53% (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey apologized for appearing in blackface while in college. A yearbook photo surfaced of her sorority sisters appearing in blackface… because appearing in blackface in your YEARBOOK used to be a thing for white people. Ivey was not featured in the photo, but old radio interviews allude to her being in blackface. While Ivey couldn’t specifically remember a time when she lathered herself in black shoe polish to make fun of Negros, because apparently that thing was so commonplace doing it was forgettable, Ivey copped to probably doing it and apologized.
From NBC News:
Ivey said Thursday that while she cannot recall dressing up in blackface, she “will not deny what is the obvious.”
“As such, I fully acknowledge — with genuine remorse — my participation in a skit like that back when I was a senior in college,” she said in a statement. “While some may attempt to excuse this as acceptable behavior for a college student during the mid-1960s, that is not who I am today, and it is not what my Administration represents all these years later.”
There’s no law against blackface. No Constitutional carve out that makes mocking the terror and pain experienced by black people a form of unprotected speech. There’s no ethical rule or norm that prevents people who have engaged in this textbook racist form of “entertainment” — and white people cavorting around in blackface doing a mock “minstrel show” is textbook racist — from running for office.
All that we can hope is that white people who didn’t wear blackface and always knew wearing blackface is wrong outnumber the white people who did or do. But there are not enough of those non-blackface-wearing white people. Not nearly enough. And so the blackface-wearing white people win. And we all have to pretend that wearing blackface is a “youthful indiscretion” white people are allowed to make and still hold positions of public trust.
Even though they’re clearly, provably and actionably racist.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey apologizes after 1967 audio describing her in blackface emerges [NBC News]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.