I tried to point out that it was something of a rite of passage up until just a couple of decades ago and people were nonplussed.
It was TOTALLY a frat boy rite of passage, a thing you did to curry favor with the BMOC's.
Back in the segregationist days, the Southern Democrats did it. When they all became Southern Republicans, THEY would do it...if not for the yearbook then just for the benefit of their peers. It was something "polite people" did not talk about but it went on even after they were aware that it was not a kosher thing to do.
The Dinesh D'Souza revisionists are so frightened of their past that they think it is possible to simply rewrite history, and they think that they can get away with it. But long after people my age who witnessed it firsthand are dead and buried, the truth will out because there simply isn't enough Charmin in the entire galaxy to paper over the bovine excrement or the stench of lies.
Virginia was "The Capital of the Confederacy" and confederates of the past AND present understood what blackface was all about.
They just did it anyway, and Democrats of today (since the Civil Rights era) are not the Democrats of 1860.
It went on even after they were aware that it was not a kosher thing to do.
This ^^ is what destroys trust. This ^^ is what strains or prevents one from
It's one thing when a person acts and truly doesn't know any better....But what sort of adult is or ever was truly that naive?
People talk about Southern pride, and they want to retain statues of Confederates, maintain the Confederate names given to bridges, buildings and schools. They claim that by keeping those names and sculptures in prominent places, it abets our learning about and reminding us of the degeneracy of our Confederate past, something they allege, disingenuously IMO, but that's another matter, should not be forgotten.
Well, okay, tell me, how effectively did those place names and statues remind a 25 year-old med school student that donning blackface evoked the legacy of the "Jim Crow" and slave eras? Did those names and images remind a collegian of the reprehensibility of mockingly aping someone else by donning blackface makeup that perpetuates and approbates the stereotyping of a whole race of people as clowns? Did those statues remind anyone to respect others, regardless of their race or skin tone? Hell, no!
So what now stares us in the face is that a whole lotta folks who engaged in unequivocally racist acts would now have us think they have evolved. Well, maybe some have, maybe many have. The question is how the hell are we supposed to know? It's not as though "I'm not a racist/bigot" is a refrain that racists and non-racists don't both utter; thus attestations alone are inherently unconvincing.
These aren't people who ages ago confessed their transgressions and have, for the overwhelming majority of time between then and now, developed an demonstrably, unquestionably unblemished record whereby they've shown they have indeed divested themselves of the notions that allowed them to don blackface or worse regalia. These people hid their pasts from us, and proceeded to bid us to invest them with the public trust.
Can one prove one isn't a racist? Probably not; few and far between, if at all extant, are the negatives that can be proven. One can, however, behave concomitantly with respecting equally among all people and all individuals. One can demonstrate that one has empathy for and has acted to abate incidences and effects of inequitable treatment and perceptions, and one can stand up and rail against manifestations of such. Of course, if one is committed to being a racist, well, one probably cannot, or at least not successfully, do those things. But, for the sake one one's country, I think one is duty bound at least to try with all one's might, for if the racial discord we today face isn't rectified, it's just a matter of time before we again sunder our nation. And that's something that, frankly, nobody wants.
