"It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them."
—Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
We know the story, and if not, I can wait while you feast upon the salacious details elsewhere: The governor of Virginia is in trouble because a yearbook picture of him either in blackface or in a KKK costume has surfaced. The Governor has denied he is the person in the yearbook picture (even though the yearbook identifies him by name), but has admitted he has worn blackface elsewhere. This semi-demurral does not is not interesting in the least, since there is no difference between someone who would attend a party in a racist costume and someone who would allow a racist photograph to appear on his yearbook page, whether it was of him or not. (His _medical school_ yearbook page, by the way. Not high school, not even college. Medical school.)
He did something racist, either way. That is settled. The more interesting question is if there should be a change of government in Virginia because of a thoughtless act thirty years ago. My answer is no, and I know I am in the diminishing minority. But I have two reasons for arguing this: first, because I don’t think the governor is more or less racist than the average southern white man (and Virginia knew it was electing a Southern white man in the first place, and so ought to have known what it was getting); and secondly, because I don’t think sending him plunging from the heights of heaven into the depths of hell is going to help the civil rights cause. And it could harm it.
I have lived in the South all my life. I lived in Virginia for 12 years, and the rest of my time is split between Mississippi and Louisiana. Suffice it to say that I have extensive experience with racist whites and can pretty much tell you anything you want to know about them. They have been my neighbors and my patients. A KKK Klavern tried to set up an office next door to my father’s small business when I was in grade school (my father briefly considered moving, but the Klavern shut down before he did anything). I had a patient who insisted on calling a Syrian colleague physician and friend a “camel jockey” (I briefly considered punching him in the mouth, but he soon moved on to another doctor). I’ve heard worse, from neighbors and relatives, a good deal of it after the year 2000, which is sixteen years after the Governor did what he did. If time of a racist act really matters, as some people think it may.
Racism is all around. Hard racism, soft racism. I met a nurse in New Orleans who said he was stockpiling guns in preparation for the day that the black people moved into his neighborhood (hard racism), and people who hinted when I married my Indian wife that I would have “social problems” trying to live between two cultures (soft racism).
But I don’t pretend to be free of racism myself. All I claim is that I am aware of my prejudices, and would prefer to be rid of them. That’s about the best someone raised in the South at my time in history can hope for. Maybe my kids can hope for better.
We are all racists, to some extent. Some more, some less, but none of us are completely free of it. Judging people by their appearance is the easiest thing in the world to do. Sometimes appearance is all we have of people. If I see someone on the street and know nothing about that person at all except what I see, how often do I consciously choose to make no judgment at all, rather than a negative one, no matter how slight? Almost never. To completely withhold judgment is almost impossible. It requires a conscious effort to say, I know nothing of this person, I will not judge him in any way. Much more effort than to allow judgment to slide surreptitiously into place. It’s what humans do; they judge. None of us can help it.
Back to the governor. So now we know he is racist. Or at least was in 1984. Do we know something about him that is not true about just about everyone else? Does anyone really think Virginia can replace him with a non-racist governor? Or if non-racist, with someone who has no other prejudice? At this point, his value over any another candidate is that we know he is racist. Unlike the average racist, who cannot be distinguished from a crowd, we know the governor’s racism because we can see it.
Virginia is mired in racism, as is every other state. Realistically, no governor, no legistlature will ever eliminate it. That probably cannot be done, but even if it can, it can’t be done through politics. The fight to end racism is about changing hearts, not laws. The very best that lawmakers who espouse the values of the civil rights movement can do is to represent the rights of African-Americans in Virginia and to make sure they have a fair say in government. What Virginia has now is a governor whose racism is proven. The Virginia Black Caucus has the Governor exactly where they want him, and can probably extract more from him than from any other governor Virginia could have. Forgive him, or at least commute his sentence, and he will be your friend forever. These kinds of opportunities don’t present themselves every day.
Let the man apologize, and let him admit he is a racist. Then work with the racist. Isn’t that what race politics is really about, learning how to work with racists? Every time something like this happens in the political arena, a mass of talking heads emerge to tell us that America needs to have a “conversation about race.” Now, I’m not sure I agree with the ethos of having conversations, because a conversation is only worth having if a decision is made and a problem is solved, and that never seems to happen. But this is what folks say. So let’s have this conversation. Conversations are two-sided, I think; though I have been known to talk to myself from time to time, I don’t pretend that is really a conversation. If you eliminate the racist from the conversation about race, you aren’t having a conversation, you are giving a lecture. If the Virginia governor goes into the dumpster, we haven’t had a conversation at all. We have had a lecture. We get lots of those. I haven’t seen it change anyone.
The Virginia governor is broken. So what? We are all broken; I know I am. I only function because I choose to function broken, and because the people in my life are kind enough to allow me to carry on broken. If the people around me wanted a perfect person, I would have to bow out of society and take my broken self to a hermit’s cave. Virginia has a chance to admit its governor is broken, and thus that Virginia itself is broken. That would be a huge advance to admit that. No other Southern state has ever admitted so much — we spend most of our time down here talking about how much better things are than they used to be, and by extension, how “people” need to “get over racism” and “get on with life.” There are no conversations or solutions in that — just another lecture.
Running a state with a governor who has admitted he is a racist and then going on from there is uncharted territory. I like uncharted territory. When I am trying to solve a problem, if I keep finding myself in the same place, I know I am failing. When I am lost and keep seeing the same landmarks over and over, I know I am still lost. When the landmarks change, when the land looks different, I could still be lost, but at least I know I am getting somewhere.
The civil rights movement, as best as this lily-white Southerner can tell, is about improvement. It is about making racists less racist. If a racist can’t be changed, if he can’t be taught, there is no reason to have a civil rights movement at all. Why bother trying to change what can’t be changed? If the governor, and, by extension, every other white person, can’t become less racist, there is no reason at all to fight against racism. In that case the only way to get rid of a racist is to kill a racist. I don’t think that is the point of the civil rights movement.
At least I hope not, because I can’t support a social movement that holds that people can’t change. Such a movement replaces one kind of intolerance (racism) with another (intolerance of racists). While that may be a kind of improvement, it isn’t much of one. It is still based on hatred, and hatred of bad things is only slightly better than hatred of good things. It is still hatred, and hatred always brings you back to the same place.
The civil rights movement has always been about high ideals. Sometimes having high ideals means doing things that are hard to do, and there are precious few things anything harder to do than pass on punishing your enemies. But if opposing racism isn’t about avoiding the easy road and taking the hard one, it has lost its way. There has been too much sacrificed by too many people (not by me, to be sure, but by many people of color) to take the easy road now.
Let’s get this done. Let’s pass on the easy answer, revenge and public shaming, and move on to the hard one. Let’s acknowledge the prejudice in ourselves so we can tolerate the prejudice in others. There is a higher standard. We can allow people to acknowledge past racism, and agree to work with them as long as they do not hide what they they are. What I am. Once all the ugliness is on the table, real progress can begin.
For myself, I am weary of people quick to shame and punish. Not that I don’t understand it — it feels good to condemn a person who has done wrong because it allows you think you are better than someone else. But thinking you are better than someone else is pretty much what racism is made of.