Fair enough, but 35 years is half a lifetime. I don’t want to think we can’t change ourselves in such a long time. I’m using my own experience here to compare, and my ideas about the world have changed in the last 10 or so years. Perhaps Northam is not capable of that and he’s a giant dick, he did choose a career in politics after all.
Mea culpa, the only context I know for a yearbook in America is before college. Didn’t know they continued past that.
They do, but I (for one) sure ignored it after high school. Never got my picture taken for one in college, and never bought one. Maybe it’s a bigger deal post-grad, e.g. they format an entire page for you.
What is really odd is that searching public records like yearbooks etc is basic 101 oppo research. Why now?
What does Occam’s razor say? Did someone just learn about that yearbook photo yesterday, or was that information someone’s insurance policy? Imagine that you could “remove” a sitting governor anytime you wanted, just by anonymously revealing something devastating about their past. Such power.
I agree. I like to hold open the option of change but so many people double down on their shit so fast and hard that it is not possible.
I didn’t say shit about “can’t.”
I said it’s highly unlikely for most people, because change is hard.
It takes actual, consistent hard work, and a willingness to want to change in the first place.
And the messed up reality is that most people of privilege who have grown so cozy and complacent in their unearned status don’t want to change.
No. That’s how a person trying to downplay the awfulness of his actions would apologize. “Who among us wouldn’t have done this 35 years ago?” is not the right way to show contrition for past sins.
As I mentioned before this is typicall Virginia Good ‘ol Boy behavior. They don’t see this as wrong and probably never will. Their audience and peer group have always condoned this shit and believe only outsiders will see it as wrong.
I’ve definitely made people feel harassed/unhappy.
The difference is while I look back at myself and cringe, I’ve made tremendous progress through therapy and self reflection. Every year I feel better about myself, and I constantly re-examine and re-evaluate in an earnest attempt to do better, and if I ran into someone from my past I’d own up that I was wrong.
Even here, on this site, I’ve lashed out at people more harshly than I should. It’s been a conscious decision on my part to try to build up a long-term nym here - because the real world is scary and frankly, the stakes are too high… so I just make mild conversation and don’t really get to know people. It’s not an excuse that I have an exaggerated startle response, that I had a shitty childhood, or I have a disability… but it’s also a lot less scary to reveal those things online, where at worst, I just stop posting.
Anyways, I haven’t read up on the latest from this governor, but it sounds like he’s been acting out the narcissist’s prayer. First it wasn’t him. Now it’s him, but it was long ago and he’s very sorry (but not sorry enough to resign or admit it was wrong without being forced).
I suspect that as long as you don’t deny the pictures are you, then say it was long ago and gaslight those expressing concern, then refuse to accept any kind of punishment despite refusing to even admit wrong, you will be fine @Doug
I suppose if he was strongly anti-choice he wouldn’t have voted pro-choice on all those bills
Remember the movie “White Chicks”? what’s the diff?
Flashback to Northam’s campaign:
And, of course:
Since it went public it obviously isn’t blackmail, but what about the guy who sits on old photos of another politician and instead of making them public “suggest” the politician make a certain decision or he will be made to resign? He can point at Northam and similar cases and point out how easy it is.
Hold on.
While I do agree with you on certain time periods (let’s say the 1850s on in certain parts of the United States), lets not forget that straight up an 1830s poor ass white farmer in Georgia just would not have the wherewithal to understand that he’d been systematically raised to believe black people weren’t any more than animals. His education was minimal, his understanding was minimal, and the society around him was literally designed to teach him that black people weren’t human.
I understand when we hold really memorable people to account, simply because they had the education to step outside the normal cultural bounds (like, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson surely fucking understood what was going on with slavery being immoral and straight up wrong), but the average person?
Sorry, we’re talking shitty literacy rates and general education back then. I can’t back that the normal person had a “moral failing” for accepting what was general practice, especially when we’ve had so much “moral failing” talk with regards to things like drug use or “poor finance skills” when it comes to poor people not spending their paychecks properly.
The working class of the UK seemed to be able to figure it out.
Poor ≠ stupid.
The “dif” as you so glibly put it, is the difference between punching up, which is what the Wayans were doing with their comedy, and punching down, which is what people of privilege mocking Black folks with blackface is.
Black people have never owned White people as chattel slaves, or oppressed them with Jim Crow and segregation; they’ve never held power over an entire demographic of people and passed laws with the intent of keeping them denigrated.
Furthermore, although they don’t enjoy nearly as much privilege as their White male counterparts, young blonde women have not been historically marginalized and persecuted in the U.S. the way that Black people, especially Black men, have.
Long story short, your equivalence is both shallow and false.
And it would also be a classic example of a sentence directed at only the white people in the crowd.
If a person is trying to refute concerns about racist behavior, don’t appeal to other white people to ignore the viewpoints of black people. It’s a self-own.
Owing Your Shit is surely the key, here.
I don’t know the soon-to-be-ex Governor or his background, and I don’t know any of the background here, and I am certainly not sticking up for him. But Blazing Saddles came out in the eighties. Supposing he had said “Ah, you found that. Yes, I am the one on the left/right. It was fancy dress; come as a song title. We were going as ‘Ebony and Ivory’. Didn’t win a prize, but people liked it. Deal with it.” He might have got away with that.
He didn’t say that, or anything like it. The other people with the same yearbook did not out him, either. He’s screwed, and probably rightly so. But he was only screwed because people trawled through forty years of old pictures looking for something like this.
I never would have dressed up as either of those gentlemen, because it is neither nice nor funny, but all this leaves me with a vague, postmodern-punk feeling that someone ought to stand up for the right to shock provided they own their shit. No-one ever went to a “Come as something politically correct” fancy dress party, ever. And, perhaps harrying anyone who does to their grave is not automatically the best course.
We now return to our regular Circus Maximus programme, and a big thumbs down for this clown.
(You might want to check your Google. It might be on the fritz.)
I didn’t. You got me.
