OK, I have no plans to run for office in Virginia or anywhere else, so I could keep this to myself, but I don't think I should. I was maybe 18, more likely 17, an unbearably raw white-boy freshman from a very small and faraway town—and I was invited, I don't recall by whom, to play the part of an enslaved black person in a video presentation, for educational purposes, of, or more likely from or about, Mrs. Mary H. Eastman's 1852 Aunt Phillis's Cabin, or, Southern Life as It Is, in brown face and hand makeup but a dignified jacket and tie, just reading my lines straight—I'm sure I'd remember if I'd been asked to read any dialect, or encouraged to do any clowning. and I don't, and I imagine it was a very small part. The book is pure propaganda against Mrs. Stowe, obviously, and I would have been Uncle Bacchus, the good-hearted but helplessly shiftless opposite of Uncle Tom—refreshing the memory from Wikipedia, it looks very proto-libertarian, in that nearly all of the characters are educated white men arguing philosophically about their helpless dependents, who have hardly any voices at all; less a novel than a tedious treatise. No wonder Mrs. Stowe won.
I may have something more useful to say on that whole "call-out culture" thing, thanks in the first place to the ongoing collapse of Virginia Democratic governor Ralph Northam since he's been called out for his repellent self-presentation in his 1984 med school yearbook, in a photograph where he was either in minstrel-show blackface or KKK robe and hood (we haven't yet been told which of the two people was him), and it looks as if he's going to have to resign eventually or, as David Brooks will be saying any day now, his life is being destroyed.
Or maybe sooner—as I write, AP is reporting what looks like an effort to plead innocent to the thing he just abjectly apologized for:
A Virginia Democrat who has spoken with Gov. Ralph Northam has told The Associated Press that the governor now does not believe he was in a racist picture in his 1984 medical yearbook and has no immediate plans to resign.
How's that? Had he thought at first we were talking about some other picture? [Update: He's confessing that he actually did darken his face in 1984 for an entirely different purpose, dressing as Michael Jackson in a dance contest, and thought initially that was the yearbook picture, although it's hard to figure how you could remember wearing a Michael Jackson costume and not remember that Michael Jackson rarely dressed like this:
