I have a number of thoughts about this blackface incident. I’ll drop them here, and then go to bed and let you rip me a new one while I sleep (I feel much better, btw, but still am just EXHAUSTED.).
First off, working from the premise that “ALL BLACKFACE IS BAD,” I see a qualitative and important distinction between someone in their mid twenties in med school posing either in blackface or standing in a klan robe next to someone in blackface and then posting the picture in their yearbook than I do some 18 or 19 year old jackass dressing up as his favorite rapper (Kurtis Blow) with a bunch of his mates. Obviously, neither is acceptable, but one seems a touch more harmless than the other. I remember kids in the 70’s and 80’s dressing up as the Harlem Globetrotters and I don’t see that coming from a place of racial animus, either.
Second, I also see a distinction between Herring’s response and Northam’s approach. I prefer the former.
Third, while I am glad my fellow melanin challenged Americans are all outraged about this, I just have to ask- did you live under a fucking rock? This isn’t shocking that a bunch of guys in the 70’s and 80’s in Virginia did this shit. I mean it’s shocking in that it’s offensive, but it’s not shocking in the “I had no idea this happened since.” I mean, fer fuck’s sake, in 1986 there was a movie released that was 2 fucking hours of blackface that ran by the name of… Soul Man.
It featured C. Thomas Howell, Julia Louise Dreyfuss, James Earl Jones, Ron Reagan, and some other people you may have heard of. The ENTIRE FUCKING PREMISE OF THE MOVIE WAS A HOARY RIGHT WING ATTACK ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION and black only scholarships. It was viewed in the Reagan White House.
Again, this shit was right there in the open. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but the over the top “wtf” from people is a little crazy- THIS HAPPENED IN YOUR LIFETIME. Kids are still doing their HS senior pictures in Confederate garb. The entire god damned tea party was a racist ass reaction to a black President.
This is a deeply racist nation- it’s part of who we are. So yes, there was black face going on, but let’s not lose sight of the other really racist shit that is happening. Let’s not all pretend that this shit is news to us, but remember to work on all the other stuff that is still ongoing and problematic. Like disfranchising millions of black people. Like the racial disparities in the criminal justice system that range from being more likely to be charged, more likely to be convicted, more likely to receive longer sentences, more likely to be sentenced to death. The racial disparities in the medical system that range from being less likely to receive preventative care, receiving lower quality and less effective care, to higher infant mortality rates to lower likelihood of being insured to worse pain management and quality of life. Or racial disparities in education which range from lower reading and achievement levels to lower graduation rates to less exposure and access to advanced classes to lower quality schools to on and on. Or racial disparities in the banking system, to christ do I need to go on?
Again, I’m 48, white, and from West VIrginia and not particularly woke, but fer fuck’s sake, if you’re surprised that a bunch of college kids in Virginia were in blackface in the 70’s and 80’s there are a lot of things about this world that are going to shock the shit out of you. You should start by listening to some people of color. And voting for them.
*** Update ***
I just re-read this and it seems like I was directing it at the lovely and talented Mrs. Cracker, and I was not. I was focused on the people on twitter who are “shocked, shocked, I say.”
Brickley Paiste
What does Joy Reid have to say about whether these people should resign? What about Omarosa?
Alain the site fixer
You said it, John.
Elizabelle
Look at what they did with their careers. You have 30 plus years to judge. Did they work to enact racist policies?
And I am irritated with those who want to terminate Northam because he did not handle the aftermath of the photo’s disclosure well. This isn’t Dancing with the Stars. And he is not Iowa’s Steve King.
Adulting is hard, peeps.
NotMax
No, they lived under an incel rock.
Kylroy
So, with simultaneous scandals cropping up for *all 3* people standing between the GOP and the VA governorship, can we officially say this is a political attack?
PJ
Yeah, the “I’m shocked, shocked” reaction is a little surprising to someone who grew up in white America. I went to high school in the ’80s on the east coast, and in either (or possibly both) middle school or high school, a “slave auction” was held annually to raise money for something or the other – this involved a student donating money to the cause in exchange for another student performing chores (carrying books – I don’t know what else they would have done) for them during the day. This was a school where the black student body was probably at least 20%, and not one teacher or administrator raised any objection. I don’t think it was maliciousness on anyone’s part, I think it was utter cluelessness and lack of empathy.
I should also say that, among white students, there was probably little or no knowledge whatsoever of blackface, minstrelism, Jim Crow, redlining, etc., even though we had all gone through desegregation (I certainly didn’t know anything about it). This stuff was just not taught. Slavery was taught, but it certainly wasn’t dwelled on (the Civil War was a misunderstanding about states’ rights), and the only other knowledge of it that white kids would have had about it was from Roots. In short, there was a general lack of historical and cultural awareness of what black people suffered at the hands of white people in this country.
ruemara
You’d be surprised how many older white people I know are are & have been under a rock. But that’s the privilege. You can see blackface and literally not see it at all.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Brachiator
@Brickley Paiste:
Omarosa wasn’t asked to resign. She was fired. What’s your point?
Wag
Thank you for this. I agree 100%. everyone does stupid shit when they’re young. Many of us stop doing it and end up doing a lot of good after we grow up, become adults, and accept the responsibilities that come with that.
Rommie
I think we have the answer to why opposition research wasn’t done before these guys were elected. They DID do it, but didn’t use it until now. After Supreme Court Justice Barf and the midterm elections, they are in full panic mode and going Defcon 1.
The reason they’ve held off spraying this oppo research all over everything is because they KNOW their folks are far more likely to get found. The (fewer and fewer) rational thinkers on their side realize that this is a one-time KABOOM that will blow themselves up with whomever they catch in the blast. Apparently desperation is the word of the day. Afoot indeed!
AnonyMuslim
First time commenting here, but I wanted to state that this wasn’t just going on in the US. Over in the UK, the BBC had an adaption of The Far Pavilions on television that had American Amy Adams playing an Indian Princess in what could only be described in Brownface. This was in 1988, 2 years before I was born.
Villago Delenda Est
The actual racists out here (Breitbart fuckheads, anyone?) are laughing their asses off right now.
VeniceRiley
My Kamala Harris gear arrived. Absolutely 100% certain I’ll never be embarrassed for supporting her.
Betty Cracker
@Kylroy:
Yes, but the issues raised in all three cases are real and must be taken seriously. Circling the wagons would be a fatal mistake, IMO.
ETA: Just to clarify, I don’t know if the accusation against Fairfax is real; waiting to see if his accuser can contemporaneously corroborate her story (as she claims she can).
A Ghost To Most
I’m shocked, SHOCKED! that blackface occurred in America in the 80s.
/Peter Lorie voice
If you didn’t know, you weren’t paying attention. I was.
Fred Fnord
Absolutely agree. Although I went to college in the ‘80s and only know a couple people who dressed up in blackface, and none at all who dressed up in klan robes. And none of them were me.
NotMax
Would posit that since the Brown decision the country had been engaged in a Civil Cold War.
(Hate that term but am at a loss to come up with another which encapsulates so much.)
FlipYrWhig
I thought the entire premise of the movie was that by pretending to be a black person because you think it will make your life easier you learn that it’s still hard to be a black person in this crazy modern world. Of course both the premise and execution are botched, because in working that through it goes off the direction of a different kind of well-meaning and condescending white racism (rather than just hateful white racism): it creates a scenario that places wise black people in the place of retraining white people to be their best selves, a/k/a the trope of the “Magic Negro.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Hear, hear. Nobody rat-fucked Northam into saying “that’s me, oh wait, no it’s not.” “If it were me I’d remember it, cause I remember that other time.” “I would moonwalk for you, but the wife says I shouldn’t.” The man’s snapped in some way.
— Herring’s statement might be enough if Northam hadn’t made such a clownish spectacle of his press conference.
— Fairfax is also not handling this well. “Tell them I said, F— but not F that b—” is bad staffing, if nothing else. Try “The Lt Gov did not say that. You are reporting ill-informed, if not malicious, gossip.” I didn’t even have to think too hard about that.
Mike in DC
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was any correlation between schools being ultra white(over 90%) and the incidence of blackface use.
A Ghost To Most
@Villago Delenda Est: Indeed. Half the Democrats lost their collective shit.
Yarrow
@Rommie:
To me, the bigger issue about oppo research is why these Democratic candidates didn’t hire people to do oppo research on themselves. If they did and the oppo research folks didn’t find these photos, then those people are unqualified to do that job. If didn’t, that’s running a bad campaign. These photos should have been found with competent defensive oppo research. Then the candidates could have got out in front of it, talked about what they’ve learned, how they’ve changed, etc. Having it come out this way is the worst way possible.
CarolDuhart2
It may also explain why they are going defcon with the abortion thing. They have lost the argument regarding first-trimester abortion. They have lost the argument about sexuality in general-nominating and electing a serial reprobate does that to you. And not just nominating, as in well-he’s kinda useful and then just standing off to the side as in a nose-holding kind a way, but defending a man who cheated several times with a porn star. And defending him as “God’s Anointed” as well. What can you say about that that anyone would listen to?
I mean Trump is so bad that only through complete blinders can you even defend him.
Also, what makes them angry is that NY State has codified into law Roe v. Wade, and that includes late-term abortions. Virginia was about to do the same until Northam blew up. It may still happen once Dems have the trifecta. So if they blow up Virginia, maybe late-term abortions will remain illegal-for a while anyway.
germy
New York Times calls blackface “dark makeup,” edits headline after being called out
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t know how these guys work, but yearbooks wouldn’t have been on my radar. That there’s such a thing as medical school yearbooks kind of throws me.
( I threw out my HS yearbooks when I moved out of my first post-college apartment– and I have hoarder tendencies. My sister, a year past her fortieth reunion and downsizing to a smaller house, deliberated about three days before coming to the conclusion she hadn’t even looked in the box hers were in for decades before finally Marie Kondoing the)
Citizen Alan
@Yarrow:
Is it actually customary to go through people’s college yearbooks in the hopes of finding an embarrassing picture as part of oppo research? I had no idea.
schrodingers_cat
Yes please, re-litigate the eighties while an actual Fascist sits in the WH.
FlipYrWhig
@PJ: My New Jersey high school, also in the 1980s, also had “senior slave auction,” where as some sort of fundraiser people would “buy” the right to make the senior (individual or group) wear a costume to a gala event. Drag was popular. I remember a Bert and Ernie costume and a Beastie Boys costume. I don’t remember anyone doing blackface but I would not be at all surprised to be told that it had been done. It was a big school, 500+ graduating every year, with very few black students. As far as I know, this tradition provoked no complaints and was treated as good clean fun. I wonder how long it lasted after I graduated. I suspect it may have been a while.
John Cole
@AnonyMuslim: Are You Being Served had blackface up until the 80’s I think. They showed that show on PBS around here.
germy
@Yarrow:
“Mr. Northam, we’ve completed your oppo research.”
“Did you find anything bad about me?”
“We found a yearbook with your ‘Coonman’ nickname. Also a blackface and klan hood photo.”
“Holy shit!! Really? I had no idea! Good thing I hired you guys….”
NotMax
@germy
Why do I get the stomach-churning feeling some editor at the last minute excised the last two letters from darkie?
Betty Cracker
@A Ghost To Most: Speaking for myself, I’m not shocked-shocked that white people were wearing “black face” in the 1980s; I’m shocked-shocked (and still incredulous) that they didn’t know at the time that what they were doing was extremely racist. My lived experience as a white woman from the rural South who was a college student in the 1980s was different. That said, the distinction John makes in the post above (Northam vs. Herring) is subtle but important, IMO.
lamh36
No offense John, but i’m not reading that long as rant.
I’ll keep my response short
White peoples dressing in Blackface is wrong PERIOD.
I Don’t care if your fav rapper is Black…news flash…you can dress like ur fav Black celebrity WITHOUT Blackface.
You don’t have to be in dress face to be say Jay Z or Beyonce…both have had iconic looks…dress close enough folks know who i are talking
Blackface is NEVER needed, unless you’re lazy, lack imagination, or just down right stupid.
Newsflash…Black folk have been dressing as our fav white or non-Black celebritiy for eons…and get me manage to do it without chalk on our damn faces ??
germy
@NotMax: They probably planned on putting darkie in quotes, which would have made it “OK”
/
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yearbooks would be one things to investigate. Yes, all schools might have yearbooks. Whether a specific one does or not, it’s something a qualified oppo research group would check.
@Citizen Alan: Yes, it is. That’s what defensive oppo research outfitsdo. They look at everything a candidate has ever done, depending on how much the candidate wants to spend to have that done, of course. Going through yearbooks is easy and obvious. Anyone could do it.
Fair Economist
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, my take on the movie was also anti-anti-affirmative action. The main character “puts on” blackface to get a scholarship but discovers society is so racist he can’t even drive. He realizes he has had a lot of privileges just for being white and eventually apologies and tries to make amends. Pretty woke for an ’80s movie.
A Ghost To Most
@Brickley Paiste: Good question. She said some pretty homophobic things back in the day. I’ve said many shitty things about religion and the religious.
Are you willing to have all your past actions judged against today’s expectations? Good luck with that.
gvg
Well I was shy and had a limited social circle. I knew blackface meant the person doing it was an offensive moron that (I assumed) was never going to amount to anything unless they learned better manners. It certainly wasn’t common in my area, it was something that happened in racist backwaters (I thought). I do find it shocking when a person who did this is nominated to the supreme court and confirmed even after it’s revealed, or another is a Govenor…I guess he has mostly by his actions done OK reforming, though it would look better now if he had supported Fairfax over not honoring Lee etc.
Blackface might have been around but I didn’t think it was common. Now the Confederate flag is. I hate that thing. Knew as a kid it meant treason and knew it meant make black people afraid by waving it over courthouses. I loved the Dukes of Hazzard, but I have to say it ended up starting me thinking about some things. I probably wouldn’t have thought about them for awhile longer if not for that show.
If I was magically Gov. of Florida, I would burn all the state owned historical Confederate flags in the dead of night, then announce it. I’ll never get elected though.
As for the klan hood…….oh boy. and that is a problem with Northram that the others don’t have.
It is time to start fighting back. I am positive plenty of GOP pols have worse in their closet in this same vein.
Citizen Alan
@John Cole:
There were two RYBS episodes in which blackface was used. The latter was the 1981 Christmas special, which had a scene parodying the Black & White Minstrel Show which I had mentioned previously.
schrodingers_cat
@John Cole: Victoria is on PBS right now. Genocide of millions by starvation and disease happened during her regime, in her name. Here title was the Empress of India. At least 50 million Indians died during her regime. Not to speak of the immense transfer of wealth. Waiting to see when PBS does a glowing look back at Hitler.
zhena gogolia
@AnonyMuslim:
Amy Irving
Fair Economist
@Betty Cracker: I didn’t think just wearing dark make-up was racist in the ’80s. Minstrel-style makeup or acting out offensive stereotypes, yes, but just wearing make-up, no. And I was the *only* kid in my high school who would openly say the Klan was a bad thing.
zhena gogolia
@A Ghost To Most:
You mean Claude Rains
JaySinWA
@Yarrow: I think this is a part of the white privilege – institutional racism issue. We grew up swimming in a sea of not seeing blackface as an issue. It has recently been turfed up as an issue for white people and we haven’t adapted well yet. So I doubt finding blackface in someone’s background would have raised alarms a few years ago. Blackface plus KKK might, but still might have passed as bad humor to opposition research types.
Manxome Bromide
I was in elementary school in 1986. This stuff didn’t come up in my life until the 1990s, where it was presented as a relic of a barbarous past.
I must conclude from this that at least on the west coast there was an active effort to keep the children away from this stuff, possibly in an attempt to break the cultural transmission chain.
This may also explain why when the reaction from my rough age-peer group to all of this can be summarized with “kill the olds” and “burn the South down”, and these folks are rapidly approaching middle age now.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t empathize with the attitude given here… it’s just for me this came up when I was trying to explain the existence of the “gay panic” defense to completely uncomprehending people 10 years my junior. Social mores change fast.
Frankensteinbeck
@lamh36:
Yeah, but a whoooole lot of people are lazy, lack imagination, or just down right stupid until life slaps them in the face a couple of times. My take is that Heller learned from that slap, and Northam didn’t. My take is also that it doesn’t fucking matter what my take is, and I should back up whatever Virginian African-Americans decide.
A Ghost To Most
@schrodingers_cat:
Focus. Don’t let the ratfucking distract us.
NotMax
@John Cole
Not to mention Sky’s Talking Pictures TV channel (emphasis added).
Cheryl Rofer
I’ve been wondering the same thing about all the shocked, shocked white people on Twitter who had NO IDEA THIS WAS GOING ON.
But as I watched Ralph Northam stumble through his press conference the other day, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his genuineness. There is so much he just doesn’t get. Not that he’d do blackface now, and he’s trying to be sensitive to the situation, but he is truly a prisoner of his white Southern male privilege.
jl
I agree that various forms of racism were cool in the 1980s. I could see it as a twenty-something coming out of undergrad. As I said in previous thread, I often thought to myself at the time, “Why are all these old white farts allowed to sit on TV pundit shows and say racist garbage all the time?” Part of maybe was 20 years of GOP Southern Strategy burrowing into elite subconscious, and like Trump years, Reagan’s cynical use of all sorts of social divisions to juice his national political career, made it an OK thing to do among elite whites.
Before then there was a different sort of racism, or bigotry, or cluelessness, whatever you want to call it, going on. Where whites would try to relate to African-Americans and assumed they were all hep cats from the urban core who played basketball. But what went on the 1980s was definitely more malicious and hostile. Though it was often a bogus scientism dressed up as social science made respectable by people like… forget his name… some pompous white hack who I think has passed on. Some academic/policy guy who didn’t really know what he was doing but set the stage for The Bell Curve incompetence and nonsense. Not as malicious as The Bell Curve, since the attitude behind the racism, or the front for it, depending on how charitable you want to be, was ‘we’re only trying to help diagnose your ills, black people.’
Edit: Patrick Moynahan?
A Ghost To Most
@zhena gogolia: Sorry. My movie Fu sucks.
Mary G
Better news:
Yarrow
@JaySinWA: Then they’ve hired a bad oppo research outfit. Northam ran in 2017. It should have at least come up as an issue then.
raven
@schrodingers_cat: If you think Victoria is a glowing look you haven’t watched it. I know everyone here has their specialties (Fuck LBJ and don’t tell me the drum guy was a Recon Ranger) and the Bloody British is yours so drive on.
O. Felix Culpa
This whole business makes me sick. It’s such obvious ratf*cking. As others have said before me, blackface is heinous behavior and it was part of the culture in benighted parts of our country and educational institutions. And, as others have said before, is every stupid thing people do in their teens and twenties to be eternally disqualifying? Or do we look at the record of service in the ensuing years?
I agree that Northam’s response was horribly botched. As a low-level candidate, I can tell you that no one prepares you for the poo that gets flung in your direction, especially by alleged allies.(Mind you, he could afford better advice than us lowlings.) Issuing the perfect response that is perfectly pleasing to everyone is fucking impossible. Especially to your alleged allies. In the meantime, the utterly evil GOP rubs its hands with glee as we decimate our own. Focus people: children in cages, environmental protections dismantled, climate change rising, etc. etc. etc.
But yes, let’s eat our imperfect own, all the way down, until there’s no one left.
Emma
@schrodingers_cat: I have come to realize that for Democrats it’s more important to “do it right” than “to win.” Watching one half of the United States thrashing around trying to root out stupid/immoral behavior while the other one just steps over the corpses in the battlefield while waving MAGA hats it’s at best disheartening. I do not deny that rooting out the country’s deep-seated racism and misogyny is important, but the timing sucks. We could be handing an important blue state back to the Confederates.
mr gravity
I’m Southern Baptist. I wish that were not the case. I don’t practice the faith anymore but I was indoctrinated at an early age and I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of it. It was largely the result of being raised in small town Tennessee in the 60’s. I was surrounded by Southern Baptists including my parents who encouraged that sort of thing. I still struggle but I’m getting better.
Now substitute racist for Southern Baptist and see if it’s still true. I think it is. I still struggle but I’m getting better.
Being honest with yourself is the first step to admitting you have a problem.
And if we’re being honest let me say that there is a whole spectrum of racism to consider. My parents taught me that we were all equal in God’s eyes. But they would have lost their minds if I had socialized with people who weren’t “very similar” to me. If you know what I mean.
Brachiator
I guess it says something positive that so many people here are shocked or think that blackface disappeared sometime in the ancient past, around 1980 or so.
But it is pretty clear that a lot of white people didn’t think deeply about it or didn’t care that blackface is, might be, or should be offensive. Ask Megyn Kelly. Or they knew it was offensive, but lived and moved in all white circles or simply ignored or discounted the feelings of black people.
Some of the photos from the Virginia medical school were taken at parties. Most of the people you see in the photos, men and women, are laughing and smiling.
@PJ:
Bullshit. Especially not in the South.
Ultimately, it’s time for a lot of people to grow up, and also to put this crap into perspective, especially since conservatives are happily going to use this to their advantage as much as possible.
ETA: When is Steve King going to resign?
Jay Noble
In the 80’s Black Studies was big thing at colleges and universities. Unfortunately it wasn’t inclusive enough. White kids like me saw (and were encouraged to see) it as “Black Kids Getting to Their Roots”. There was/is so much that we didn’t know and maybe should have but needed to pointed out.
“The Jazz Singer” 1980 Neil Diamond
“Designing Women” 1989 Delta Burke (as a Supreme)
“White Chicks” 2004 Wayan Brothers
schrodingers_cat
@raven: I haven’t watched it. I have only seen the petite pretty actress in the PBS promos.
Have you watched it.
Cacti
Nope. It’s still not okay. Stop trying to rehabilitate it.
germy
It’s weird to me how people zoom in on the blackface makeup and turn it into a discussion of “blackface: bad?” because there are two people in the photo: one posing as a klan member and one posing as a Black person. The “joke” is: “That n**** is about to get lynched, haw haw!”
It’s like if they’d posed as a concentration camp prisoner and a nazi guard (the “joke” being the guard is about to escort the prisoner to an oven) and the discussion was “Is it so bad to dress up in striped concentration camp prisoner garb? I mean, Jerry Lewis made that The Day The Clown Cried movie, right?”
RinaX
I think a lot of white people, even now, think of Al Jolson when it comes to defining what’s blackface, and not using paint on their faces to match a black celebrity they admire. I remember when Julianne Huff used brown makeup when she dressed up as one of the characters on Orange Is The New Black because she was her favorite, and got a lot of crap for it. She immediately apologized and admitted she never made the connection to the racist history of blackface, and I think that’s true of many people, not even just white ones.
I think if you combed back through the photos of public figures over the past 30 years, there’s going to be quite a bit of that type of thing unearthed. I can say I saw that version of it quite a bit while growing up, and no one batted an eye.
JoyceH
I just have to say, and I’m sure I’ll be basted for it, that I’m getting some definite “butheremails!’ vibes from this whole thing. (After all, Hillary should NOT have had a private e-mail server as SecState, right?) When I compare what Northam and Herring did thirty or forty years ago to what the ENTIRE GOP is doing or trying to do, TODAY, this very minute, my reaction is – nobody resign.
And I just wonder how many people here who were calling for Northam’s resignation on the weekend have been on these threads for the past several years condemning the way Al Franken got the bum’s rush out the door?
PJ
@AnonyMuslim: It was common in movies, made in Hollywood and elsewhere, from the beginning through the 1960s, for white actors to play characters of other ethnicities. Some are completely offensive (Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s), some treat the character with respect (Peter Sellers in The Party, Alec Guinness in Lawrence). It’s not “blackface” per se, as that comes from the minstrel tradition where white Americans mocked black Americans via stereotypical racist tropes. Some times, as in the Mickey Rooney case, it was used to perpetuate “funny” racial stereotypes, other times it was because having a white star in the role was thought to have bigger box office potential than an actor of that ethnicity. Some times it was also just a desire for the actor (say, Orson Welles as Othello), who wanted to play a particular role regardless of the ethnicity of the character.
Mary G
This guy needs to crawl back under his rock:
cwmoss
@A Ghost To Most: That was Claude Rains’ character who said it. Peter Lorre’s character handed him his winnings right after he said it!
Elizabelle
@Cheryl Rofer: Northam is not a bad guy. And he is a good governor. He is good on important issues that you might not expect someone from his background to be good on, and he was out front early with them.
I don’t think we can afford a sacrificial lamb.
And — and this is interesting — maybe Northam could atone by protecting Buckingham County/Union Hill’s traditional black community against the Dominion’s Atlantic Coast pipeline. Leverage, people.
jl
@Brachiator: ” Bullshit. Especially not in the South. ”
You sure about that? I didn’t learn much about social history of the US until college. HS history for me was great white men, wars, battles, great events, white persons right minded goo goo civics history.
I spent a year in community college in same place I went to HS, and because out of curiosity I took some honors courses in US social history, and it was a whole different world opening up, just a few miles away from my HS campus. I don’t know what people who avoided US history or took the standard courses learned.
Edit: and remember there was a whole campaign to normalize confederate symbolism as something completely wholesome. The media has been full of it for decades.
raven
@schrodingers_cat: Every week. this week’s glowing look was at cholera and the stupid christainistas insistence that it was “foreigners” who caused it. Remember last year that most people in England had no idea about their government’s role in the Irish potato famine until they saw it on the show. I know it’s not a perfect history but it’s far from glowing.
tobie
When I look at what’s going on in VA, I see more than typical GOP ratfvcking. This is part of a national GOP campaign. They desperately need to get evangelicals out to the polls in the same numbers that Democrats rushed to the polls in 2018 and what better issue to unite the right and send Bible-thumping God-botherers into fits of joy than to make Viriginia the front lines for outlawing abortion. First get rid of the Democratic leaders in the state. Outlaw late term abortion. Have the case go to the Supreme Court where the right-wing justices will overturn Roe v. Wade. Once this is done the evangelicals will work overtime to reelect Trump and the GOP in 2020. It would not surprise me if people high-up in the GOP were involved in digging up dirt. And it also would not surprise me if the GOP party brass were accepting help from shady outfits linked to Russia. Conspiracy rant done.
Frances Perkins
We are in an existential fight with the fascists. As bad as it is, its history. Democrats should stand their ground.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mary G: I believe he’s the one who said he wanted to be the AOC of the right.
Kraux Pas
In the early 90s I, as a 4th grader, was part of a “minstrel show” my Catholic school put on. It did not, however, feature black face. The implications of them calling it a minstrel show rather than a talent show escaped me until I was older.
raven
Have ya’ll seen Spike’s “Bamboozled” where the lead black dude does blackface?
”
“It is time, then, to take a close look at Bamboozled, which deserves to be respected as much more than a mid-career oddity in Lee’s filmography. It is a vital work that’s equal parts crystal ball and cannonball: glittering and prophetic, heavy and dangerous.”
raven
@tobie: You know they are saying the white outfits were congresswomen dressing as abortion doctors?
schrodingers_cat
@raven: Victorian era is treated by Brits as the height of their influence and their culture, hence I thought it would be a glowing look. I stand corrected. Victorian era on the other hand decimated India, and India is still paying the price for her majesty’s civilizing rule.
tobie
@raven: Oh gawd…I didn’t know that. These people are sick. I don’t have any bumper stickers on my car, but I’m thinking of buying one that reads: “Republicans {heart} you until you’re born.” This should make me some friends on the roadways.
ETA: I was taken aback by the lurid statements on abortion in the SoTU last night, which is what got me thinking about how what’s happening in VA from a craven political angle is aligned with Republican efforts to gin up its base nation-wide.
O. Felix Culpa
@O. Felix Culpa: Shorter: nobody fucking resigns. We’re in an existential battle and knocking off our own only encourages the ratf*ckers.
Betty Cracker
Per WaPo just now, the woman who accused Fairfax of sexual assault now says she didn’t tell anyone about it until October 2017. The assault allegedly occurred in 2004.
jacy
I think the problem with the “I’m shocked” attitude shows that a lot white people just don’t hang with black people. Black people always knew about this, but the generalized racism in our society meant that you pretty much kept your head down unless you wanted to get it knocked off. And so there has been a willful blindness on the part of white America — even, and maybe especially, liberal white America. Liberals wanted to believe they weren’t like that, so they didn’t look too close. It was not examined, not dealt with, not admitted. The one good thing about all the shit that has gone on the last two years is we’re FINALLY having the discussions regarding racism, sexism, and homophobia we should have been having all along. This all sucks and is demoralizing, but it’s also the growing pains of getting better. We can learn. We can be better. It just takes a fucking lot of work and pain.
VeniceRiley
Remember when Ted Danson did blackface while he was dating Whoopi? I think it was at a roast.
Mary G
Sad news:
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: @Frances Perkins: Hear hear!
A Ghost To Most
@Betty Cracker: Point taken, but having grow up the outlier in a family circle of straight-up racists and klanners, perhaps I saw more and recognized more. A lot of people don’t see what they would prefer not to acknowledge exists.
There’s nothing like a guy trusting you enough to show you his prize possession: a custom-made, hand-sewed, 1920s silk Klan robe. Also, being recruited for League of the South because of my family ties. That was an awkward and ugly end to a lovely evening. I’ve got a hundred memories like that.
Mnemosyne
@AnonyMuslim:
There’s a fairly infamous video of a group of Australians performing in blackface for a horrified Harry Connick Jr. about 10 years ago. As I understand it, it’s still pretty common and accepted in Australia.
Searcher
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Northam can’t run for re-election, so what’s the problem?
He’s “officially” no longer a Democrat, but he stays in office governing the same way he would with a (D) behind his name?
Snoopy
It’s been 30 years since I’ve seen “Soul Man”, but my recollection of its big moral was: “affirmative action is necessary, know I know why”. This was me viewing it as a privileged and callow white kid in the south.
Is this not how it was received?
Cheryl Rofer
@Elizabelle: I’m not saying he should be sacrificed, just that he remains clueless in important ways.
I tend to agree with O. Felix Culpa – it’s ratfvcking all the way down and should be resisted.
Northam, Fairfax, and the AG should appear together, genuinely apologize, and then point out their records. Then say that Republican disruption of government has to stop, and to that end, they are remaining in office and intend to attend to the business of the state, unlike those who rejoice in digging up decades-old dirt.
But they need to get a better advisor than Northam has been working with. I’m available for $500 an hour plus travel expenses.
Brickley Paiste
@A Ghost To Most:
There are a few points here:
1) Reid’s comments, set one, were in 2007-2009, not ancient history. She was a grown-ass woman, too. But, she apologized, admitted she was wrong, blamed her “traditional” (sic, homophobic) parents, said she is not that person anymore. Fair enough.
2) Then another batch of Reid’s homophobic slurs surfaced (from 2005-2007) and, this time, she went with the “I was hacked” defense which is patent bullshit as the Internet Archive captured the posts in real time when they were made. And the Internet Archive released a polite yet unmistakable statement noting that they had not been hacked. So she lied like a motherfucker. For that she should be fired/shunned/de-platformed/etc.
3) I don’t know what you’ve said about religion but all monotheistic religions are silly, I’d say you get a pass.
4) The main point of my question was to point at the, ahem, somewhat problematic implications of simplistic bromides like “We need to listen to people of color”. Okay, cool beans, you mean like homophobic liar Joy Reid, nutjob Omarosa? What about Clarence Thomas while we’re at it? The idea that “people of color” are a monolithic block of liberal wisdom is a notion that you really can’t hold in your head unless you are a fucking racist.
[Some of this was stated in previous thread, so sorry for the repetition …]
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yep, the as Al Fraken showed, the left is so fucked with the demands for utter purity. We knew Al was a comedian and we were shocked, shocked, when we found out Al did jokes in bad taste time to time. Off with his head, the bum.
So tell me, were do you all expect to find this limitless supply of Democrats who spent their entire lives examine their own actions under microscope on the off chance they might run for office? Minorities? like no one has ever accused a black man of rape in America. Women? Like being a racists ass is only a white guy thing? Perhaps you might want to reflect on how pretty much at the same time Northam was trying to be cool by moonwalking was when Barrack Obama decided that he was going to be president and set out to live the next twenty five years of his life so one could find fault in it. Someone with that level of drive is not normal.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: And don’t forget Aahi tuna for Ric and Zoe! We need a kitteh break.
Jay Noble
@PJ: John Wayne as Ghingas Khan
Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder?
raven
@schrodingers_cat: I in no way question your depth of knowledge of the crimes of the British Empire.
Ladyraxterinok
@Yarrow: How DID blog? get the picture? Someone clued them/knew they were there. How???
ruemara
@VeniceRiley: Yes.
@Mnemosyne: Yes.
@Snoopy: It’s like “White Man’s Burden”. I believe it was done in good faith. I’m definitely not the intended audience and I would have been the right age demo for it. But I didn’t want to see C. Thomas in blackface. Consider it the Kardashian Pepsi commercial of it’s time.
West of the Rockies
@Brachiator:
We can all point to people of every race who are creative, honorable, eloquent, compassionate. We can all point to people of every race who are violent, stupid (or ignorant), mean, grubby, etc.
Because of institutionalized racism, collectively-speaking, white people have a lot to address in America. That doesn’t mean all of us were slave-holders or terrible people individually. That doesn’t mean other races (religions, ethnicities, etc) have never, ever treated people of different races (or members of their own race) poorly.
Humans are deeply flawed. We are capable of sublime kindness, creativity and generosity. There is much work ahead. Some of it calls for apologies and acts of forgiveness (not forgetting). There are those among us who will continue to be vile, dishonest, cruel, and stupid.
Rant over.
Edit: this is addressed to BP, not Brachiator.
A Ghost To Most
@O. Felix Culpa: That would be my position. There is nothing these people would not do to win.
Elizabelle
@Cheryl Rofer: I will take you out to dinner if you come to Richmond! With wine!
Agreed. They need to stay in office and work for all Virginians.
O. Felix Culpa
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “Where do you all expect to find this limitless supply of Democrats who spent their entire lives examine their own actions under microscope on the off chance they might run for office?”
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa:
Well said! You get dinner with wine in RVA too!
A Ghost To Most
@cwmoss: Zhen already corrected me. My movie fu sucks. Apologies. Google is my friend.
Anonymous At Work
John,
Fully supportive of the basic premise.
As to the tone, the clouds needed a good talking-to and the kids needed to get off your grass anyway. ;)
Brachiator
@jl:
Yep.
Did you also live in a largely segregated society?
There was also a whole campaign to normalize Southern and American racism as honorable. It still is happening.
cckids
@AnonyMuslim: It was Amy Irving, not Adams. And the character was supposed to be half Russian (according to the book), but still, Irving was just too aggressively white for it. And the casting was panned at the time, too.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: I’ll take you up on it the next time I’m in the area! :)
A Ghost To Most
@Brickley Paiste:
Silly is how I described all religions in my yoot. That position has evolved to the belief that all religions are dangerous grifter cults. At best.
Ladyraxterinok
@Frankensteinbeck: Why oh why don’t we white people just shut up and start listening to what black people experience as racist and unacceptable?!?
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: You must!
PJ
@Brachiator: You’re the one who’s full of shit. None of that stuff was taught in school, and unless some white kid had some other adult enlighten them, they weren’t going to know about it. Sure, there were racists, and racism was bad, but specific acts of white oppression, particularly institutional oppression, were never discussed – it was all to do with the South and was a thing of the past. (We were also taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery.) That’s how adults could condone and support a “slave auction”.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne:
And be prepared if you visit The Netherlands at Xmas.
trollhattan
The yearbook pictures make me squirm and I found Northam’s responses so weird I wonder why the hell he was ever drawn to politics in the first place. And from three time zones away I’ll let the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia decide what to do about it all without my sage advice.
Guess I’m just lucky to have not grown up around this particular type of idiocy. We had our own special idiocy, damnit! But not this.
Mnemosyne
@VeniceRiley:
Yep, and she unceremoniously (and rightfully) dumped his ass almost immediately. And she was the woman he had divorced his first wife to be with.
NotMax
@A Ghost To Most
Ironic as the original meaning of the word silly was deeply pious.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: No love for me? Or wine? I has a sad.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat: Come to New Mexico. I’ll share whine and wine with you. :)
PaulWartenberg
I just wanna note that I was not surprised. Not that it was Northam – or now the state’s AG – but that it was fcking common enough in the high schools and colleges of my youth that sooner or later someone from my era in political office was going to get caught pulling this sh-t.
I keep noting that right before THIS story broke, the Florida Sec of State Ertel had to resign when a photo of him in blackface posing as a black woman Hurricane Katrina victim in 2005 (doubling or even quadrupling down on the racism AND sexism) surfaced… and this was a moment when the SOB was 35 YEARS OLD and fully aware that what he was doing was racist/sexist/WRONG.
This whole story is exposing the reality of how pervasive White Privilege is, how even seemingly decent white folk have done extremely tone-deaf (at BEST) and extremely hateful (as usual) stuff towards Blacks and other minorities… even without realizing the severity of their acts nor facing any consequences until years later.
We are not going to fix the problem of racism until White folk admit that White Privilege is a hell of a drug.
Mnemosyne
@Brickley Paiste:
So, wait, Reid can successfully apologize for things she said in 2007 but must be fired for similar things she said in 2005? Do you understand how calendars work?
And, no, the but she lied about being hacked! thing has not actually been proven to be a lie. Being told by your computer expert that you were hacked and repeating what that person told you is not a “lie.”
trollhattan
It’s not looking good for Justin Fairfax.
raven
@Ladyraxterinok: Yea because all black folks think exactly the same. . .right?
NY Robbin
@jl:
That explains the public musings of white guys of a certain age who always sound stuck in the ’80s regarding black culture and race: Wilmer, Bill Maher, even Trump. I’m probably saying this awkwardly . . .
A Ghost To Most
@Cacti:
Just because something is not okay, and it’s not, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Should we shun everyone who ever dressed up and acted like a gay person?
Ladyraxterinok
@RinaX: Some MO governor ran for Senate in 90s. It came out he’d done a blackface gig with his band when he was young. (Not sure about details.) He was killed in an accident before the election but still won–great GOP mocking of MO and of democrats.
I believe his wife was appointed to the senate seat he won.
C Stars
I agree with a previous commenter that the fact that the blackface guy is standing next to the guy who’s (dressed as?) a klan member makes the scenario that much more nightmarish. And of course the fact that these chuckleheads and/or whoever was editing the yearbook thought it was ever so haha clever, and had just completed howevermany years of higher education, oh god help us.
But right now I am trying to hold these two things in my mind at the same time: 1.) This is reprehensible and should trigger Northam’s resignation, ratfucking or not. 2.) I would want him to resign in any circumstance OTHER than the circumstance in which a governor who did a stupid, racist thing as a young person and regrets it resigns and is replaced by an actively racist governor (because 99% of Republicans are, right? And in Virginia….) who will grasp the present moment to enact stupid, racist, immoral laws and NOT regret it. That’s the situation we find ourselves in, yeah?
I don’t know if this position is right or wrong. It feels very ethically transactional, in keeping with our crazy modern times. But that’s kinda where I stand on this issue which has nothing to do with me or my state.
As for the legacy of folks doing this kind of thing… not so long ago it was a big thing among white, fratty/bro types, to sport those big “afro” wigs at any occasion for drinking too much and just generally comporting oneself like an asshole (i.e. many occasions). This was happening throughout the 90s and later, and isn’t this also a kind of de facto blackface? (I could insert multiple anecdotes about my “non-racist” Southern in-laws here, in order to illustrate the insidious and persistent nature of the white South’s culturally ingrained racism, but I think that’s probably unnecessary.)
Now, can we say that any drunk college kid who donned an “afro” wig is a racist? Nope. But isn’t it clear by now that racism is so inextricably connected to parts of our cultural background that often we don’t even see it until it’s pointed out? I am STILL thinking about stupid shit I did–as recently as a few months ago–that I realized later came from a place of structural racism, though I didn’t see it at the time. My point is, per John Cole, this kind of shit is still going on. We’re naive if we think it has magically stopped in the last few years. We are never going to be perfect people, but that’s not the goal, I don’t think. The goal is to weed out the nightmares as soon as we wake up to them.
So maybe my earlier point about Northam not resigning doesn’t stand. Shit, I don’t know. This stuff is hard.
SenyorDave
The universe of acceptability when it comes to blackface in current times is tiny. It consists of people who are playing the role of Al Jolson in a biopic, or some type of historical overview of minstrel shows and the like. IMO, If you are 100 years old, and you put on blackface in high school you get a pass.
raven
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
I already know to watch out for the former Bishop of Turkey and his six to eight black friends. Nobody’s stuffing me into a sack and taking me to Spain.
BKinNc
@cwmoss: Peter Lorre’s character was dead by the time Raines got his winnings.
PaulWartenberg
@VeniceRiley:
yup. I remember that too. His career took a hit and he disappeared for a few years before making it back in a Sullivans Travels miniseries that was made in the UK.
FlipYrWhig
@germy:
Not to be defending or excusing but I would guess the “joke” is supposed to be “even Negroes and Klansmen can be friends, haw haw!” But I haven’t heard anything about the occasion for which people made and wore those costumes. Knowing the ’80s, white privilege, and white-boy logic as I do as a man in his late 40s, I think someone came up with an idea for a party where two buddies would dress in a group costume as hilarious opposites. No one has said that so I’m taking a wild guess, but given the context that’s how it feels and, if true, would explain partly why Northam isn’t apologizing in quite the right way.
PaulWartenberg
@A Ghost To Most:
Not Peter Lorre. Claude Rains. Christ, watch the movie.
Peppermint Patrick
Although I’ve lived in Los Angeles my entire adult life, I grew up in an all-white rural area, and am roughly Northam’s age. I’m not sure I would want to have a conversation about race today with my 18-year-old self. But, I was at least sufficiently historically-aware as a college student to recognize that blackface was offensive, even waaaaay back in the early ’80’s. I don’t think it would have occurred to me at the time that blackface at a fraternity party would be career-killing 35 years later, but I did understand – contemporaneously – that guys in Halloween blackface were dicks. Interesting, too, that you virtually never see women in blackface photos from the era. I’m not worried about a picture of Amy Klobuchar turning up as Diana Ross for Halloween at Yale in 1984. It’s a guy-thing, it was offensive then as it is now, and whether it should be career-ending is up for debate, but “that was the ’80’s” excuses ring hollow to me.
Elizabelle
@Ladyraxterinok: Mel and Jean Carnahan.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker: How long did Kavanaugh’s accuser take to first report?
A Ghost To Most
@NotMax: I did not know that, but I certainly conflate the two.
NotMax
@BKinNC
What, no spoiler alert?
:)
Cheryl Rofer
@Elizabelle: I’ve written that down! I will be in DC next month.
The Moar You Know
@schrodingers_cat: The way PBS has been lurching rightward I’m expecting that by mid-year.
PaulWartenberg
the only funny joke in Soul Man was the bit where Howell’s dad (a Boomer) refuses to pay for his Harvard schooling (Gen X) because the dad’s psychiatrist – dressed up in sweats – told him not to pay for his kids’ education and indulge in himself. And then Howell realizes the shrink’s office is full of middle-aged Boomer men all dressed in sweats like they were in a deranged Me Generation cult.
I dunno. That bit’s always stuck with me.
Brickley Paiste
@A Ghost To Most:
If they weren’t gay … probably.
@raven:
Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” knocked this one out of the park, with a heavy side order of class consciousness. No wonder it, too, bombed at the box office.
SenyorDave
@A Ghost To Most: /Peter Lorie voice
Shouldn’t that be in a Claude Rains voice?
gene108
There was a Culture Club video set in a courtroom, with a bunch of people in blackface. I can’t remember the name of the song, anyone remember what it was? It was a pretty big hit for them, IRCC
A Ghost To Most
@PaulWartenberg: I have watched it, but not for decades. Your condescension I’d noted, but I can live with the guilt. Movie douche.
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa: The downside of that strategy is that you’re basically saying “fuck your feelings” to the people who are the victims of these incidents. You can make the argument that it’s the right thing to do anyway since Republicans are nihilistic scum who are destroying the country. But it’s important to acknowledge that this is inseparable from the strategy you’re recommending.
Ella in New Mexico
@O. Felix Culpa: Couldn’t agree more.
I think it’s time we all take a big fucking breather and get some perspective here: It may be time to say “No, all things are not equal and NO, you’re not holding our values against us so we turn a firing squad on our own people.”
We’re being attacked by pretty much the most immoral, overtly racist and un-American Party in the history of the United States because they’re counting on us–the good guys– to have absolutely NO ability to discern the moral in-equivalence between:
Marching in the streets with Tiki torches saying “you will not replace us” or calling counter protestors “N****rs”
vs.
Dressing as a Rapper at a party at age 18 in 1980 and admitting it was a bad choice but you’ve dedicated your life to equality.
Having unprotected sex with underage girls and hookers and porn stars and trying to assault as many as possible in your lifetime and just generally treating women like toilet paper
vs.
A tasteless but harmless photo done in jest while you were part of a comedy tour and having your arm drift too far down to a woman’s butt during a photo op
As frustrating as it is, we might need to stop holding ourselves to perfect standards that are impossible and silly and come up with a new paradigm for how we deal with this kind of shit. BECAUSE THE REPUBLICANS GET IT–they’re holding us hostage to our own values.
The “purity test” is a real thing. I remember it was used over and over again by people I no longer speak to to justify why it was ok for George Zimmerman to murder Trayvon Martin. Or for the killing of Michael Brown, or the choking death of Eric Garner or for the arrest and subsequent hanging death of Sandra Bland.
They weren’t “pure victims”, they were tainted by human failings or frailty or youthful indiscretion and so were to blame for what happened to them. I blasted my sister in law for posting a video of Michael Brown “maybe stealing something so there, he was no angel he deserved what he got”.
THEY love to use our imperfections against us. But we must be able to see the full spectrum of good vs. bad, and be able to rationally apply it to ourselves or they will win, folks.
PJ
@C Stars: I think you have to look at what good will come from resigning or not. In this case, a no tolerance policy would show that the Democratic Party will brook no demonstrations of racism from politicians at any time in their life, unless properly apologized for and atoned for, which may or may not reassure African-American voters, but it may mean that a Republican leader of the General Assembly will become governor (if Fairfax has to resign, and the AG is forced out because of his own blackface incident). That will surely make life for African-Americans in Virginia worse. Is demonstrating moral purity worth that outcome?
eemom
@O. Felix Culpa:
You have piqued my curiosity. Are you the proverbial candidate for dogcatcher? ?
Brickley Paiste
@Ella in New Mexico:
You just get on out of here with your reasonable distinctions.
Fairfax must resign and be replaced by Aziz Ansari!
NotMax
@gene108
Also too, Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz music vid.
Immanentize
@A Ghost To Most:
Good old Black Pete. I bought French fries at a market stand from a Black Pete….
Dmbeaster
Something worth adding to this.
Blackface does not mean that a white person applies makeup to darken the appearance and passes for black for any reason. The offensive tradition of Blackface was a cartoonish appearance and a schtick to mime alleged bad habits of blacks. That is why it has such a racist connotation, and is the same reason white people just cannot use the n word. You come across as a racist dick no matter what your intentions because of history.
But I can remember an appropriate use of “blackface,” such as the author of “Black Like Me” which I read as a kid and opened my eyes to the truth of racial inequality. I grew up with no black people in my life and plenty of racist white adults. It is sad that a white man passing as black is what it took to teach white kids like me about racism, but it worked. It would be slander to label the author of that book a racist because he used “blackface” to develop the material for his book.
So context matters, but the best possible context for blackface as a costume for a party is stupidity. Still, that is my perception of Northam and do not agree with the demand for automatic resignation.
If the party could make room for a reformed Byrd (which it wisely did), then a blackface episode 30 years ago is not automatically disqualifying.
Ladyraxterinok
@raven: incredible! The GOP will use/twist anything they can!
Ksmiami
@Emma: fuck that. Have the governors Apologize and move on. We have a bigger war to fight.
NotMax
@O. Felix Culpa
Yes.
Juju
I live in North Carolina, a state that sent Jesse Helms to the senate from 1973-2003, and would probably have sent him at least one more term if he had not retired. So I was a bit shocked that juicers from this state were saying that even they knew blackface was wrong. I wasn’t surprised that an upper middle class southeastern male in 1984 wouldn’t see anything wrong with blackface or even dressing as a clan member. I don’t know the answer to the resign or not question. He’s not the same person he was in 1984, but the way he handled the situation was lame, to say the least.
As a high school teacher I still hear clueless white students discuss various Halloween costumes, usually singers, that involve blackface. At least in most cases it’s not meant in a malicious way. My advice is always not to do the black face part.
oatler.
As philosopher-king Venus Flytrap said, “You can cut down the tree but the roots go deep.”
raven
The Richard Pryor Show – To Kill A Mockingbird Pryor as a cracker lawyer.
The Moar You Know
@Emma: God, thank you. Exactly. Seconded. All of it. Even the parts I didn’t quote. We have all the time in the world to fix everything after we win, but Dems….damn, as a group, we just do not understand that.
And I have fellow Dems ask me why we aren’t winning everything in a walk. I ask them what they are spending their time and money on. Deer in the headlights, every time. Followed by an agonizing long and detailed recounting of the last protest they went to.
“So, you’ve done nothing”
“Weren’t you listening? I went to a protest! We stuck it to Trump but good! There was a blimp of him with a diaper!”
“Exactly”
PJ
@Brickley Paiste: For an indie movie, Sorry to Bother You was a big hit, grossing $17.5MM at the box office on a $3.2MM budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You#Reception
Betty Cracker
@Immanentize: I don’t remember. I didn’t mean to imply she shouldn’t be believed because she waited to speak up — just noting that she hasn’t offered contemporaneous corroboration as someone on the previous thread suggested she might. Just read her statement as linked by Trollhattan at #120, and I gotta say, she sounds credible to me. Jesus, what a shit-show.
Brachiator
@West of the Rockies:
I said:
If this didn’t cover it, what is the point of your rant?
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker:
Respectfully disagree. You can say, I was wrong and I’m sorry. That acknowledges both the misdeed and the feelings. Resignation for the sake of purity (or feelings) is disproportionate to the misdeed and to the ensuing record of positive public service.
jl
@Brachiator: Well if you say ‘yep’ and ask cryptic tendentious questions with no specific point, then contradict the first part of your own response at the end in a way that agrees with what I said, who am I to argue, ?
ab in pa
Something that is racial isn’t necessarily racist..
Are cross dressers misogynists?
(I’m a male and in high school I once dressed up as a female cheerleader, along with others, for a stupid pep rally. Does that make me a misogynist?)
Cheers
different-church-lady
@Emma:
Yes, but the only way we can prove we’re not horrible is to give the horrible people power.
[nods]
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So.
NotMax
@Dmbeaster
Trivia: The original adoption of blackface on the stage was by (and for a time exclusive to) Irish-American performers in the early to mid 1800s, in both Jim Crow and Zip Coon* guises.
*Sorry for that, but it was the common name for the character.
LAC
@Brickley Paiste: those the only people of color you know? Hence, the problem.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Yes. She does sound credible. Was aware of that a few days back. Believe she is a friend of Levar Stoney, Richmond’s marvelous young mayor, progressive ideals, African American. Who helped recruit Ralph Northam to run for governor and called for him to resign a few days ago.
I am getting whiplash.
germy
@PJ: We loved that movie, but we had to drive almost an hour to see it.
Compared to some crappy movies that were in every theater around here, the Boots Riley film didn’t get the distribution it deserved. And it STILL made money.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: I know.
Don’t be fucking lemmings, purity ponies. Think. Look.
Steve in the ATL
@schrodingers_cat: [upvote]
A Ghost To Most
@SenyorDave:
I’ve apologized twice. That’s what I get for quoting a movie I probably last watched back when the events under discussion occurred. I’ll leave it to those who care about old movies far more than me. The comparison, regardless of the correct character, still stands. Some people’s lives were undoubtedly more shielded than mine, but C’mon man!
eemom
@Ladyraxterinok:
Wasn’t that MO Senate election the one that GWB’s first AG, John Ashcroft, coverer-up of boobies on Justice Department statues, lost?
As I recall, there were those at the time who thought that the simple act of losing an election to a dead man should be disqualifying for appointment to a cabinet position. So quaint.
Jamey
Even Brett-Fucking-Kavanaugh’s seconds had the foresight to scrub cyberspace for any evidence that he was [likely] a racist cockswab. Maryland beltway towns like B/C-C are geographically and ideologically a pitching-wedge shot apart from Virginia.
I think they didn’t touch the grab-ass/sexual assault stuff because there was too much of it, and they were entitled fuckwads who understood that there were millions of Republicans–men AND women–who would apologize away misogyny if it meant having one of their good old boys wearing a SCOTUS robe.
LAC
@O. Felix Culpa: still “fuck your feelings” but said nicely with a a head tilt and sad face.
The Moar You Know
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: This is a good question. My wife has been at me to run for school board for the last five or so years. My answer is always the same: no fucking way. I was a professional musician back in the late 1980s. All it’s going to take is one party pic and I’m toast. And it’ll be a fellow Dem doing the knifework.
O. Felix Culpa
@NotMax: Good. Then you perhaps know firsthand – unlike the rest of the esteemed pundits here – just what a vulnerable position being a candidate or elected official is. I’ve had people scream at me and call me an enemy for doing a minor thing my predecessors had done without objection. I’ve had people tell me I’m undermining the foundations of democracy…because they didn’t understand or didn’t take the time to understand a thing. I’ve been bombarded with emails, text messages, voice messages, from people who imagined an imaginary transgression…which even if real would make no difference in the real world. All these people were supposedly ON THE SAME SIDE. We eat our own. I survive and continue to do my work, but Jesus Christ on a cracker, who wants to do anything in the public under these circumstances?
Mnemosyne
@PaulWartenberg:
And now it’s my turn to be that person and say it was “Gulliver’s Travels.” Sullivan’s Travels is a Preston Sturges movie.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker:
It didn’t help that Fairfax referring to her said, “Fuck that lying bitch.” Which is being reported….
johnnybuck
i attended college in west Georgia 35 years ago. I never saw anybody wear black face, but I saw plenty of rebel flags and didn’t think much about it at the time. It actually wasn’t until the Klan march in Cumming ga, in 1987 that I really began to understand what it might be like for some people to have to endure that symbol codified by the state government. it was a clarifying moment for me. I went to the march to protest the klan, but i came away understanding that they were a symptom of a problem that I was only beginning to understand. I never questioned the racism around me, as it was prevalent in daily life, it just hadn’t occurred to me that I was affected by it.
i can’t speak to what was in the mind of either of these men 35 years ago. I know I thought, said, and did so much that I would be profoundly embarrassed about today. I don’t know what the right course of action is, I only have my own perspective to draw on. People can change, and they do. At some some point we have to reconcile with the idea that where we are trying to go is more important that where we’ve been. I believe honest contrition, and forgiveness will make that possible.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Huh. That makes a horrible kind of sense, and could explain why Northam is all tangled up trying to explain it.
Ladyraxterinok
@jacy: In 90s I was talking with a black female colleague in Tulsa when there was the push to get the OK legislature to do something about reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.
I said I’d never learned about the Riot in school (K-12 in Tulsa) and only learned about it from some things my Gramma told me–she ran a boarding house then. I said most whites living in /growing up in Tulsa didn’t know anything about the Riot.
She just looked at me and said calmly ‘We in North Tulsa have ALWAYS known about the Riot; it’s part of our history.’
Once again I realized that a white and a black–even living in the same town for years–inhabit different worlds! I knew that–I just seem to have to have that fact emphasized periodically!
tobie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup, I remember that election, and how there was some last minute change that made a 1-vote Democratic victory a tie. The Democratic candidate decided not to contest the race. Boy, do we wish she had done it now.
I remain convinced that these revelations are an effort on the part of the GOP to gin up evangelical support nationwide by the having the party in VA stop a late-term abortion bill. They need those folks to go to the polls badly.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Immanentize: in fairness, it’s easy to see Fairfax saying something like “Fuck this shit!” and somebody getting it wrong. Or, and I guess more likely, somebody in the room (or pretending to have been) is eager to shiv Fairfax.
Steve in the ATL
@Ella in New Mexico: [upvote]
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa: I’m not talking about the pols; I mean the people who are essentially saying nothing matters but winning. Winning is important! I get it! But so is changing the status quo. Minimizing this garbage behavior in the interest of political expediency — characterizing genuine anguish about sexual harassment, overt racism, etc., as “virtue signaling” (if you’re a wingnut) or “purity” (if you’re a liberal) — does not change the status quo.
O. Felix Culpa
@LAC: No. And the battle with the current GOP transcends feelings. Fuck unilateral disarmament. Ask the parents of the two dead Guatemalan children. And the parents whose kids may be forever lost to them. Blackface is and was wrong. It’s not criminal. Move on.
NotMax
@O. Felix Culpa
Both sides (oh, that dreaded term) eat their own. See: We’ll primary you from the far right. Difference in scale perhaps, but not in motivation.
Barbara
Herring should not have used “dark make-up,” but it’s the combined impact of Northam possibly being in blackface while standing next to someone in KKK costume while in medical school that I found and still find amazing. I was alive, I was at UVA at the same time, and believe me, I knew people like Herring who went to costume parties in costumes of questionable taste along the same lines (and no, I wasn’t one of them). The KKK has never been a joke. To test myself on this, I asked my husband who grew up close to where Northam did and he is as shocked as I was. But on the larger point, you have to find a way past ostracism for genuine changes of heart. On that score, IMO, Northam’s threatening to become an independent was absolutely the worst thing he could have done. It shows a continuing failure to comprehend how wrong it was to incorporate these racist images into one’s social life, and how much they were part of an entire cultural edifice that worked hard to demean and exclude African Americans.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: also hard to see VA democrats winning in a few months by ignoring the voices the black legislative caucus
Brickley Paiste
@PJ:
By that metric, it did okay, but for an 800+ theatre release, it did not do well. (Plus which Annapurna co-distributed with MGM.)
Don’t know if you’re a Boots Riley fan but check out his albums. Fantastic.
A Ghost To Most
@The Moar You Know: They cut out the not-in-the-closet atheists decades ago. Keep shrinking the pure-enough pool, Dems.
Chyron HR
@Betty Cracker:
When the victims propose to voluntarily turn Virginia into Kansas to redress their grievances, they’re basically saying “fuck a lot of people’s civil rights and personal safety”.
PJ
@different-church-lady: We will march from moral victory to moral victory, all the way down.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I have no idea who Debbie Dingell is, but I assume she is the wife of John Dingell, the oldest serving rep who is so totally awesome on twitter. Oh no, that is terrible news. He is a treasure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: can’t edit: “ignoring voices like the black legislative caucus”
Brickley Paiste
@LAC:
It’s a shame that in your eagerness to loose your carefully curated zinger, you’ve completely missed the point of what I was saying.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne:
I will leave this to the experts, but I did laugh.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WaterGirl: both his wife and successor in the seat, which John himself took over from his father. The district has been represented by a Dingell since 1933
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker: I think that the current controversy and issues raised about practices like blackface should (had better!) change the status quo. But seriously, why should a person whose record has been good for decades not only lose his job but also quite possibly hand it over to the GOP over a 35-year old infraction? Why do we do this to ourselves? When people’s lives are literally at stake? I don’t get it.
My ex-husband is a POC and my children are mixed-race, so I know firsthand the racial ugliness that happens in this country. Still don’t agree with hounding a person out of office for ancient infractions so the GOP can do its dirty work.
C Stars
@PJ:
* Getting flashbacks of crazed Bernie bros shouting at me on Facebook: “But Clinton will be EXACTLY THE SAME as Trump!1!!*
No, I don’t want that outcome.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
When minstrel shows came up the other day, I found a book by a film professor explaining how Jewish performers like Al Jolson used it to make themselves more “white” for the broader American culture. Presumably the Irish immigrants were doing it for the same reason.
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: Well said.
WaterGirl
I can’t recall — which Republican senator was it during the Kavanaugh hearings who basically said “you better watch out with what you started here; we are coming for you”? Was it Lindsay Graham during his spittle-flecked rage?
I think that’s what we are seeing now.
Ladyraxterinok
@A Ghost To Most: My Gramma told me how she was invited to join the women’s auxiliary of the Klan in the 20s–it was very strong in
Tulsa then.
She said she wouldn’t ally with any group that wouldn’t accept her husband. He was from Switzerland, and the Klan was very anti-foreigner.
Note–she was a pillar in the First Baptist Church–as an adult I’ve thought about what that says about that church, the the Klan thought it would be a good source of members.
In the past yr Wm Lindsey as his blog bilgrimage.blogspot.com has had a few posts about how the protestant churches were leading supporters of the clan, invited them to services in their robes, lead marches, etc.
Mnemosyne
@O. Felix Culpa:
Herring made a sincere public apology that acknowledged that he realizes that he did wrong and regrets it. I don’t see any reason why he should have to resign.
Northam needs to either come up with a sincere, heartfelt apology or GTFO.
The Moar You Know
Since Fairfax’s situation has just gotten a lot worse, and AG Herring is having blackface issues of his own (albeit handled better) here’s what the state of Virginia is likely facing soon:
A resignation of the governor which will hand control of the state back entirely – 100%, as they control the Senate and Assembly – to the Republican Party.
-or-
a non-resignation of the governor which will be exploited by the GOP to maximum effect to piss off and depress African-American turnout.
Hell of a choice. Expect this to repeat in many other states. We better figure out how to handle it now.
Steeplejack
OT, but a good laugh today.
Just got a “call to action” e-mail from RAICES, and it uses the Nancy Smash “fuck you” applause photo as a banner across the top. Trump is cropped to a little head poking up from the bottom corner.
O. Felix Culpa
@Mnemosyne: I agree that Northam’s response was simply awful. He needs to wake up and fully acknowledge that what he did was wrong – no excuses – and do that right quick.
Cacti
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Insensitive if he said what was reported, but anger is a fairly predictable reaction to being accused of a crime out of the blue. His actual public statement today was measured and restrained, but firm in its denial.
LAC
@PaulWartenberg: you can see the tone deafness here on this very thread. It is very depressing. And now i would be hard pressed to argue about voting and seat at the table if a fellow POC saw these comments here from our “allies”. The guy might have salvaged something if he was forthright about it all. But he reverses his story, adds another embarrassing story, had to be stopped by his wife from moonwalking. And we get nice versions of Sit Down and Shut Up (but thank you for your black votes) and the plot to Soul Man. Because a face plant a day is normal. Jaysus….
PJ
@Brickley Paiste: Maybe it’s just a regional thing, but it played in NYC for at least a couple of months. I do think a movie with that kind of satirical tone and a left turn into horror can be difficult to market, particularly without any major stars, but then Get Out did extremely well without any stars, so maybe it was just the distributor.
WaterGirl
What if Nancy Pelosi announces that they will be checking yearbooks for all sitting representatives and senators in Congress, and anyone who works or has worked in this administration, and the music should stop until that until effort has been completed?
WaterGirl
@lamh36: Is it worse to leave one of these people in office in Virginia, in spite of blackface? Or is it worse to have all 3 in line gone and leave Virginia being run by a Republican?
As for the rape accusation, I think he should stay until the accusation has been investigated. To me, that is different from being about to install him on the highest court in the land, and saying it should have no bearing on that.
Mary G
Nuance is important:
When the first Northam picture came out, I immediately thought he should resign because of the Klan figure. But now it does seem like this is some major coordinated ratfucking and I am not sure. Perhaps we should all agree that white people in blackface is not OK ever from here on out, and apologize for being ignorant of the hurt it causes, but that we cannot all be perfect and it is bad to get rid of people if real racists AKA Republicans will replace them? And then leave it up to the voters in Virginia to decide what they want their elected officials to do? I keep going back to Obama’s idea about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: I have not seen that substantiated anywhere. Do we have reason to know that he actually said that? Or was that a paraphrase of him saying that the post had investigated and not found her credible?
Elizabelle
@LAC: Hello there.
Other than the blackface and moonwalking, what do you know about Ralph Northam? What issues has he advocated for?
Immanentize
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s not him saying it really that upsets me because it would be a natural reaction to say it if you were innocent. I’m complaining g that he was fool enough to say it so it could be reported.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Kind’a sort’a. Vaudeville pretty much put minstrel shows into eclipse, the latter having become more of a curiosity or holdover than a mainstay of mass entertainment by the early years of the 20th century. Not to say there weren’t minstrel acts included in some vaudeville shows, but they were no longer the sole attraction.
Strictly as an aside, you might find reading about (if you’re not already aware of him) William Henry Lane (a/k/a “Master Juba”) of some historical interest.
A Ghost To Most
@Ladyraxterinok: Yep. I know many Catholics, including family, who are very Klan friendly, but ignore the anti-Catholic strain so common in the 20s.
Catholics are accepted as “white” now. Well, except for those people.
LAC
@Brickley Paiste: yes, a real shame that the many bon mots you sprinkled on the board were not given their due. And that was a genuine question i asked. And i think you answered.
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yikes, I mistakenly thought that John Dingell was still serving in that seat. What you said makes sense.
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl: I don’t think the Post necessarily said the woman was not credible, in declining to publish the story earlier. But that the account could not be corroborated. That is a different thing.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@raven:
drive on
Immanentize
Any one want to take odds on whether the result of this whole shit show will be the white guys stay and the black guy resigns?
Searcher
@The Moar You Know: Oooooooor Northam resigns from the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party decries his actions as unacceptable, and Northam continues to govern as an independent. He can’t run for re-election anyway, so whether he would actually be denied the D line for governor is academic.
If Northam doesn’t resign, what happens to what’s-his-name and the-other-guy is a non-issue. The Virginian Democratic Party has a couple years to decide if either of them are still good candidates for the next governor, or if they need to find a third option.
You know, what you pied me for pointing out this morning.
Quaker in a Basement
“Let’s not all pretend that this shit is news to us”
And let’s not pretend that it was rare then or rare now. Lots of people did this (and other) ugly stuff and lots still do. I was having this same conversation with my wife not an hour ago. She agrees, but brought up a good point, namely, that news of these incidents can be upsetting and revictimizing to some black folks. It’s important to include context and some sensitivity when discussing these events.
Frankensteinbeck
@WaterGirl:
Very much so, especially if this is the accusation that was previously investigated and nobody could find any substantiation. It is easy to produce a false accusation for political purposes, and something Republicans have specifically tried to do before. Let it be investigated. I think Heller will be fine and his caucus and constituents will accept his apology, but that’s their decision, not mine. I can only guess.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
BBC article post-SOTU used that same photo.
Ladyraxterinok
@NotMax: Both English silly and German selig (holy) have the same root. Selig can also be translated as pious, but not with the negative connotation often present in contemporary American usage.
different-church-lady
@raven: Holy god, Pryor was a funambulist like no other.
Immanentize
@WaterGirl:
This is all I know from Huffpo:
Cacti
Fairfax shouldn’t go anywhere. By all means investigate what needs investigating, but I’m not okay with overturning the results of a democratic election based on the unsworn accusations of a single accuser. Nor should anyone on this blog be. If that’s a precedent Dems want to set, they might as well resign en masse today.
Brachiator
@jl:
I grew up in the South, but have lived all over the country. Most people I’ve known who are racists, know exactly what noxious stuff they believe, and why they believe it, and that includes delusional bullshit about state’s rights, etc.
O. Felix Culpa
I have actual work to do, so will step away with sadness at some of our rush to “off with his head!” I say this as a person who – as I mentioned earlier – has POC family and who is female and a member of the LGBT community. I’ve been at the receiving end of shit. All my life. My feelings get hurt. So what. The GOP wants to take away my rights and protections and my children’s rights and protections and my daughter-in-law’s reproductive rights and poison our water and our air and tear babies away from their parents and we need to oust pretty good public servants because…they did something offensive (not criminal) thirty-plus years ago. Please proceed. Your privilege is showing.
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa: You’re talking about Northam specifically. I was trying to make a larger point about a “circle the wagons” strategy. But has Northam’s record really been good for decades? I don’t know. I’m not a Virginia voter. I did read that he voted for GWB twice. Maybe that should have been a red flag? Even our irascible reformed wingnut host wised up after a single term!
Anyhoo, the larger point I was trying to make is that there’s a trade-off on either side of this argument. I’ll own the one on my side: we’re up against amoral scumbags who play dirty, and sometimes our insistence on sticking to principle will hurt us politically. I’m saying there’s a trade-off to the strategy you’re recommending too, and it exists whether you acknowledge it or not, IMO.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: The letter I read from the woman and her attorneys said that HE had said that she was not credible. And I wondered if someone from her camp had made the comment that is being attributed to him, but is still currently unsubstantiated.
Example: Wondering if it would be like me describing an interaction with the manager of such-and-such a place as her “not giving a shit about my complaint, and basically saying fuck you” to my request for thus-and -so. Even though she literally didn’t say she didn’t give a shit and didn’t literally say fuck you.
That’s what I was trying to say in my comment.
A Ghost To Most
@Betty Cracker: I agree. But as the Department of Defense seems to constantly forget:
You don’t win the current war by refighting the last war.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: I love that photo more and more with each passing minute.
Elizabelle
Some details from the WaPost’s current story. Professor who accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of 2004 sexual assault issues statement detailing alleged incident
[There is a fairly disturbing account of the alleged activity.]
[She wanted this to come out, on some level. Otherwise, why Facebook, where you are no longer in control once you’ve posted content?]
Looking now for the earliest Post story. A mutual friend was quoted as saying it was hard to choose between the two accounts. Fairfax and Tyson are both credible people.
This one is the real nightmare.
Citizen Alan
@PJ:
We see the same thing today with the “whitewashing” of ethnic roles in film. For all the arguments about whether it was racist to cast Scarlett Johansson as the Major Kusanagi in Ghost In The Shell, the simple fact of the matter is that GitS was never going to get made at all as a big-budget Hollywood film without her or some other white actress with sufficient box-office draw playing the lead. To say nothing of The Last Airbender, where M. Night Shyamalan, himself a POC, decided to cast white actors as Asian and Innuit characters. While Shyamalan and the other producers handled that in probably the worst possible way, the simple fact is that Paramount was never going to greenlight a $150 million action-adventure movie with a mostly Innuit cast.
NotMax
Never considered what is now called the moonwalk a particularly black thing. Not so say getting oneself made up as Jackson to perform it is A-OK.
FYI: History of the Moonwalk.
joel hanes
Slavery is not America’s original sin: Native American genocide is.
As offensive as blackface is, it should be nowhere near as offensive as costuming as a Native American stereotype, e.g. with a goddamned feather or twelve and beads or “war paint”.
The tomahawk chop should be as obsolete and reviled as Al Jolson.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Thank you for clarifying.
I am sick to death of all these anonymous sources – if you want whatever you are promoting to be in print, then fucking let them use your name. In this age of lies and propaganda all around us, the rules need to change. No more quotes from anonymous people.
Not swearing at you, just beyond pissed in general.
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker: Please see what I wrote just above you. This is existential for me and my family and many of us. Real harm is being done and worse could come. The time for the finer moral judgments is when the vulnerable among us are reasonably protected.
We both agree that blackface is wrong and we should be held accountable even for youthful actions. But let the punishment be proportionate to the wrongdoing and without causing potential harm to wider swaths of the population. God help the women and minorities of the Commonwealth of Virginia if we purify all the Democrats out of office.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: I think its not one or the other. We need to take every case and assess it on the basis of its merits or the lack thereof. One cannot be 100% pure, for that one needs to renounce the world. Nor can we be power over everything else, we will end up like the Rs. Life is not always easy.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: This. My husband’s mother did not want to come visit us after the Muslim ban fiasco of two years ago. She is neither Muslim nor is she a citizen of one of the countries under the ban.
Elizabelle
@Citizen Alan: And Cameron Crowe’s movie “Aloha” from 2015 tanked, because the part of the half Asian female lead went to
Emma Stone.
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: I am making you my spokesjackal if I ever need one.
Steeplejack
@cwmoss:
Nope. That was the croupier at Rick’s (Marcel Dalio) who handed over the money. I believe Peter Lorre’s character was dead at that point in the movie.
Elizabelle
Here is the WaPost’s story from 2 days ago, before the accuser was named.
Va. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax denies sex assault allegation from 2004
That last paragraph is the part that breaks my heart.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about, for example, Maria Ouspenskaya in brownface in The Rains Came? Or Marlene Dietrich as an olive-hued Gyspy in Touch of Evil?
sdhays
@John Cole: Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry starred in an (otherwise excellent) adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster” in the 90’s which included one episode where Wooster (Laurie) dresses up in blackface. I don’t remember seeing that episode in the 90’s (back in those days, it was easy to miss an episode on the local PBS station and never have a chance to see it again), but it was really jarring to see it when I was rewatching them on Amazon Prime last year. I mean, there are lots of Jeeves and Wooster stories, and they picked THAT ONE??
LAC
@Elizabelle: well, up until his horrible, self wounding press conference, i though he was a honest person. He was as progressive as VA was going to get and i hoped that he was going to use his strong showing among VA’s black voters and put a diverse strong coalition together that would keep the state blue. I like his stance on a number of issues, and he is a contrast to what we have MD with Hogan. That is why i am deeply disappointed in his behavior. We have been accused of a rush to judgment, but nothing is said of the excuse making and equal rush to sweep this under the rug because it interferes with an agenda. The learning experience here, with notable exceptions, has been one sided. Meanwhile, i have learned that Soul Man wasnt the uncomfortable offensive tripe that was protested about when it was released, that perhaps i should paint my skin white of i ever want to impersonate marilyn monroe (to get it right) and that while we might have the “black don’t crack” thing down, there is never an age where white men cannot use ” youthful indiscretion”.
What is sad that Northam could have done something positive about this. Hell, morris Dees of the southern poverty law center grew up from that background and made it mean something. Sorry, but this like taking a shit sandwich and putting it on a pretty plate. Still shitty.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: Not seen either of those movies.
BroD
Agree. Our ethics with regard to race and gender relations have been undergoing rapid change–for the better.
Change is hard because we’re burdened by past sins: the important thing is to focus on the way forward.
A Ghost To Most
@joel hanes:
Agreed. Treating other people like shit is a very human trait, especially in the name of one’s tribe.
The enemy is in front of us. They would love for us to be looking over our shoulder.
sdhays
@joel hanes: I still marvel (in a disgusted way) at how people get enraged at the idea of changing the name of the Washington NFL team’s name. You’d think someone was proposing to burn down their house, and yet NFL teams move around and change their names all the freaking time.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: I don’t excuse Northam or anyone for their blackface, it was racist and offensive. If he had done this last year I would be among the chorus asking him to resign.
When Rs say jump we don’t have to say how high.
Kim Walker
@AnonyMuslim: Amy Irving, not Amy Adams.
Planetjanet
@Elizabelle: Can I come?
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
The Rains Came takes place in India so thought there a chance you’d seen it; comes around on TCM periodically – next airing Feb. 21 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. Touch of Evil is set in Mexico and is a must see at least once (even with the gross miscasting of Charlton Heston).
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
The sad part is, it’s entirely possible that they’re both telling the truth. He may not have realized in the moment that she was distressed, and that’s why he would be angry and confused that she’s now accusing him of assault. It sounds like it may be a genuine gray area situation.
Betty Cracker
@LAC:
Thank you!
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: As for people of European (or African) origin playing Indians on the screen, it depends on how it is done. India is a subcontinent, so there are Indians of all hues, from light to dark, Indians can be pretty much every shade known to humans. It would be totally plausible for a brunette with brown or hazel eyes to portray an Indian person or someone like Zoe Saldana to play an Indian person.
goblue72
@Elizabelle: He was pitched as the more “electable” candidate. And criticisms of the state Democratic party machine favoring Northam over Perriello were dismissed (including by YOU).
Despite the fact that the tool voted for George Bush TWICE and almost switched parties to GOP when he was a state Senator.
Meanwhile, national progressive Democrats (as well as Obama) favored Perriello. Who I can guarantee would not have any of this crap in his closet.
goblue72
@Mnemosyne: Boys will be boys, huh?
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Doing a yellowface or brownface role in Hollywood used to be regarded as just another way for an actor to stretch their wings, like doing an accent. We obviously regard it very differently these days.
Take a look at the all-star cast of Dragon Seed, with Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, and a dozen other white actors playing Chinese characters in a movie about China.
LAC
@Betty Cracker: Thank you!
Mnemosyne
@goblue72:
Do I get to use my magic vagina to answer that question, or are you still pretending there was no misogyny on display in 2016?
Redshift
Hmm. In the bit of Black Twitter I wandered into on Friday evening before the Saturday press conference (which may very well not be representative), there was plenty of decrying as bad allies white people who hasn’t already called on Northam to resign. It definitely influenced my thinking.
Maybe someone could suggest some additional opinions I should check out?
Steve in the ATL
@sdhays: I can’t believe there weren’t protests about the Utah Jazz, a name so ridiculous that you don’t even notice that LA Lakers makes no sense.
Elizabelle
@Planetjanet: Yes! Come on down!
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Never suggested otherwise. And sometimes not a professional stretch so much as a avocational twitch; the Charlie Chan or Mr. Wong movies, for example.
Then there’s those such as J. Carroll Naish (known as the United Nations of Hollywood) who made a career of it, at one time or another portraying nearly every nationality one could name – except an Irishman, his own heritage.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: @NotMax: I don’t know if you guys have heard of Tom Alter. He was an Indian of American origin, his parents were American missionaries who settled in India. He recently passed away. One of his final roles was playing Indian Congress Leader, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in Shyam Benegal’s miniseries about the making of the Indian Constitution.
Tom was a graduate of the National School of Drama and grew up in Uttar Pradesh and could speak better Urdu and Hindi than I can.
Here he is as Azad, weighing in on the debate of the national language.
Elizabelle
@LAC: Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I forget you’re in Maryland.
Who is sweeping this under a rug? I will admit, Northam has hardly been silver-tongued on this. But I don’t think anyone takes this lightly.
Stuff like this is important to get out in the sunlight. Is it a capital offense though? That’s a dreadful precedent? I am getting the sense that if Northam had been more eloquent, some of you would be more inclined to give him a pass.
How much of this could be shame and some level of denial? The silver lining, for me, is a message to others in or considering public life to own up to their pasts, all of it. And then weigh it in totality.
I have been appalled at MSNBC lining up a firing squad of panelists everytime I looked in. Is opinion that monolithic? Really?
ETA: I don’t blame you for rolling your eyes at the “youthful indiscretion” bit. When Northam is elected governor and Trayvon Martin is in the ground for these several years.
But at what point can someone own up and atone? Is this a capitol offense? Medicaid expansion. Gun control. Voting rights. Education and equal rights. All trumped by — a photograph.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne: Yes. Agreed.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Mentioned Ouspenskaya because she was done up in Max Factor pancake #infinity.
;)
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: I have no idea who she is.
See my example, it goes beyond just the color of a person’s skin. Alter could convincingly portray Azad because of his command over Urdu. It also depends on whether the portrayal was a caricature.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: Here is my view. Northam’s political career is over. The General Assembly session is going on right now, and Fairfax is often a swing vote. It would be nuts for either to resign right now for that reason alone. I want fair redistricting, expanded voting rights, and to keep greater abortion rights (which is what I am convinced triggered the unleashing of this information — which doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be consequential). In other words, Virginia has now started unlocking the dungeon that the Republican party has been trying to keep women and minorities in for a long time. There is a palpable sense of panic among Republicans in Virginia. Yeah, I want Northam to face the music (I think Herring is truly in a different place here — plus, my God, Herring has proved his devotion to civil rights in so many ways since becoming AG) but I don’t want him to face the music in a way that infringes the civil rights of me and my fellow Virginians.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Character actress with a Russian accent. Most often cast as either an oh so proper dowager or a humorless, ultra-stern ballet teacher.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: Thanks!
lamh36
@WaterGirl: BLACKFACE IS NEVER OKAY. I’m getting really tired of folks with the “okay but is it worth…” the people of Virginia will ultimately decide that.
Doesn’t change this: BLACKFACE IS NEVER OKAY! Asking me if it’s worth…whatever tells me that in the grand scheme of things…a little racial insensitivity from well meaning white folk, even in the face of Black folk or people of color telling you the hurtfulness and the discomfort they have with, is ok with too many of the folks who claim they are better than those other folks
A Ghost To Most
@Betty Cracker: You mis- characterize the intent, but carry on. How many times in the next 18 months will Democrats lose their collective shit over bombs thrown by ratfuckers?
Nobody is perfect. Nobody. We all have awful and/or illegal things. I myself may have been guilty of unlawful agriculture back before the statute of limitations.
Some goatherder once said something like “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
dr. luba
@germy: Have we ever gotten an explanation for the “Coonman” nickname?
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Though she’s best remembered nowadays for playing a “Gypsy” with a werewolf son. ?
(“Gypsy” in quotes because that’s how she’s referred to in the movie, but the correct term is Rom or Romany.)
O. Felix Culpa
@LAC:
@Betty Cracker:
These highly felt issues are hard to discuss dispassionately. To clarify – if I wasn’t clear before – I do not make excuses or sweep under the rug. Blackface and other racist behaviors are wrong. As mentioned before, my own family has been on the receiving end of racist behaviors and racial discrimination. I don’t take them lightly. At the same time, I believe the punishment should fit the crime. I also consider the consequences to the very populations you purport to defend if that punishment is enacted in Virginia. My *agenda* is the protection of civil rights (and life) for women, POC and LGBT folks. We know what happens when the GOP takes control. Purity and punishment agendas for long-ago non-criminal offenses take a back seat under those circumstances, imho.
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
Democrats need to learn how to apologize simply and sincerely without making excuses.
Herring managed it. Northam failed. That’s why Herring will keep his job and Northam will (probably) have to resign in disgrace.
Elizabelle
Heading out. Catch you guys later.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Just knew someone would bring that up.
;)
A Ghost To Most
@lamh36:
True. People suck, but time only moves forward. You can only change the future, and learn from the past.
The ratfucking will not cease. Will we let them succeed?
Betty Cracker
@A Ghost To Most: In the comment you replied to, I wrote exactly two words: “thank you.” Carry on…
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Steve in the ATL:
Utah Jazz: originally based in New Orleans.
Los Angeles Lakers: originally based in Minneapolis.
Washington Redskins: originally based in the very sort of white privilege that enables Ralph Northam to not fully grasp why his admission and apology hadda be far more fulsome and introspective and far-reaching than “I’m-really-sorry-I-got-caught-now-let’s-put-this-embarrassing-mess-behind-us” was for him to earn the benefit of the doubt lo these many years later. If you fucked up and did something repugnant and offensive and you are now entrusted with serving in public office, people (justifiably) wanna know you learnt something more’n don’t-get-caught.
Northam’s muddled non-apology apology makes him rather hard to defend.
(fwiw, I agree with those who have said la’affaire Northam coulda been an instructive and teachable moment in which redemption might be earnestly sought and forgiveness granted, but Ralph screwed that pooch, which is regrettable for everyone, imo.)
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne:
Agreed. I think a liar would have aced it. He came off to me as blind-sided and clueless.
LAC
@Elizabelle: I do not know if it would have worked – only that i am more inclined to give a person the benefit of the doubt when there is honesty. As i have said, we are not a monolith and do not all think alike.
There is no perfect eloquent way around this, but northam should have and could have done better. I do not take this lightly either – i know what this is and why it may be happening. But i also need to trust the people i consider for office. As a POC and a woman, i take nothing lightly. I cannot afford to. I feel like there was an opportunity squandered.
debbie
Someone better be scouring everything for photos of GOP teens past and present in blackface. “Whoever you are, I hope you’re looking for the countless photos of youthful conservatives parading their racist shit.”
Ryan
I just re-read this and it seems like I was directing it at the lovely and talented Mrs. Cracker, and I was not. I was focused on the people on twitter who are “shocked, shocked, I say.”
Mrs. Cracker FTW!
A Ghost To Most
@Betty Cracker: Sorry, took LAC’s comment as yours. The point stands.
A lot of abuse has been shelled out here since the ratfuckers dropped their bombs. Is the next ratfucking bomb going to generate a similar purity purge? Fratricide is not a winning strategy, unless you are on the other side.
We are in this together, whether we like it or not. I hate drunks, but if he’s on my side in this, well then, I’ll buy him a bottle.
Ella in New Mexico
@O. Felix Culpa:
So well said.
Having lived here in NM for 33+ years, it’s exactly how I feel. Like I said above, put the GD brakes on while we get the babies out of cages and everyone has affordable healthcare and we secure women’s reproductive rights and get a new Voting Rights Act passed into law. Then maybe we can start applying Zero-tolerance purity tests to the folks in the one party that actually cares about those things.
This is reminding me of the “Zero Tolerance for Weapons” era in the public schools when my kids were little. It got ridiculous because no shades of gray were allowed. We had a 5 year-old Kindergartener here not only suspended but referred to JUVENILE PROBATION because, at an end-of-the-year outdoor water party at school, the plastic water toy he brought was a squirt gun. “Well, we have a zero tolerance policy, we can’t use discretion as to how we enforce it” was the principle and School Administration’s answer.
See, also, “Lying is a sin and evil and destructive and always wrong. So if the NAZI’s came to my door to ask me if I was a Jew so they could take me and my children to the ovens, I’d have to tell them the truth.”
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa & @A Ghost To Most: I think we’re all talking past each other at this point. I just wish we could all agree there’s a cost to either approach. I own mine. I don’t think y’all own yours.
@debbie: Could be a good blog-wide assignment: everyone with a GOP rep, gov, senator, etc., research that person’s past. Much of the material will be online. If not, go to the school and look at the archived books. If you’re in a Dem area, adopt a nearby wingnut repped district!
Yutsano
@poleaxedbyboatwork: It’s pretty much why I think Northam should resign but not Fairfax or Herring. Northam couldn’t have screwed up his response any more than he did. But Fairfax deserves a fair hearing and Herring coughed up his cluelessness. I’m more than willing to admit this is copulation by rodentia, but I’m starting to lean on not rewarding the copulators.
Also: inb4 TBogg.
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker:
I’m sorry. I love you and your commentary. However that comment is low and inaccurate. I understand cost-benefit analysis and I’ve made mine. We can disagree, but please don’t insult me or my capacity for nuanced thought or my lived experience. That said, neither of us is likely to determine the outcome of this battle and perhaps that’s a good thing. Peace.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Hell, I’d be happy if someone with a microphone stepped forward and asked why Steve King, an avowed white supremacist, hasn’t been forced to resign in ignominy.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: Well thank your lucky stars that she didn’t compare you to Megan McCardle.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Steve in the ATL:
Reread your post cuz it was troubling me. Then I did what I shoulda done in the first place, i.e. read more attentively the post your were originally replying to.
I fucked up. I apologize (unreservedly) for missing the snark in your post. Lo siento.
Lalophobia
@Searcher:
If that could actually happen it’d probably be the best result we could hope for, politically. Dems disown him for his incredibly shitty behavior and handling of it coming out, but Virginia is safe from absolute Republican control.
One thing I think is worth noting. The right was expecting the left to rally around Northam and then was shocked when it didn’t. Morally it is right to disown the (current) Virginia governor but there might be strategic elements to condemning him there as well. Trump’s shit is going to come out, and sorting it out is going to be an uphill trek as it is. Bothsiderism is far from dead, but its iron grip has loosened thanks in large part to the orange mold growing in the White House. If it can re-tighten it’s hold because of something like this, it might be easier to paint the Dems investigations of Trump as a partisan power grab or payback for Clinton.
Or not? Maybe I’m completely wrong about that, but it’s something worth considering, if only for the sake of discounting it.
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa: Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. The cost I’m worried about is trust.
The VA statehouse black caucus unanimously wants Northam to resign. Black people aren’t a monolith on this or any other issue, but the overwhelming consensus from black Virginians seems to be that he should go.
If you’ve factored in the cost of overruling that consensus, I apologize for assuming otherwise.
That sounds snotty and self-righteous, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean, maybe you’re right. We’ll see, looks like.
@schrodingers_cat: My husband teases me about carrying grudges, says if it were an Olympic sport, I’d be a gold medalist. He hasn’t met you.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: My husband teases me about always having the last word, says if it were an Olympic sport, I’d be a gold medalist. He hasn’t met you.
ETA: You have a way with words Betty C, and I admire that.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Betty Cracker:
Re: Black people aren’t a monolith on this or any other issue
Anecdata:
Gotta dear friend I play scrabble with. He’s black. Wouldn’t mention it, cuz who gives a fuck, but in this case it’s germane cuz I sought his perspective.
Asked him what he thought oughtta happen in la’affaire Northam. He said: Black folks oughtta keep Northam but make a big ask as a condition of employment. Time gone on what happent 30 years ago, but right fucking now they gottim over a barrel if they wanna use it. Use it.
Now, is that cynical as fuck? Ya! Realistic? Quite possibly.
(Will also say: my buddy ain’t under any illusions about what the South is or is not, or what racism is or is not. Grew up in Gastonia, NC, sent to stir for 9 mos. for borrowing his buddy’s guitar inna band they were in, got swept up in the ’80s prosecutorial “tough-on-crime” horseshit, and even tho his bandmate wanted to drop the charges and tried to communicate the misunderstanding to the man, my buddy was in danger of receiving a multi-year sentence and considered himself lucky to just get 9 mos. for a “crime” in which no one but a misunderstanding was wronged.)
There’re a lotta crosscurrents in this excruciating story, and I think you hit upon a commonality of misunderstanding when you mentioned that perhaps folks’re talking past one another. Seemingly contradictory things can both be operative simultaneously, which makes it hard to make oneself understood.
(I don’t object to being disagreed with, but it’sa mortal blow to be in good faith misunderstood.)
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker: @poleaxedbyboatwork: Betty, I appreciate what you say about trust. It is an essential factor for well-functioning organizations and Northam (and apparently everyone down the line) has done something to damage trust. That said, trust can be rebuilt if parties are willing and operate in good faith. I like what poleaxed’s friend suggested, namely using the situation as both a teaching moment and leverage for the black caucus to move important policies forward. This looks to me like a win-win. It acknowledges the heinous actions of the past and allows for redemption, positive action, accountability, and doesn’t play into the hands of the GOP. In fact, it turns the GOP ratf*cking on its head and turns it into something positive. This is how I would like to see our party model reconciliation and at least the start of racial healing.
PaulWartenberg
@Mnemosyne:
I blame the Coen Brothers
dave
FFS please PLEASE look at this situation clearly.Turning over the government of a state to the party that definitely and proudly does not give a rats ass about the reasonable stuff you are concerned about to feel better about your collective purity is a mark of rank insanity and amazing irresponsibility.