During the Sixties, I followed and studied closely the American news media coverage related the rise of the civil rights movement in the U.S. The incredible emergence of movements led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael greatly interested me at the time as a Canadian student of American history and political science. My studies also looked at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Black Panther Party. With the federal Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and other U.S. laws which ended segregation practices and moved to protect civil and voting rights, it looked like Americans were on the right track to deal with overt practices of discrimination. With the election of Barack Obama as the first black President, it looked like the U.S. had finally overcome many of the inequities of its racial past.
However, some things just refuse to change. First, there are all those statues in the U.S. dedicated to the infamous period of the Confederacy which fought against the Union forces to conserve its abominable practices involving black slavery. You would think that people would have matured enough in the eighties, nineties and today to understand the real sensitivities that African Americans have today about a history involving inequitable and inhumane treatment. Yet this doesn’t appear to be the case. We now have the white Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, and his Attorney General Mark Herring acknowledging that they wore blackface at parties in the 1980s. Unbelievable!
Although both men have apologized for appearing in blackface, many Virginians are outraged by the admissions. Sure, both were young and college students at the time, but this is no excuse. Knowing Virginia’s racial history, both men should have known better. What’s worst, they don’t appear to see any self-evident need to resign. The sad part of the scandal is that it shows from a cultural perspective how much further Americans need to go to deal with its racial attitudes. Hopefully, they have learned from these incidents and will work more closely with people of all races to deal with racism in its midst. We in Canada must also learn from our own past and history of racism and discrimination. Given that this is Black History month, we owe it to our children to learn from history and move forward together into the future.
FROLITICKS 