Problematic Yearbook Photos (or, I was a horse’s @ss in college)

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Upon learning that the governor of a southern US state became embroiled in scandal this weekend over a college yearbook picture showing him either in blackface or in a KKK hood, I did what any sensible person would do. I started thinking back over my own yearbook pictures to see which ones would be incriminating in case I ever run for public office.

There are no pictures of me in blackface. But there is a picture of little white me standing next to three other white people who are wearing blackface.

The year was 1978. Our Grade 8 class was performing a Christmas play about a kind middle-class family who give their Christmas presents away to a poor neighbour family. In the play, the poor family was black.

This was St. John’s, Newfoundland, then (and possibly still now) the whitest place in North America, where 98% of the population was descended from English and Irish fishermen. We did not have any black kids to play the Poor Black Family. I had, at that point, never met a black person.

One thing we did have was a lot of Poor White Families. Probably half the kids in that play came from families that were receiving social assistance. I have no idea why our teachers thought blacking up three white kids with shoe polish was a better solution than just having the poor family be white.

But it happened. And there’s photographic evidence. Which I will not post here.

I have, however, posted (above) slightly edited pics from an event a few years later in which I (kind of) appeared.

We’re up to 1984 (the same year as Ralph Northam’s yearbook photo). I was attending a small Christian college in the US with a wonderfully diverse student body from around the world. I now had non-white friends! And for a Halloween costume party, four of us decided to dress up as the Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Silver.

I was the back end of Silver.

We had a blast. We won first prize in the costume contest. Then we went and crashed a house party hosted by some more popular students, realized they were about to sit down and watch Nightmare on Elm Street on VHS, and peeled out of there because we were all scared of horror movies. But that’s not relevant to this story.

What’s relevant is: Tonto’s costume.

We went full-on Native American stereotypes – braids, moccasins, face paint, the lot – but we also wrapped Tonto in a sari. Because the girl playing Tonto was Asian, and we were (in our college-aged minds) making a clever satiric comment on the idea of “Indian” and Columbus’s huge error. See, Tonto was, like, an Indian, but not that kind of Indian. (The girl playing Tonto was not either kind of Indian). We were using an offensively stereotypical costume, but we were doing it ironically. We thought this made it OK.

In the photo above, I’ve replaced Tonto’s face with an emoji that approximates her facial expression. This means you miss seeing her face paint, which was (to use two terms we wouldn’t have used in ’84) both on-point and problematic. But it also means I’m not going to be the one to sink her campaign if she ever decides to seek elected office.

There’s no need to edit out my face because, again, I spent the whole evening bent over in the back half of Silver, staring at another friend’s backside.

In 1978, at age 13, I knew no black people and was not aware of the racist history of blackface. In 1983, despite all the black and Latinx and Asian friends I made at college, I knew no First Nations people and thought that an ironic Tonto costume was cool. I’m fairly sure that in 1984, the now-governor of the state of Virginia had a pretty good handle on the history of both blackface and the KKK.

I’ve always been suspicious of that saying, “When we know better, we do better.” Probably because so often we know better and we still don’t do better.

But two things are for sure:

We rarely do better until we know better, and
Once we know better, we have an obligation to do better.

And if people who are smart enough to run for public office still can’t figure that out, well …

I may not be the only horse’s ass around here.