I don’t know what’s more puzzling—that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D) once dressed in blackface in college and admitted it, or that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring listened to Kurtis Blow and knew the lyrics of one of his songs enough to actually perform it in said blackface.
It seems that after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook photos were unearthed—you know the ones where Northam (whose nickname was “coonman”) was pictured next to people dressed in blackface, which Northam initially claimed was him and then moonwalked away from—there has been a call of conscious for other Virginia officials to admit that they too dressed in the face of black.
“In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song,” Herring said in a statement, according to The Washington Post. “It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes—and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others—we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.”
This is Mark Herring:
Herring called the event a “one-time occurrence” and said he accepted “full responsibility.”
“That conduct clearly shows that, as a young man, I had a callous and inexcusable lack of awareness and insensitivity to the pain my behavior could inflict on others,” said Herring, who intends to run for governor in 2021. “It was really a minimization of both people of color, and a minimization of a horrific history I knew well even then.”
This is an obvious attempt by Herring to get ahead of any photos that might resurface of him in blackface. Herring wants to control the narrative and look as if he’s falling on the sword before the incriminating evidence surfaces. He wants to be seen as the guy who had the decency to admit “his inexcusable lack of awareness” before the shock of this white haired ass clown in full shoe polish surfaces.
I say let them all go down in flames.
Currently, the Virginia government is in complete disarray. Northam is facing calls for his resignation for his blackface photo, oh, and there was also someone in a damn Ku Klux Klan robe in the same damn photo.
“And early Monday, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D) denied the allegations of a woman who said he sexually assaulted her at the Democratic National Convention in 2004,” the Post reports.
Fairfax would replace Northam should he step down. If Fairfax couldn’t take that post for whatever reason, guess who’s next in line? Yep, Herring.
“It’s a mess,” Va. State Sen. Lionell Spruill (D-Chesapeake) told the Post before an aide stopped him from saying more.
The Post also noted that the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus left Herring’s office stone faced and didn’t speak with reporters. They were probably wondering like the rest of us, “What the fuck is wrong with these guys?”