https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/us/northam-blackface-virginia.html

Beyond College Campuses and Public Scandals, a Racist Tradition Lingers

By Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson
Feb. 8, 2019

ATLANTA — Nina Yeboah was a freshman at Georgia State University in 2004 when she heard about the pair of white fraternity brothers who had shown up at a “Straight Outta Compton” party in blackface.

Fifteen years later, she said, it still feels traumatic to talk about what would become a moment of embarrassment and pain on the Atlanta campus. As a student of color, said Ms. Yeboah, now a writer, “it kind of wakes you up to what racism is like in the community that you’re in.”

It has been a week of waking up.

What first appeared as a grotesque act of racist clowning on the part of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia turned out not to be an aberration at his medical school in the early 1980s. A confession from Mark Herring, the state’s attorney general, revealed that blackface was common at other Virginia schools at the time as well.

The news of other blackface episodes — an ever-growing tally including yet more Virginia politicians as well as Florida officeholders — led a rush to old yearbooks by reporters and others across social media.

This last week has reinforced that blackface, with its roots in demeaning minstrel-show traditions that date to the 1830s, has never gone away. In fact, it surfaces on a regular basis across the country, beyond the South and beyond the Greek houses on college campuses. Over the past two decades, there have been at least a handful of incidents every year, in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Alabama, involving judges, police officers, bank executives and credit union employees.

Just last year, a fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo was suspended after students dressed up as gang members, with one person in blackface. A candidate for the Illinois Senate apologized for dressing as a rapper in blackface at a Halloween party a decade earlier. And a student at the University of Arkansas posted on Snapchat an image of himself in blackface and the words “I hope this offends someone.”

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