Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal lays bare America’s racism problem
- Racist photo stirs calls on Virginia governor to resign
- The incident is the third ‘blackface’ in recent weeks
When Virginia Governor Ralph Northam refused to resign last week, he did so in the shadow of a Capitol built by a founding father and a slave owner, in the former seat of the Confederacy still wrestling with what to do about statues that honour those who fought to preserve slavery.
The 35-year-old photo on his yearbook page of a person in blackface and another person in a Ku Klux Klan robe has brought about a stunning reversal of fortune in Northam’s political career and laid bare for the United States just how deeply racist behaviour remains interwoven in American culture, institutions and politics.
In rejecting calls to step down, the 59-year-old white son of Virginia came across to many African-Americans as displaying a sense of white privilege.
“What we have learned over the last 24 hours along with all the incidents of the last two years brings front and centre the need for this nation to deal with the question of race once and for all,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in an interview Saturday.
“Because we have (President Donald) Trump in the White House, who has created a political landscape of intolerance and racial hatred, this has exposed a wound that has been festering for a while now.”
The incident came on the first day of Black History Month and as Virginians prepare to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the settlement of Jamestown.