What Folks Need to Learn

In the years before he became Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam apparently chose not to read books in which blackface was present. “I used just a little bit of shoe polish to put under my—or on my—cheeks,” he said about the day he impersonated Michael Jackson in blackface. “I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that.”

Now, as governor, Northam is choosing not to heed calls for his resignation. He is denying he’s pictured on his medical-school yearbook page in blackface or in a Ku Klux Klan outfit above the notation of his alma mater, his interests in pediatrics, and his quote advocating having “another beer.”

Is Northam, then and now, two sides of the same blackfaced white man affronting African Americans? He wants to be seen another way.

“Now that he knows better, he is going to do better,” a Northam adviser toldBuzzFeed.

He is being presented as another white American awakening to the pervasiveness of racism and his role in sustaining it. His advisers are giving him a reading list that includes Roots by Alex Haley and “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And they say he has started reading.

From: “A Reading List for Ralph Northam”