On today’s BradCast, should Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam resign after his 1984 medical school yearbook was revealed late last week to have featured a photo of a man in blackface standing next to a man in a KKK costume? Don’t answer that too quickly. Or, at least listen to today’s show first. [Audio link to show follows below.]
After apologizing on Friday night for the appearance of the photo — calling it “clearly racist and offensive”, but failing to specify which of the pictured two men he actually was — the Governor said at a bizarre Saturday press conference that he was neither man and that he had never even seen the photograph before, since he hadn’t purchased that year’s yearbook. He says the photograph hit him “like a ton of bricks” on Friday night. However, he told the media that he did remember an instance around the same time when he darkened his face to dress up as Michael Jackson for a dance contest. He said he remembered the contest outfit very specifically, discussing it publicly for the first time on Saturday, while insisting that he never recalls dressing up in either minstrel show blackface or as a Klansman, as depicted in the mystery photograph.
One of the two African-Americans in the same medical school class that graduated with Northam told AP the explanation is plausible, as he didn’t purchase the yearbook either and found the racist photo on Northam’s page to be out of character. Despite Northam’s record of working closely with the African-American community and still being a member of a predominately black church in the town where he grew up, top Democrats from Virginia to D.C. and beyond continued their loud calls on Sunday for him to step down and allow his Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — an African-American Democrat — to replace him.
But should he? And should he be shunned for something that may have never happened? Or, if it did, happened 35 years ago and appears completely inconsistent with his record since then? The answers to those questions are both “absolutely yes” and “no, not so fast”, as we discuss with callers today, focusing on Northam’s remarks at the strange, yet seemingly earnest Saturday presser in which he stated that acquiescing to calls to step down would allow him to “spare myself from the difficult path that lies ahead,” adding: “I could avoid an honest conversation about harmful actions from my past. I cannot in good conscience choose the path that would be easier for me.”
We endeavor to have a least part of that “honest conversation” with tons of callers on today’s program, including some discussion about key civil rights figures (from Lincoln to Justice Hugo Black to LBJ) whose own histories of racism arguably allowed them to lead on a number of landmark civil rights issues from Emancipation to Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil Rights of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Also today: While I was happy to see MSNBC, on Friday night, highlight a Super Bowl ad buy in Georgia markets by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ voting rights group Fair Fight, calling for “hand-counted paper ballots,” the news outlet’s Rachel Maddow Show maddeningly cut the :30 commercial off when reporting the story, just before the crucial line calling for “hand-marked paper ballots”! (Made, in the spot, by Republican Commissioner of Habersham County, GA Natalie Crawford, by the way.) Maddening. Especially since, unless the voters rise up to protect overseeable elections and stop them, the state of Georgia, along with counties in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas — not to mention Los Angeles County and neighboring Ventura County! — are all now planning moves to expensive, unauditable touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) before the 2020 Presidential election. Those systems print out computer-marked and barcoded paper ballots which are 100% unverifiable after an election has ended.
Add MSNBC’s failure there to a list of disappointments over the weekend from the mess in Virginia to the loss of the L.A. Rams at the Super Bowl…
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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_RalphNorthamResignationDebate-Callers_020418.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Hi Brad – Re: the Ralph Northam business
You asked our thoughts on this. I agree that he should step down but not for the reasons you state. I have no idea if the governor is a racist, but he proved himself a liar. He went into great detail to describe his Michael Jackson dance number. And he said he only used “a little bit of shoe polish under the eyes” because, he went on to say, “I don’t know if you’ve ever used it, but it is VERY hard to get off”. So…..if he’d never used blackface before, how did he know before putting it on for the MJ dance, how very hard it is to get off? Made me very suspicious of his truthfulness.
So…perhaps his nickname was “Coon man” because he did a lot of Blackface back in the day.
So the first reason he should step down is that we have enough problems with lairs in office. It’s not a good thing at all. How can the people of VA trust anything he says now after his weekend of whopper?
One more reason he should step down: 20% of Virginians are black. There is no way any of those people can consider him their leader anymore.
I agree that he could and should work for racial justice and reconciliation in his state but there is no reason he could not do that outside of government.
He is no longer capable of running the state which has huge issues right now. Staying in office would distract from those issues. He should step down.
The media firestorm over Northam is ridiculous. First of all he is accused of appearing in costume or heavy cosmetics in a yearbook photo, “therefore” he should resign. Probably it was not even him in the photo, based on the fact it sure doesn’t look like him. No media I saw has ever apologized for misidentifying the man in the photo. Here’s my notion: the actual outrage is that anybody in the media would call for anybody, ever, to resign based on a bogus photo while giving zero evidence it was a valid photo. Second, I simply do not care. Somebody appearing, or more likely not appearing, in a weird costume, in a photo 30 years ago? What possible relevance does that have to his job performance? Hey, maybe there is a photo of you as a child dressed as a witch on halloween. Guess that means you should resign huh? Third, I graduated from a number of schools. In each, there was a yearbook. What did those yearbooks say about me? I have absolutely no idea, since I never bought a yearbook, never looked in a yearbook, never participated in any way in the making of any of those yearbooks, and never cared in the slightest about those yearbooks, and thought they were just a stupid waste of time by whoever was creating and/or buying them. If somebody now reveals that next to my name in one of these yearbooks, is some wacky photo of something, then you know what relevance that has to my job performance in any job whatever? Zero.
Fourth, re the whole concept that this “proves” Northam is a racist, HELLO?? His running mate was a black guy. Don’t you think, if Northam were a racist, he’d probably be, at the very least, trying to get a white guy to be his Lt. Governor? Because, I mean, he’s the most ineffective racist ever if his goal is to gain the topmost powerful
office in VA to start a White Takeover, and then he can’t even get a white to be his own running mate.
This is complete bullshit. And meanwhile, McDonnell, another recent governor of VA was, e.g., convicted of
bribery while in office and never resigned, never impeached, nothing. So Northam should resign for no crime whatever?
I’ve got news for the Black Whiner movement. If you go around trying to throw people out of office based on this kind of nonsense, it is not going to help the cause of blacks. It is simply going to make you look like whining irresponsible screamers having a temper tantrum. That will hurt your cause, because people do not like whining
screamers who have no underlying facts behind their screams.
And another little point: black people have appeared, in public, and in photographs, wearing “blackface” makeup.
I have such a photo. You too can have such a photo, if you look for one on the internet, quite easy to find examples.
So: should any such black person be forced to resign from his job?
Oh wait, there’s more. Now somebody actually looked at the yearbook, in a first time ever case of journalists actually accessing a primary source (it had to happen eventually, only a few days after they published the story), and there were other pages with photos of other people including men dressed as women, and white men pretending to be black women for a double black+women whammy in one photo. Whoo whee! Golly, should all of them be fired? I don’t know who’s being insulted more, white men, white women, black men, or black women!
It is so hard to keep track of all the possible insults and what they all might mean and who might be insulting who.
Or, maybe, just maybe, this all has no freaking worthwhile meaning whatsoever and never did.