In a scene from the 1976 film Silver Streak, white actor Gene Wilder appears in blackface alongside black actor Richard Pryor.
Describing the controversy surrounding Virginia Governor Ralph Northam—involving an old yearbook photo with one person in a Ku Klux Klan outfit alongside another in blackface—Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin said, “that medical yearbook page is vintage Americana.”
Americana is defined as “American culture or materials concerning or characteristic of America, its civilization, or its culture…things typical of America.” As Emdin, author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . And the Rest of Y’all Too observes, blackface is an enduring tradition, and racism is typical of America.
As February is Black History Month and this week is Black Lives Matter at School Week, it only fits to acknowledge with this yearbook photo incident that anti-blackness is at work in our nation’s schools.
White students continue to appear in blackface. White teachers do so as well, and then argue that they never intended to offend anyone. White administrators do it and defend it as an effort to build professional camaraderie.
Blackface is an ugly part of our ongoing history; it dehumanizes black people for white entertainment. Educators and students should not have the luxury of claiming ignorance of the racist roots and deeply harmful practice of blackface. White people who choose to wear blackface do so not because they want to be a black person, but because America is anti-black. And America’s anti-blackness is, for some, what once made America great.
The dynamics at play in schools reveal that anti-blackness isn’t only a sentiment within individual hearts. Anti-blackness is systemic.
Black students are more often than not without a black teacher despite the research showing the benefits of to all students of having teachers of color. Textbooks whitewash history; withholding the truth of America’s original sin because white teachers are uncomfortable teaching it. Schools where Black students attend are named for Confederate soldiers who fought to maintain Black enslavement. Black communities are denied local control of their schools by state governments who wrest away control and hand it to reformers and philanthropists who tend to be white.
Black students as young as preschool age are disproportionately suspended and referred to law enforcement. Black students are violently beaten and even tazed by police in schools. Black children are told their hairstyles are a distraction in school and will bar them from athletic competitions. And the current administration has recommended that Obama-era discipline policies—which attempt to address the disproportionate disciplining of black children—be rolled back.
The dynamics at play in schools reveal that anti-blackness isn’t only a sentiment within individual hearts. Anti-blackness is systemic. However, America would rather address individual acts as isolated racism, rather than address the mechanisms of white supremacy that suppress the Black vote, mass incarcerate black people, and expand the black-white wealth gap.
Anti-blackness is why no one from the Eastern Virginia Medical School prevented a picture of Ralph Northam in blackface to begin with—and his wasn’t the only picture of blackface in the yearbook.
This week, through Black Lives Matter at School Week, schools throughout the country have rallied around the demands to replace zero-tolerance disciplinary policies with restorative justice measures, to hire more black teachers, and mandate black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curricula. These demands are good for everyone. As James Baldwin once said:
“If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating White people who know nothing about their own history.”
Ralph Northam won’t be the last person to try explaining his way out blackface. Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring is attempting to do the same thing. And many people will continue to disregard blackface as a problem because they don’t see anti-blackness as a problem. Some of those people teach children, write curricula, and implement school disciplinary policies. Black children will continue to suffer because America isn’t ready to confront and correct its anti-blackness. Racism is not an issue of the past. It is front and center in the news cycle, social media, in the lives of those who are oppressed by it and who oppress because of it.
Because anti-blackness is more than vintage Americana. Anti-blackness is the American way.