Kos is right when he wrote progressives have a long way to go on racism. There is no rationalizing racism. There’s no explaining away the pain and injustice of racism. Clearly, we do not live in a post racial America. Today Ralph Northam, Governor of Virginia is being pressured to resign his governorship. This diary isn’t about that. I want to focus on some of the shit show commentary (kudos to Kos for that great name) surrounding a Medical School Yearbook page published in 1984.
Racism is further along the path of elimination today than it was in 1984. True, Trump has created a resurgence of faux acceptability of racism, but our reaction to Northam’s yearbook page shows it’s not as acceptable as it once was. I listened to Tiffany Cross today ask why the medical school yearbook publisher thought Northam’s page was acceptable for print in 1984. It’s a good question. A lot of schools would not have allowed it in 1984, but that school did. As much as we’d like to think our medical providers are free from bias, that would be a dangerous assumption to make. Provider bias is a serious problem in medicine today and it was far worse in 1984, so to me, a person who works for a hospital, I’m not surprised at the medical school yearbook page. (There are numerous studies how racism leads to poorer health care for minorities. Other surveys and studies point out Patients have racist attitudes toward their doctors. Minority physicians have to carry their medical license with them or they may be challenged when rendering aid in emergencies and more. )
It’s important to note what was going on back in 1984. Jessie Jackson ran for President and Geraldine Ferrari ran for Vice President. Apartheid was still the law of the land in South Africa and would remain so for nearly another decade. Yes! 10 more years! In 1984 The Jesse Owens Story biography was released as was Ghostbusters!, Johnny Dangerously, indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Footloose. Thriller was 2 years old and Top Gun was 2 years away from being released. Blacksploitation films were in a downturn as was the civil rights movement — we all thought we were in a post racial America. We weren’t. No doubt, there were many, many Michael Browns and Trayvon Martins who never had their stories told. What we did find out was banks red lined zip codes to deny people of color loans and the U.S Dept of Ag routinely denied loans to black farmers that they granted to white farmers in the same circumstances. Oh, and rape shield laws didn’t exist for most states at that time and sexual harassment was rampant. You think rape cases are mismanaged now? Yeah, circa 1980 was a hellava time to report rape.
As bad as it is today, racism was worse in 1984. Racism was bad in 1984 but better than racism was in 1964.
When I was a child friends of my parents felt entitled to say all manner or racist things. They also used belts to beat their children and women simply didn’t talk much about domestic violence — but I often saw my neighbor across the street and another guy three houses down slap their wives and daughters silly. Then, the Civil Rights Act was passed and signed and white people — at least the ones around me stopped using the N word — but they didn’t stop slapping their wives and daughters around. Racism went from smack-you-in-the-face overt type to a lesser, more sneaky, covert racism. Or, maybe not so covert; our local radio station played radio re-runs of Amos N Andy. The needlely kind of racism. The type where a white guy patronizingly says something like, “Hey! That’s great! You really do know what you’re doing!’— kinda like what other marginalized populations regularly experience today, happened all the time.
In the mid 60s I remember as a kid deciding with a bunch of kids who would be “it’ for a game of Hide & Seek. We decided that we needed to change our rhyme to Eenee Meeny Miney Moe, Catch a Tiger by the Toe…. Oh, if becoming a post racial America was as simple as changing a children’s rhyme. It wasn’t. In other locals in 1964 James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi for registering black Americans to vote. In 1963 four girls died in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama and Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway. Yes, way too many black and brown people die today as they did then at the hands of racist assholes. The change today is the level of awareness and outrage. In 1964 the level of tolerance for racism was far greater than it is today. This is not rationalizing racism. This is remarking upon progress and noting we haven’t made enough progress at the same time.
Racism is not acceptable, ever; for every inch of progress, there are miles yet to go. Unfortunately, racism doesn’t seem to go away. It morphs. Serena Williams is subjected to more “random” drug tests than white tennis athletes. Colin Kaepernick is not an NFL player anymore. There are too many victims like Sandra Bland and Laquan McDonald. Black people can’t baby-sit, BBQ, walk, talk, drive or sit in a hotel lobby without racial harassment or risking arrest or death. The difference is our phones that we can use to record these unjustices on video for all to see the lack of progress we have made and force us to confront our failings head on.
The difference is that everything we do in our entire lives is subject to opposition research. Get noticed and someone will look for dirt on you and likely find it. So here we are confronted with a Democratic Party members’s racist past. Dirt dug up by a a right wing website that has a single agenda of discrediting any Democrat mostly because he supported a non-sexist position of a woman’s right to choose to be a mother or not after 21 weeks of gestation. I feel like I’m being played. I think the cynical right put that up there knowing full well we progressives would insist on ridding ourselves of a former racist within our midst. Racism is not acceptable. Neither is sexism and we know women who die a violent death usually die at the hands of their spouse, significant other, father, uncle, or brother (pretty much in that order) who feel entitled to kill them for whatever reason they feel at the time of death. We have too few men who believe a woman has a right to choose what to do with their own bodies. We have too few men who fight for women’s rights. Racism is never right or acceptable. Neither is sexism, anti-semitism, white supremecist nationalism, Islamaphobia, or homophobia. I am being asked to demand a man with a racist past, not presently racist, resign because he was smeared for attempting to advance women’s rights. Women’s rights are human rights. Black rights are human rights. Human rights are both women’s rights and black rights.
It’s a hellava thing. I know how this is going to go. Zero tolerance and all. I know there’s another Democrat who will accede to the Governor’s office who has what it takes to win re-election to the governors office in Virginia. We don’t need this guy muddying up our brand. And Kos and all are right in pointing out the only person to blame for this is dumbass 25-year-old Ralph Northam back in the day. I just hate to give sanctimonious right wingers the satisfaction of forcing this decision. Shit show is as good a description as we can get for this situation.