re: #394 HappyWarrior

One thing I’m thinking about tonight are the men/women who shaped my worldviews. Mostly white people as I’m a white male with two white parents and four white grandparents and who had mostly white authority figures in school, youth sports, etc. I would never say I was “color blind” but I do think I just tried to see people as people. Yeah I knew my good friend growing up was from Peru but what mattered was that we had common interests. I don’t know anything about Northam’s upbringing or the culture at that medical college but from even an early age, things like the KKK weren’t a joke to me. I remember my grandfather- a child of an immigrant telling us about the KKK going through his hometown. And I knew that the CIvil Rights Movement wasn’t the PG rated version we got in school. I just don’t understand what made a 25 year old guy think dressing up in KKK or blackface was not only funny but worthy of his yearbook for all posterity to see.

Are things different now than they used to be? Every yearbook I knew anything about, it was up to the students to provide the face pics for the alphabetical section, but the editors chose what other pictures to put in. Doesn’t excuse the existence of the picture in the first place, but I doubt if Northam had any say in its appearance in the yearbook.