It is reasonable to criticize Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey for doing a skit in blackface in college. It’s also reasonable, given that this happened half a century ago, to neither belabor the criticism nor demand her resignation.
Some racial offenses merit commonsense statutes of limitations, especially when taking into account the severity (or lack thereof) of the offense, the youth of the offender, the cultural milieu at the time, and, of course, the subsequent half-century of behavior of the individual involved. If someone is to be adjudged harshly 52 years later for an offensive-but-common practice in Alabama sororities in the 1960s without any consideration of these other factors, then we as a society have eliminated all appreciation for, and encouragement of, personal maturation, character development, and redemption.
Blackface minstrelsy is clearly demeaning towards black people. Period. Even half a century ago, civil rights activists were denouncing it, and those who participated in it should have known better.
But it also was a common, accepted part of entertainment for nearly a century, engaged in by presidents, by generally well-motivated actors like Bing Crosby who were insistently and famously integrationist, and sometimes by black performers themselves. A college girl in Alabama doing a sorority skit in blackface in 1967 was quite likely acting from ignorance more than meanness — and, again, people mature, social mores change, and the sense of what is merely in bad taste versus what is unforgivable evolves as well.
Outside of Alabama, the name Wayne Flynt is probably not familiar to most readers. But longtime Alabama readers know him as the state’s “foremost historian,” an old-school liberal, and a leading white advocate for black interests and civil rights. Flynt told AL.com that people ought to cut Ivey some slack.
“My take on this is that was a different time,” Flynt said. “She was young. She came from a county, Wilcox, that did not have a single registered black voter at the time the Voting Rights Act was passed. Any black person who wanted to vote had to have a white person vouch for them. That was the culture she came from.”
Moreover, Flynt said, “She would have been unique and unusual if she had said I’m not going to do that, it’s racist.”
The difference between an undergraduate in Alabama in 1967 and a medical student in Virginia in 1984 — as was Virginia’s now-Gov. Ralph Northam when he wore blackface — is significant. Even then, though, as in all race-related incidents, context and subsequent behavior should be considered important. So too (cutting against Northam) should be whether there is a sense of deceit or hypocrisy involved. There’s no obvious rule as to where to draw the line, but clearly, people should apply a sliding scale of judgment.
In sum, when a years-old, unpleasant race-related incident comes to light, people need to take deep breaths and be reasonable. There do exist different degrees of error and sinfulness. As a society, we must recognize that some things can be forgiven without any less insistence that they were wrong.
