The hidden meaning of Northam's racist yearbook photo

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Ralph Northam first said he was in this photo, although he said that he didn't know if he was the one in the KKK outfit, or the one in blackface. This already showed his confusion. How could he not remember if he either had to scrub off shoe polish or merely take off a sheet after the party? Today, he is singing that old Bob Dylan favorite "It ain't me babe."

I don't want to weigh in on that. Let the pundits have their field day. Now that it has come to light, I want to address what is being depicted in that photo regardless of who is responsible for it, because nobody seems to be talking about that.

It clearly is a parody photo. But of what? We have one white man dressed up in a Klan outfit. Standing next to him is another white man in grotesquely done blackface, presumably to represent an African American. These two appear to be having a friendly beer together. With this interpretation comes the obvious question: Under what unlikely circumstance would these two characters be partying together?

I submit to you that there is another interpretation that would explain this: What is being depicted in that picture are two Klansmen. One is dressed up in the pointy head sheets they used to terrorize African Americans. The other is dressed up in the costume they occasionally used to create terror of African Americans in the white population  - blackface. This is probably the most important role blackface has played in US history, and it is the reason it will forever be associated with racism.

It's popularly known that blackface was once widely used on stage to depict African Americans in a derogatory manner. Less well known is its use by white supremacists for the purpose of fabricating attacks on white communities. They would then use these "false flag" attacks and crimes for stoking racism, recruiting, and for justifying what they did in the hooded sheets. What is being depicted in this photo is not the paradox of an African American and a Klansman partying together. It is something entirely sinister.

Clearly, both these characters are played by white supremacists, but one is not trying to portray an African American. If you know the true history of racist practices in this country, you know that he is portraying a white supremacist dressed up in blackface to terrorize white people. Given that interpretation, it makes perfect sense why these two characters would be having a friendly beer together.

I wrote about this particular use of blackface in The Rise of Xenophobia, but much more needs to be researched. That piece focused on Chicago. Here are a few relevant selections from it:

In a piece titled "How do you become “white” in America?," Sarah Kendzior ... gave us a lesser known example of why blackface will forever be associated with racism in her description of how the Poles became white:

In 1919, Irish gangs in blackface attacked Polish neighborhoods in Chicago in an attempt to convince Poles, and other Eastern European groups, that they, too, were “white” and should join them in the fight against blacks. As historian David R. Roediger recalls, “Poles argued that the riot was a conflict between blacks and whites, with Poles abstaining because they belonged to neither group.” But the Irish gangs considered whiteness, as is often the case in America, as anti-blackness. And as in the early 20th century Chicago experienced an influx not only of white immigrants from Europe, but blacks from the South, white groups who felt threatened by black arrivals decided that it would be politically advantageous if the Poles were considered white as well.

....
These post-war years were very tumultuous ones for race-relations in the US. During the war, many African Americans migrated North to take part in war production while others went abroad to fight in it. Both were changed by their experiences. In Chicago, the African American population increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 in 1919, when many veterans were returning to find them in the industrial jobs that were "whites only" before the war.

"Xenophobic" groups like the Ku Klux Klan were taking full advantage of these disruptions. The KKK was making a comeback, and bringing racial violence back to the South. There were 64 lynchings in 1918, and another 83 lynchings in 1919. One would hope that such "xenophobic" lynchings are history, but even now, Monday, 12 November 2018, CNN is carrying a story about a white US Senator from Mississippi joking about her desire to sit "front row" at a "public hanging," as she faces a 27 November run-off election against her African American opponent.

And now, sadly, we must add the recent attack on Jussie Smollett.

In the "Red Summer" of 1919, resentment against the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North prompted by the war came to a head, and race riots broke out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and Chicago. The riot in Chicago started on 27 July 1919 after an African American teenager was stoned and drowned to death by a group of white youths because he had strayed over an unofficial segregation line. Police refused to arrest the white man that eyewitnesses said was responsible, and that sparked a week of rioting that saw more than a thousand black families burned out of their homes in violence that also took the lives of 15 whites and 23 blacks.

While some of those homes may have been burned by white men in white sheets, others were burned by white men in blackface. Blackface wasn't just for minstrel shows at the time. As Christopher Lamberti wrote in Riot Zone: Chicago 1919:

White men in black grease paint posing as African Americans frequently committed crimes in the South around the turn-of-the-century, and in Chicago as early as 1914, when the Defender complained, "With a blackened face crimes of all kinds are committed and laid at the door of an innocent Afro-American." The number of robberies and assaults by white men in blackface increased in Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration.

Characteristically, some of these blackface crimes involved assaults on white women.

Here's an interesting tidbit that turned up in my research: One of the Irish-American gangs that took part in the riot was the Hamburg Athletic Club. At the time, the legendary mayor of Chicago (1955-1976), Richard J. Daley, was a 17 year old member.

The hidden meaning of this photo is that white supremacists didn't just dress up to terrorize black folks. They dressed up in blackface to terrorize white folks as well!

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