“We should care about racist imagery, but we should care even more about our still-segregated society.”
It’s easy to focus on the racist of the day. We The People must uproot institutionalized racism of Voter Suppression and Segregation — each and every day — each and every election — each and every piece of legislation.
It took almost 16 years for House Republicans to reprimand Steve King of Iowa for his frequent expressions of explicit racism, by stripping him of his committee assignments. The catalyst? An interview with The New York Times in which he expressed sympathy with racist ideas. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King said.
Compare that slow-moving response with the quick dismissal of Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, who resigned the same day that photos of him in blackface were revealed to the public. Taken at a Halloween party in 2005, they show Ertel with a painted face and a costume that make clear he was mocking survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days.
“Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.”
American society is still structured by color. Your health, your wealth — your ability to live and act freely — still turns to a large degree on whether you were born white. Like Ertel, Northam should resign. Virginia’s history with racism is too fraught to allow this association with blackface (to say nothing of the Ku Klux Klan imagery) to stand unaddressed. But any collective reckoning with racism that comes out of this moment must go beyond the personal and offensive to the unequal depths.
A vote for a Republican or a DINO is a vote for
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