Well that was a racist post if ever there was one. It is not only up to the feelings of "African American constituents in Virgina". It is up to all the citizens of Virgina.
I'm sorry, you failed to call the pasty white dude a house ****** again. You're slipping in your defense of whatever opposite land race harmony philosophy you subscribe to.
Truthfully, this thread took some turns I never would have had anticipated. When I read Realjad's early posts I thought he/she was either ill-informed or trolling. Taking the later posts at face value, I'm not sure what to think. This place could be a sociological experiment.
Wait - assuming you believe him, how was Northam's Michael Jackson blackface dancing not in "good faith/humor"?
He should step down. I think you are confusing how we should judge a politician versus what a politician is suppose to be. As a man, I am sure he would never today wear blackface and probably understands that what he did in his 20's was terribly wrong. People change and grow, and he certainly has. We shouldn't judge older people on the stupidity of their youth right? Except, what does it mean to be an effective leader? To lead, you just have the covenant of trust amongst all those you lead. You have to be the example of the best, and you have to have the trust of the people. It's not about what is far or not, it's about making people feel they can trust you to have their interests at heart. How can he lead people now after that picture comes out? He's lost that trust. It's not about who he is today, it's about the baggage now hanging around his neck and that he will always be viewed with suspicion. That's politics. He should step down, and the message to young people should be - don't do stupid things if you want to be respected in the future. You can make mistakes and grow, but that doesn't mean your mistakes don't have consequences now and later.
Harris is a self serving parasite. She has no integrity and only cares about herself. She isn’t a Trump level scumbag, but America deserves better.
Except we have a long history of people with terrible pasts becoming great leaders - there's nothing inherently impossible or even difficult about it. Endless slavery advocates became abolitionist leaders. Racists became civil rights icons. Anti-gay-marriage people of the 80's and 90's became the advocates of it over the last decade. Transformation of people is a fundamental part of our history and success. The reason it's a problem today is the new outrage culture. This country would be trainwreck if, historically, we booted everyone with an ugly past out of office. I have no idea if he could be an effective leader or not, and you're right that if he can't, he probably needs to go. But so far the only evidence of that is politicians (largely from other states) looking for a spotlight to claim a holier-than-thou attitude and calling for him to step down - before they even had any details or heard from him. We have no idea what the actual people of Virginia think, or whether they think he can lead them. Is that really the basis we want to use to judge whether he can be an effective leader? If that's the standard, this country is basically done in 20 years when there will be no future leaders, since everyone will have decades of Facebook and Instagram history, thousands of digital photos, or Clutchfans message board posts or whatever else.
Your point is well taken, but there is a difference. Those you speak of we open about their positions and at the time being a racist wasn't as damning - 100 years ago if you were openly racist it wasn't considered a horrid thing in many circles like it is today. Today - you should know better. The other difference is that their positions were not hidden. Gandhi was openly racist when he was young and didn't try to hide from it. He changed his position and others saw that and embraced it. This guy didn't talk about how he didn't understand racism when he was young and as he grew older changed. So that is why there is an issue of trust. Ultimately, it's his decision whether he steps down or not, and the voters decided whether or not his past should be held against him, and it's up to him to convince people it shouldn't be.
i actually agree with the fact that all blackface is not offensive, I am coming around to the fact he should resign.
I highly disagree with this, any person can be offended by others stereotyping them. Which is what blackface or whitespace usually does.
Making fun of people is different than stereotyping in an effort to dehumanize someone. White face does the former and black face does and has a history of doing the latter. Even if it were stereotyping of whites, what is the harm? The society at large which is heavily white won't think the stereotypes are full of truth and treat whites differently. But that is exactly what happened with black face. If a few white people get offended, then they don't have to watch. But large segments of society won't buy into the stereotype.
Well said. This is all being well overplayed. Sure, it is not a good look for him. But the level of outrage over this is excessive to say the least. The problem here is that his candidacy was not vetted adequately during the primaries or the general election contest for governor. If everyone involved will start doing a better job at that, then if you find yourself presented with a candidate that is regarded by many as distasteful in some way, at least the voters will be given the chance to weigh in and register their preferences at the ballot box. This is when you determine that this sort of behavior is disqualifying, not after he has already spent a year in office. The much more egregious political blunder by Governor Northam this week was his apparent endorsement of infanticide. Now if he decides of his own free will that he wants to step down for some reason, fine. But these hysterical lynch mob style purge campaigns have got to stop. The conduct of these campaigns is in almost every case worse than whatever it is that they are purporting to eviscerate and destroy.
Understood - but I also don't know that we know that Northam really had any abhorrent views. He did something stupid, but if you believe his current story - and this is a big IF - then: * He didn't know about the Yearbook photo (totally plausible to me - I have no idea if my grad school ever had a yearbook, and he said he was already stationed in San Antonio when it came out, which should be verifiable) * He was not in the the blackface/KKK photo (questionable - the previous day's explanation complicates things) * He did blackface in a Michael Jackson context, but he loved MJ and won the contest (so judges weren't repulsed by whatever he did) If we believe this, that suggests he did blackface out of trying to make a costume, but was too stupid to know it was a bad idea. But he wasn't inherently racist or trying to attack black people. If that's the case, I'm not sure there'd be any reason for him to bring it up in the future as some evolution of his views or anything. That said, my bigger problem is with the rush to judgment by politicians and even people on here (first page, before we had heard anything from him). They didn't need any context or explanations before deciding he was done. I'm pretty you could take anyone on this board, find some old posts without context, and find something that looks abhorrent. And that seems to be all that's required for the outrage-fest to start. That's a huge societal problem, IMO. We saw it with the MAGA Hat story too - people want to make immediate judgments without need for details or context. And then once the outrage has grown enough, no one in power can back down because then they have to admit to a rush to judgment, which will create it's own outrage (maybe more justified, but still to-be-avoided by politiicans).
