.

Thanks for having us for having me.

Let's talk a little bit about the history of Blackface.

For people who kind of don't understand how this this all began, Van,

where do we first start seeing white entertainers dressed up in blackface?

So you really start seeing blackface in the middle of the 19th century.

It starts with people from outside of the slave states kind of seeing the images of slavery.

And

of course, you couldn't have black people in these images of slavery.

And you had white people who put on burnt cork or other skin darkening things and would go and play happy slaves or would go and make fun of uppity uh free blacks and you know it was it was basically tv at the time it was the most popular form of mass media in the country and that's how ubiquitous blackface was was there a class element embedded in all of this yeah so it a lot of it was geared towards working class white folks um it confirmed especially people who hadn't hadn't really had a lot of experience with black people from outside the South, confirmed their stereotypes about black people.

Either they were docile, happy people on the plantation, and shortly after slavery, you know, sort of during Reconstruction and after, they were portrayed as uppity or unhappy, you know, it was kind of the political messaging.

There are variations, as you mentioned here, Van.

There are two major sort of buckets of blackface, if you will, Adam, the northern dandy Zip Coon and the southern plantation character Jim Crow.

These end up being sort of pervasive

poles of black identity as seen by racist white America, right?

Yes.

And I think the thing to keep in mind is that the point of this entertainment ultimately was to reinforce racial barriers.

It was to suggest to a country that had not that long ago almost torn itself apart over the issue of slavery and emancipation that black people were actually happier in being subservient to whites, which was the racial order that had been established after Reconstruction.

So it wasn't just of like racial mockery or, you know, fun.

It was a matter of reinforcing the racial order that had prevailed despite the efforts of Reconstruction to create a more equal society.

And by the way, that idea that somehow blacks were happier under slavery exists today.

There are still people that allege that in our American political system, Van.

Plenty, folks.

It's in lots of school books.

I went to school.

I grew up in North Carolina, and there was still that in my school books, talking about how some people who were enslaved, not all, some people who were enslaved, they enjoyed it.

You know, it was enriching for them.

There were people who were savages and were brought to this country and they were given Christianity.

And that's not just a a strain.

I would say it is actually the major way that slavery was taught to most people in this country for most of the time since slavery.

So this is, we're talking now about a period in like pre-Civil War to slightly post-Civil War.

But at some point, Adam, slavery ends and African Americans themselves get into the game.

So by the time of the Kuhl, as it is officially known, which is kind of like the turn of the century, 1890s,

you have different kinds of characters.

What does it mean that African Americans themselves are sort of lured into the minstrelsry?

So I think

this is one of those things where it's people doing what they can to

survive

and sort of gain their own, gain

a level of agency over their own portrayals.

I mean, I think there's no question but that when black performers started doing blackface, blackface performances became, to the extent that they could, more

textured and emotionally nuanced than they were before, because it wasn't just a matter of racial mockery.

You think of someone like Burt Williams, who was at one point the most highly paid black entertainer, who sort of, there was a way in which his performance of blackface was almost subversive because he was so good at certain things that he did in terms of like physical comedy that it really suggested that there was much more to black people than the blackface caricature wanted to suggest, if that makes any sense.

Do you think in some way, Van, the involvement of black actors in Blackface sanitizes the notion of blackface?

Because eventually it migrates to Hollywood, right?

This becomes a popular form of mainstream entertainment.

It becomes Hollywood.

I think you can look at the portrayal of black people in Hollywood and trace it directly back through the entry of Blackface.

It's not a, you know, a portion of Hollywood.

It's a part of its DNA.

And I think it is, I don't know if it sanitizes it because on the one hand, Blackface

does become the sort of Hollywood version, the mainstream, gets into all the theaters version, but also the very fact that people were in blackface allowed lots of black actors into the cinema who wouldn't have been allowed with their regular faces on cinema on screen and so i think there's competing elements there like adam said uh the biggest thing to me is it was a vehicle like lots of other imperfect racist vehicles that black performers used in order to get to break in and you can see it it's direct i think direct line between that and the kind of mammy era of blacks, of cinema portrayals of black people.

Right.

The sort of Antromaima, Mamie character that becomes a staple of big, glossy Hollywood films in the 40s and 50s.

Yeah.

What is it?

But Blackface, while it sort of eventually falls out of favor in Hollywood and let's say

to some degree, fans rolling his eyes, the 60s and 70s, it continues in society, right?

I mean, as we have evidence this week, well into the 1980s or even later if you're megan kelly and it's halloween um adam when do you think it becomes publicly unacceptable in mainstream society i mean has it i don't think it's happened interesting I'll be honest with you.

I don't think it's really happened.

I think it's unacceptable for some people.

But I think the truth is, is that some people have been around at these parties where blackface, where someone has been wearing blackface, and they simply don't remember it because

they didn't even consider it offensive enough to note in their memory.

And the reason I'm saying this is because I recall someone showing up

at a Halloween party in blackface in college and

nobody reacted.

And I don't just mean white people didn't react.

I mean like everybody was just kind of like, okay, that's really weird, but like moved on.

And I think so, I think

there's something specific about the

Northam photo that's particularly menacing.

I mean, it's not just that there's someone in blackface, it's that there's someone in blackface and there's someone in a clan outfit.

So there's there's a there's an attempt to the joke is that lynching is funny, essentially.

The irony is the absence of violence in a scene with two

characters, for lack of a better term, that are

one is meant to murder the other.

So I think the Northam photo is like particularly malicious.

It's not just like a question of insensitivity or ignorance or anything like that.

I think it's, you know, the reason why, part of the reason why that photo caused so much controversy is not simply because of the blackface, but because of the implied joke about racial terrorism that is present in the photo that Northam, for whatever reason, in 1984, found so humorous that he put it on his yearbook.

Van, let me ask you the same question.

Is it just that in this present moment, we're more attuned to racism and therefore blackface is unacceptable?

Or do you think there was a slash is a point at which blackface became something you cannot do?

So I'm going to push back a little bit on what Adam said, because I do think there has been an evolving, developing taboo against blackface.

People have, if you follow mass media and you care at all about what happens there and the voices of people of color, I think it's clear enough, it should be clear enough to you that blackface is offensive.

That is not, I think, a controversial take.

What I think has happened, though, and what I think is that the clear dynamic here is not that necessarily the attitude of America as a one big we has changed.

It's just that those voices, the people like Spike Lee, who led a boycott against blackface in film, the people, the black creators, their voices have become louder.

They've become more prominent.

It's become,

there's a contingent of black folks on social media for whom these things won't pass.

And I think the voices of the tractors have become loud and influential enough to create a real social penalty for some people.

Now, I don't know if that's actually changing minds, whether it's changing if you are willing to do this to

to dress in blackface in all white parties because it keeps happening.

It keeps happening on Halloween.

So I can't say that it's changing sort of the national consciousness, but I do think there is just a greater penalty from the people who it offends.

Right.

So, see, I wouldn't disagree,

I wouldn't disagree with what Van is saying.

There's certainly, um, in political circles, politically active people, among politically active people, blackface is unacceptable.

Um, I think among people who are not as politically aware, I think

you know, I think the fact is it is not as

taboo as I would like it to be or as it should be.

But I do think that, you know,

as Van pointed out,

the increasing political power of people of color, particularly black people, particularly within the Democratic Party, has altered behavior standards, particularly for politicians,

which is why this has become such a big deal.

But I...

I wish I could say that I thought that like blackface, you know, that blackface doesn't happen anymore, but it clearly happens.

I mean, there's a reason why people like Megan Kelly are saying, well, why is this offensive?

Because people are still doing it and people,

like, there's a lot of people who don't seem to understand why it's offensive.

So what I'm sentencing from you guys is kind of like a cynical optimism, which is basically it's becoming less palatable, not because we are policing ourselves and having a more in-depth understanding about race and racism, but because the people who are victims of racism have more power to say, you know what, this isn't I think that's exactly right.

All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we are gonna get into the politics of racism, specifically in Virginia and why this is the locus of all the blackface action.

Stick with us.

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Okay, we are back with Van Newkirk and Adam Serwer.

Let me just talk about Virginia specifically here and Ralph Northam.

This is what Ralph Northam said when he was elected in November of 2017.

Virginia has told us to end the divisiveness, that we will not condone hatred and bigotry, and to end the politics that have torn this country apart.

I want to let you know that in Virginia, it's going to take a doctor to heal our differences,

to

bring unity to our people.

And I'm here to let you know that the doctor is in.

So Van Northam is positioning himself as some kind of serious reformer here.

Was he like that when he was actually running the campaign, though?

I don't think he really was at first.

And you have to remember the campaign for Virginia governor that took place in 2017.

So it kind of straddled Charlottesville.

And so you saw in the beginning, he actually started out, he was lieutenant governor under Terry McAuliffe, who was then governor.

He started out as more of a centrist than McAuliffe.

He was reluctant when it came to the very issue that created Charlottesville, which was the removal of Confederate statues and the removal of the Robert E.

Lee statue.

He didn't say we need to protect them or anything like that, but he said it should be a local issue.

And

when tracking up to the events on that weekend in Charlottesville when Heather Heyer was killed,

that's actually when his position on some of those things starts to change.

He comes out and says he'll be the biggest advocate for removing the statues.

He does a tour of black churches in Virginia, especially around that area.

And I think he saw the moment, and you could view this cynically, or you could view this sort of as a true believer of people moving in response to the issues.

And he saw a racist conflagration.

He saw Ku Klux Klansmen

in their real robes in Charlottesville, and he made a move, and black voters rewarded him for that.

Right.

Well, there's a strong political calculation here, right?

Which is the changing demographics of the state of Virginia.

And if you, you know, you write about this, fan, that basically Democrats understood they could win by boosting black turnout, even if it meant losing some white suburban and rural votes.

Yeah.

You look at the coalition now of Virginia voters.

There are many more urban voters in northern Virginia, and they are a strong foundation for what's basically a blue state at this point in lots of elections.

And if you combine sort of the more affluent young folks with the Tidewater region, with the black community in Richmond and in Southern Virginia, you have a winning coalition.

And so you don't have to chase now sort of the good old boys.

You don't have to chase wealthy white suburbanites and the kind of people, frankly, who would have gone to school with Ralph Northam.

You don't have to chase those people anymore.

And I think they made a

calculated decision, especially in the wake of Charlottesville, to pivot towards picking up those black voters, and they outperform their own demographic share.

Adam, you know, some people are going to say you guys are just being so cynical.

Can't, as Van posited, can't a person just evolve and sort of see the light as it concerns racism?

But you make a point, and you're writing about this controversy, that there's something especially dark in Northam's dressing in blackface, given the fact that he was in medical school at the time.

You write, for many black Americans, Northam's admissions evoke a particular horror, the long-standing legacy of racism in the medical profession.

I know both of you guys have taken particular issue with this.

This was a medical student dressing in blackface.

Can you expand upon that a little bit more?

Well, look, you know, you have a history of medical experimentation and exploitation in the United States of black people.

You know,

the quote-unquote father of modern gynecology, J.

Marion Sims de Blasio, just Mayor de Blasio of New York, just removed a statue that was of him because his advancements in gynecology were done through involuntary experiments on slave women.

So,

you know, there's just a long history.

I mean, you think about like Henrietta Lacks, you know, there's just such a long history of racism in the medical profession in the United States that

the picture of a medical student

doing this is particularly jarring.

You know, this is someone who at some point you know was responsible for the health of a black person who was

making a joke about, essentially making a joke about killing black people because that's what that picture is.

And

the gravity of that required a response from Northam that was not the one that we got.

I think if he had been like, look, this is actually really horrible and I understand why, because X, Y, Z.

You know, if he has seemed really contrite and really sorry and really understood what it was about that photo that was bad, I think he'd be in a different position.

But it seems to me that his

response to this whole thing has been so concerned with staying in office rather than, you know, genuinely reassuring his constituents that he's not the person who put that photo in his yearbook that I don't know, it just bothers me.

There's another aspect.

I mean, the fact we're talking about this this at the same time that the Attorney General has revealed himself to be another person at the top of Virginia's government who also wore blackface, which begs this larger question here, Van.

Is this actually this, you know, what we were getting back to at the first part of this discussion?

Is this a signal that there is a certain cloth, as you write, that sort of

gives rise to these southern politicians and the elite sort of former Confederacy, the elites of the former Confederacy sort of secretly maybe harbor very antiquated, if not outright racist ideas.

Yeah, if you

the one

question that everyone has tried to answer and come up with a million different theories over the last 30, 40 years has been black turnout in the South.

Why don't black voters turn out for the Liberal Party in the South?

You know, except for Obama, turnout has increased over time, but it's still been much lower than white turnout.

And

people will have built entire careers off of trying to figure this question out.

If you look at Virginia, I think you get a pretty good case study.

Why?

You see these politicians now who are revealed to be

good old boys who dressed in blackface, who saw nothing wrong with it.

And they're the Democrats.

And they're the Democrats.

And, you know, they're supposed to have the moral authority against people who dressed in Klan robes, maybe, or who endorsed or who backed white supremacy or the Unite the Right protesters.

They're supposed to be the guys saving you from those guys.

So if you look at the voters and this is what you're confronted with, these are the people.

And now you've come out and you've...

against the natural cynicism of the community, you've come out pragmatically, you've come out and voted for this guy to stave off white supremacy.

And now you've been burned again.

What happens?

Well, actually, I want to point that out because both of you guys bring up this choice,

this necessary pragmatism that is embedded in black votes, which is

basically we're going to hold, we know this guy deep down inside might not be actually that different than the other guy, but because there is at least the veneer of progressivism and racial tolerance, we're going to pull the lever for him or her.

That's a pretty damning assessment of Southern politics and black votes.

I mean, I think that that's

I think that's clearly the case.

I mean, you look it's important to go back and look at the campaign that Ed Gillespie ran against Northam, which featured, you know, ads of there was there was one particular ad that tied Northam to MS-13, and there was like these visuals of heavily tattooed Latino men.

In fact, black voters reacted to that ad even more angrily than Latino voters

because

black voters really don't like racist campaigning.

And the state Republican Party said that Northam had betrayed his own family when he called for taking the statues down.

This was an explicitly racist campaign.

And Northam was the only alternative.

So it's, you know, at a certain point, it's like, it's not about, you know,

we love Northam.

It's about, are you going to vote for the guy who's explicitly

running on racism or are you going to vote for the guy who is running against him?

And I think that the answer to that seems pretty obvious, but those votes should not be taken as a vote of confidence necessarily in the idea that Northam is going to be, you know, is some paragon of racial equality.

Well, and to that end, I mean, I think both of you argue that Northam stepping down is bigger than just needing to step down because of his career and, you know, leadership in Virginia, but because of what is being asked of politicians in the the age of Trump, you know, that we are dealing with florid and systemic racism.

And therefore, leaders who are in place leading the progressive charge can't have tarnished records the way that Northam does.

Right.

I don't think you need, again, I don't think you need to be a crusader.

You don't have to be in protest photos with black people in the 60s and 70s.

Black folks are really looking for, there are the systemic issues.

You know, I mentioned turnout and the other big thing there is voter suppression.

And there are stuff like

people asking for affordable health care, for economic justice, things like that.

But also, you know, there is the project right now of being able to credibly come out against the creep of open bigotry, right?

And I think opening that door makes it impossible.

to actually fight for these kind of more systemic issues.

You can't really go out and fight against voter suppression if it's okay to say the N-word in public.

Like, these are not disconnected things.

And so how do you, as a politician now, voted to do, voted in to do, do these things, have the moral authority to ever stand against, say, a politician in Virginia does something really racist, and now you are compromised in your ability to call him out unquestionably.

And I think that's a real betrayal of what voters asked for.

And And unfortunately for those voters, it seems like there's no bottom to the well here.

Aaron Trevor, Adam,

you've written that Trump's rise basically has resulted in social barriers against overt expressions of prejudice being eroded, right?

And I guess I want to get to a point that Jamal Bowie makes in the New York Times, which is that blackface is really the tip of the iceberg as far as racism in America.

And we focus on politicians and their blackface proclivities as if the story ends there, but we're not actually getting at the, what is at the core of all of this.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think we need to make a distinction between individual acts of

racism, racist cruelty, and systemic racism, which is obviously the, you know, the larger institutional problem.

And I think that You know, that said,

you know, it's much easier to call out instances of interpersonal bigotry when you start talking about mass incarceration or police brutality or economic inequality or

the disparity between black and white wealth.

When you start talking about those things, people get a lot more uncomfortable because

either they or systems they treasure become implicated.

So it's, you know, I think Jamel was identifying something very real, which is that it's much easier to say you shouldn't use the N-word or you shouldn't wear blackface and condemn someone for doing those things.

It's a lot harder to think about the ways that American institutions, particularly elite institutions, we act like this is like some sort of working-class disease, but it's not, particularly elite institutions have been constructed on the basis of racist exclusion.

And that is much more difficult to deal with.

And it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not, it's not like,

it doesn't feel quite as good as being like, this guy sucks.

Well, right.

And we should say that we're having this conversation against the backdrop of the State of the Union, where the president has come out, once again, demonizing refugees, people seeking asylum in this country, calling them effectively criminals and drug mules.

Jamel, and I think you guys, and I think many people see, you know, racism in that.

This is a president who championed, you know, fight freedom fighters against anti-Semitism, but who has, in fact, given harbor to white nationalists who support anti-Semitic platforms, right?

There are all kinds of hypocrisies at the higher sort of broader levels of our institution that we don't call racism, but in fact have racist thinking at their core.

Yeah.

Well, if we actually started calling stuff racism, it would clarify lots of these conflicting emotions and arguments.

I think the linguistics do a lot of the work here.

When we don't want to call

saying that, you know,

Caribbean countries countries or shithole countries, we don't want to call that racism.

Right.

We want to call it racially charged.

When we want to call Steve King,

what was it, racially polarized?

Polarizing.

Yeah, racially polarizing or something on that effect.

If you can't do the easy stuff and call that racism, then it makes it impossible to make that kind of racism disqualifying.

If we do want to have a conversation about making

systemic racism or endorsing it disqualifying, I'm sure there'll be lots of people there who are ready to have that conversation.

But the fact that we cannot even classify it as such in the media, in our common language, that essentially keeps,

it gives just enough of

deniability.

I'm not racist.

I don't know what's in his heart.

That gives just enough deniability to where you can never get anything done.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So where do we stand with the situation in Virginia?

What happens now?

I mean, there's some thinking that Republicans in Virginia see all of this swirl as an opening, a way to point to the Democrats and say, see,

these guys aren't good guys.

I mean, I'm not sure if that exonerates some of the Republican embrace of, for example, the Confederacy and

the racist history of the South.

But

how do you guys see the landscape changing or not changing for Northam Northam and his,

well, I guess his attorney general and generally in Virginia politics?

Is this an inflection point, Adam?

Well, I think, you know, Republicans, I think

conservative writers in particular

have been arguing for a long time that the Democratic Party's anti-racism is cynical.

It's political.

It's not a genuine commitment to anti-racism.

It's just something they do to get votes.

And there is, and the truth is that

there's some truth to that.

But the reality is that for Democratic voters, it's a very real problem and they care about it a lot.

And so I think in the short term, at the very least, Republicans

are going to be claiming vindication in the idea that the Democratic Party is a cynically anti-racist institution.

Whether that translates into larger political gains, I don't know.

But I think it's very clear that there's something deeply rotten within the leadership of the Democratic Party in Virginia.

There's something rotten in the state of Virginia.

Van, how do you think this ends?

I think it will end in at least one official resigning.

I'm not sure who.

There's a lot of trouble brewing at the top there.

And

we should note the lieutenant governor is also mired in his own scandals that have to do with sexual assault.

So the chain of command has been very poisoned, if not adulterated.

Yeah.

And I think there will be turnover somewhere near the top or at the top in Virginia.

And like Adam said, I don't think it stops.

I don't think the ripple effect stopped there.

I think you're going to have a real, in a state that, again, elected these folks to do a specific job of closing the door to this very overt neo-Confederate white supremacist loss cause resurrection,

it's going to damage that project.

And no matter who is elected next in the next election, no matter who is appointed, if anybody resigns, it's going to reduce the moral authority of those elected officials or appointed officials to be able to stand up against those things.

Because every time you do, the people who you're accusing of being racist are going to be able to come out and say, hey, you're the party of blackface.

So it essentially, I think, in many ways hamstrings that project.

And time and again, when I talk to black voters in Virginia, you know, this was a top three issue.

And in the polls, it was a top three issue.

So essentially, what voters wanted and what they came out and droves for and gave the Democrats in Virginia a mandate to do seems almost unworkable at this point.

Well, I just, I mean, I will end on one semi-hopeful note, which is maybe the trajectory follows that of Hollywood, which is you have to have more people of color seated at the table where the decisions are made.

Because left to their own devices the sort of white power structure there are too many skeletons in the closet but once you have people who are direct victims of racism and sort of racist ideology making the decisions then you finally begin to purge the sins of the past well i'd say women would be great in this case because

you know how i feel about that van lieutenant governor's black and he is still in trouble yeah women well women are basically the solution to everything i'm kidding i didn't really just say that we don't know where this ends It would be,

I'm actually prepared for more politicians in the coming weeks and months to announce that they too have college pictures where they were in blackface.

I wouldn't be surprised.

It feels like this is the beginning of some kind of revelatory period where we find out just how racist we actually really are.

Van Newkirk, Adam Serwart, thank you guys for your time and thoughts on a complicated issue.

We appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me.

That, my friends, will do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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