The predominant hot take on the Ralph Northam blackface controversyis that it’s a politically-damaging debacle for the Democrats—and that it may be—but it should also be a reckoning for every American, from those in the fashion industry to the Halloween frat parties, who has long treated blackface as a relatively benign offense.
The fact that not just the governor of Virginia but also the state’s attorney general indulged in blackface—not as unwitting children but as adults who certainly knew the act was both incendiary and wrong—should be an inflection point for a dirty little secret: blackface is still a potent part of our culture, not just an embarrassing emblem of our past.