Just a good ole boy

I recall being at a restaurant in Ocean City (MD) in 1980 at Halloween time. The wait staff all turned up in costumes, including one gangly white kid who decided it would be fun to go around as a gangly black kid in a basketball uniform. He had it all; the Afro wig, blackface makeup. He even was dribbling a toy basketball as he went from table to table.

Reactions ranged from dumbfounded to, sad to say, some mirth among those who find this sort of mockery funny. He wasn't our server, so I didn't have the opportunity to share my thoughts with him, not that he would have liked them.

In all these years, I don't think I've seen anything quite so blatantly insensitive in public, and now we see that the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, either was or was not dressed in blackface and/or a Ku Klux Klan getup in his yearbook in 1984.

I hasten to add, this was not his high school yearbook, where stupidity can be blamed on the callowness of youth, or his college yearbook, where it can often be due to overindulgence in drugs or alcohol. No, this was a medical school yearbook, from a school called the Eastern Virginia Medical School. Click on the link to be taken to their website to see how they are scrambling to form advisory committees to make sure nothing this embarrassing occurs again in this school until a whole bunch o' seniors get all juiced up and go off a-hootin' an' a-hollerin' this spring.

So Northam was 25 when he was graduated from this school, and the yearbook shows the racist pictures, about which he said on Friday he was one of those pictured and then on Saturday said he wasn't, although he did put shoe polish on his face to take place in a Michael Jackson dance contest that same year. His wife gave him the raised eyebrow when he was about to demonstrate the Moonwalk at the press conference.

Good thing she was there or he might have started talking like Stepin Fetchit for the press.

Other interesting pictures on his yearbook page show him wearing a cowboy hat, and posing languidly in front of a Corvette. Hardly the sort of image one seeks when choosing a pediatric neurologist to treat a child.

His political career is finished, although as of now (Monday morning) he has refused to resign the governorship because he feels he is the man for the job and can regain the trust of the public, because that's how blind a person can be who once thought that dressing up like this was amusing.

And what kind of medical school publishes yearbooks like this? Is there anyone with any sense in charge down there?