Ruminations On Vriginia's Difficult Situation

A week ago I posted here supporting VA Gov Ralph Northam, comparing him favorably to the late Robert C. Byrd of WV.  A day later I joined the call for him to resign after his bizarre press conference that has still left unpleasant unresolved issues such as who put that awful photo in his yearbook and why.  Since then much else has come forth, and this continues. In any case it looks like Northam may hang in for at last awhile, although the situation is complicated and constantly changing, to put it mildly. What I intend to add in this post beyond the latest news is a combination of inside local infornation as well as, hopefully, a deeper historical perspective.

Last morning's (Friday, 2/8), Washington Post top headline was that Northam would not resign soon, and late this afternoon I as an employee of the  Commonwealth  of VA received an email message saying he hoped we would all support him continuing to lead the state, while carefully not being too out there too much on that he would stay in office for his full term.

One reason why he was not going to resign immediately, even without the recent collapse of his most immediate successors, is that until Feb. 23 the VA legislature is debsting a serious budget issue.  The Trump tax law has resulted in a revenue windfaall for Virginia.  This involves technical details I know but will not bore any readers of this with. So there is an ongoing debate in the VA legislature on what to do with this extra money, with the barely majority GOP in the legislature saying give it all to upper middle income persons, while Northam and the Dems have proposed giving half of it to lower income people while using the other half to fund various state initiatives. If this current scandal had not appeared I think  Northan would have gotten an agreement not too far from what he wanted. Now in his weakened state, the ultimate compromise will be closer to the GOP version.

For any not following the news since a week ago, both of Northam's immeiate successors hhave themselves come under unpleasant scrutiny.  Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has now been seriolusly acccused of two sexual assalutls. When accused of the first he denied  it and hired an attorney.  The second accusation coming a few hours ago is of rape, and while earlier many were supporting him to replace Northam, this now seems to have become unlikely.  I note that I never liked Fairfax, Iknow all these people personally, and the African American I would like to seee as governor is Levar Stoney, currently Mayor of Richmond and a grad of JMU where I teach.

And now the second in line to the governorship of VA, assuming that both Northam and Fairfax resign (neither of which at this point has so far remotely come close to doing so), is  Attorney General Mark Herring, now in his second term, having stepped aside from running  for Lt Gov to let the now seriously damaged J. Fairfax run for that.  Last Thursday AG Herring revealed that he also had performed in blacface in 1980 at UVa at age 19.

If  Northam, Fairfax, and Herring all resign or forced out of office, then the acting governor will be the Speakr of the Hoouse, Kirk Cox, not only a Republican, but one how just gave an impassioned anti-abortion speech full of ridiculously irrelevelant Biblical passages, given that there is nothing in the  Bible that directy forbids abortion.

As it is, it appears that all of this blew up because Northam is a pediatrric neurologist, who only recently became a politician. So when Dems in the VA legislature attempted to loosen rules on late abotions, Dr. Northam got into rare and weird cases I was not aware of involving treatment of deformed fetuses and whether one born should be"revived." Personally, I do not know how to deal with such exremely rare cases, although baically siding with mothers and their physicians.  But Republicans cherry picking this overly specfic discussion by Dr. Northam turned it into "infanticide," with Trump making this charge in his SOTU.

More immediatley and seriously the rumor I have heard is that what triggered the revelation of that embarrassing photo in Northam's yearbook came as a result of his professional testimony about this  odd and rare case, which his opponents seized on, blocking any expansion of abortion rights in VA and providing fodder for Trump's ranting in his SOTU about "infanticide," a false charge.

But back in VA, reportedly a rommate from med school of  Northam got ticked off by this medical testimony by Northam, and then leaked the story to whhatever media about  the yearbook photos.  This set off he should resign, leading us to the now  unaccepable (although I read he  has hiired lawyers, puke), and then the now damaged AG Herring. While so far Speaker Cox is "clean," aside from being  a far right  winger, the  GOP majority leader of the stat senate, Norman Tennant, has been accused of a half century ago being an editor of a yearbook containg racist photos.

I have lived in VA for 42 yearss and have deep south ancestry includingVA.  But this matter has made me realize that for all my deep family backgound going back to the 1600s in VA, I was a and am a "damned yankee" to all those born and raised here.  My parents were born and raised in Deep South northern Florida, and when young I spent serious time there.  This made me think I knew the South, but I now know that ultimately I was  an outsider, especially given that i went not only to high school in liberal/progressive Madison, Wisconsin, where the state capitol building has a museum for the Grand Army of the Reuplic, the ultimate hard core of the northern Union that won the Civil War ("War of Northern Aggrsssion according to a cousin of my father that my wife from USSR/Russia met in 1987).

So a big revelation to me in the last week is how widespread this "blackfacing" and related racist manifestations were even into recent times.  The yearbook where Northams  photo appeared (Eastern Medical School of Virginia) had racist photos as recently as 2013, when the then dean just shut down the yearbooks.  I have never seen a blackfaced performance, but now  old very liberal and local friends have been surfacing with old past incidents of racist conduct.  This sort of resembles post-WW II France, where many collaberated with the Nazi Vichy regime, but then later joined the anti-Nazi Reistance. Eventuallly this became a matter of when one  turned from one side to the other, and good liberal close friends have been essentially playing postwar French fessing up to just exactly when they stopped using the "n-word," much less blackfacing.

The deeper history of all this is in Virginia 400 hundred years ago in 1619 when on the one hand the oldest continuing English speaking legislatiive  body in North America was founded, the same one (with some modifications over the centuries), that I noted above is trying to resolve the Trump tax "reform" with VA tax law. The other is the first arrival in what is now the  USA of African slaves.  Needless to say, this latter matter is on many minds and relevant to this current  controversy.

To make things even worse, it was in Virgiinia in 1705 that the crucial laws were passed fully establishing that slavery was to be of people of African descent and that those people could not marry anyone of European descent. So cince then in 1860 the state had more slaves than any other, its capitol became the that of the Confederate States of America, with half the bsttles of the succeeding Civil War (or "War of Northertn Agression" according to some of my cousins of earlier generations), and then its state capital became the capital of the Confedracy. This led to half the battles of the Civil War being fought in Virginia.

More recently we had the  Byrd Machine supporting reistance against racial integrstion of public  schools after Brown vs Board of Education in 1954.  Eventually this was all over come. But in the private places, including many frats on many campuses until very recently, racist practices such as "blackfacing" persisted.  And although the worst violence came from outsiders, in Charlottesville in August, 2017, wwe saw overt racist violence in Virginia.

Eventually this has become personal. With all these revelations, very liberal friends of  mine have now outed thesselves as having been varyng degrees of racist in the past. I now  realize that  while I have deep southern ancestry including high officers in the Confederate army, I was born and raised in the North.  I did  not see all this  stuff, and I did not personally haave to go through this process of personally deracizing myself, which I now realize my deep southern parents went through, my fahter moving from deep south racist Democratic Party affiation when he went to math grad school in Princeton in the 30s to being a Republican, When he took us in 1963 to uber-progrssive Madison, Wisconsin, well, no wonder I did not do blackface.

A final bottom line is that Gov. Northam's still uresolved yearbook photo has the absurd possibility of a racial reconciliation to all this.  I do not know why he continues to claim no knowlege of the origin or handling of this od photo of blackfaced white person standing next to someone wearing a KKK hooded outfit that is in his medical school yearbook.  But while whateveer relation it had to Gov. Northam personally, it could be interpreted in its superficial stupidity as also showing a possible  racial reonciliation for the long and troubled racial history of Viriginia.  This now shocking photo shows a blackfaced man standing peacefully next to somebody wearing a KKK outfit.  While indeed the obvious interpretation of  thos photo supports racism, another interpretation is of harmony among the races, even including the old southern racists of the  KKK.

Obserivng old Virginia friends of mine now confesssing their past racist behavior and  views, it seems that for them this looks sort of like the post-WW II French. After the war they were supposedly all anti-Nazi and supporters of the anti-Nazi Resistance.  But, of course, many did work for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime after the German conquest of France in 1940.  But then, as the Allies increased their obviouly ultimate victory over that regime, more nd more former collaboraters with the Vichy regime would quit and join the Risistance.  Eventually this game became a matter of timing one's switch from working for a ruling Vichy to an anti-Vichy/Nazi Resistance.

Several of my good friends now confessing their past racist conduct have put it in these terms: it has become a matter of timing, just when did one finally stop doing these bad old behaviors?  Reportedly Ralph Northam only learned two years ago that "blackfacing" was not socially acceptable.  Whatever comes out of the current crisis in Virgina, hopefully in the future we shall  have better informed and more deepl understanding leaders in Virginia and more broadly.

Addndum: 2:30 PM, 2/9/19: The VA legilslature has reportedly come to an agreement on its budget dispute.  Apparently the agreement tilts strongly towards what the GOP members favored due to the weakness of the Dems arising from these scandals involving their elected leaders in the state.  Not surpsing.

Barkley Rosser