No kidding. And wouldn’t someone remember going as a crazy thing like that? Heck, a decade later I went as Pat from SNL (I actually looked more like Daria Morgendorffer, but she hadn’t come along yet) and I remember that.
He was responding to legislation proposed in his state in which an aborted baby survived. You can read about it here.
Here is what Kathy Tran said about the bill she proposed:
“How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?” Gilbert asked.
“Through the third trimester,” Tran responded. “The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.”
“Where it’s obvious that a woman is about to give birth,” Gilbert then asked, “would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified? She’s dilating.”
“My bill would allow that,” Tran said.
Watching the press conference. Hearing this guy talk about impersonating Michael Jackson at a talent show is cringe-inducing beyond belief. His vocal delivery and body language also remind me of George W. Bush to the max, which is not a point in his favor.
Another page from that yearbook has surfaced with someone else in a blackface costume. The 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook features more than one photo of someone in blackface
A bigger nightmare would be if, in the face of a growing Democratic chorus to have him resign, he decides to switch parties and become a Republican. It’s not like the Republicans wouldn’t at least partially support him.
Now, if only I could pick stocks that well… 
I accept that Northam is not a racist today, and as far as we know, he might never have been a racist. It doesn’t really matter; the offense is still serious enough that he needs to resign for the good of the Commonwealth.
If he came out and owned up to it and said “It was an insensitive joke – much like Prince Harry’s decision to wear a Nazi costume at a Halloween party. I apologize, full stop.” I could almost accept that, except for the fact that he really ought to have known better, given his age and given the fact that he grew up in a culture with very clear racial dividing lines.
Let’s step back and consider this: it’s a blatantly racist photograph, not in his high school yearbook picture, not even in his college fraternity yearbook picture, but his medical school yearbook. He’s about to enter the professional world, and he thought somehow that this was acceptable to participate in. We’re talking about knowingly, willingly participating in a picture that makes light of an organization that murdered black people by the thousands from 1866 - 1979. I doubt that it’s the case that he had no say at all in what photographs he got ‘tagged’ in. He presumably thought it was okay, that it’s just a joke, and that it’s funny and doesn’t matter. He’s just edgy, politically incorrect, I guess.
But why didn’t it seem to matter? What made him think that it was just an edgy joke that nobody would care about? The reason it didn’t matter is that in 1980s Virginia, the opinions of black people didn’t really matter. There probably weren’t that many black med students in his program and in his formative years, Virginia was still segregated. It was just harmless humor among mostly white folk. In 2019 the opinions of black people probably matter a little more now than they did then, fortunately, but we shall see.
From the same cite, the school is going to review every student yearbook:
Homan said the school’s administration is planning to hold a meeting with students and its board of visitors to discuss the issue and find a way to address it.
In a second statement Saturday night, Homan said he would “direct that an external investigation be conducted as soon as possible to review all our past yearbooks.”
the beeping sound you hear is the bus backing up.
He’s supposed to be Diana Ross. I think that’s vastly different from coon stereotype + KKK. I don’t think it’s really shocking to see somebody in fancy dress like that as a famous black singer in 1985.
Yeah, it’s tasteless now, not racist like the other.
I think the point is that the students themselves might have run the publication themselves without needing approval from anyone on faculty or staff.
There is the issue of thinking it might be a political attack without the photo. But I’d expect having any Dems who were trying to come up with an excuse to support him would up the outrage factor, not decrease it.
If it would have allowed it now, then the law has allowed it all along. Per your link, the law wouldn’t have changed when an abortion could take place. It now only would have required one doctor rather than three to approve the abortion, and would have set a lower bar in terms of the potential health consequences needed for the doc to give the go-ahead.
You are repeating what one might call the organized, deliberate hysterics of the pro-lifers.
Doug Wilder got elected Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 1985.
I’d agree that, much to our shame, the opinions of black people, then and now, mattered and matter less in our body politic than the opinions of white people. But to say they didn’t really matter in Virginia in the 1980s is demonstrably false.
Again, as was the case during the Barack Obama era, don’t delude yourself into believing that evidence of having elected a light-skinned political moderate is evidence that some kind of major progress has been made in terms of race relations.
Jeez, excluded middle much?
Could a black man have been elected President of the U.S. in 1984? Certainly not! Neither party would have nominated one. That one could be elected President in 2008 is evidence of substantial progress in people’s attitudes.
Does it mean that everything’s flowers and unicorns? Hell, no! But to say it means practically nothing is one big fat steaming pile of bullshit.
I’m in team “who the heck has a yearbook for graduate school? Why would anyone look for one? And who on earth LOOKS at old yearbooks?”
There were probably a couple hundred copies printed, most of which are sitting dusty on the bottom shelf of someone’s bookcase in the basement.
I guess what this incident tells us is that he was popular in medical school, because if he had enemies, one of them might have gone poking through the old yearbook to see if he could find any dirt on the governor.
As for what should happen now? At first, when it looked like he was going to apologize, I was thinking that might be enough. It was a long time ago. Virginia was pretty openly racist then. A good sincere apology along the lines of
“I was wrong to do that, I was wrong to put it in my yearbook, but I have since learned how harmful that sort of behavior is and I have put it behind me. Look at my record for the last 20 years and how progressive I’ve been on racial issues. That’s what I want to do going forward.”
And I would likely have been okay with him. But this mealy-mouthed “oops! that wasn’t me”? No dice. You chose to put it in your yearbook. You are responsible for it.
I wonder what the reaction would be if instead of this it turns out he had been convicted of a crime and nobody knew about it. that is unlikely given background checks but it’s possible something could have been sealed. Would people want him out for a crime, say stealing a car for a short joy ride?
He is still in the governor’s mason? I would have bet heavily against that.
My point is that Northam apparently felt comfortable posing either as, or with, someone dressed up in Klan garb, and at minimum, consenting to said photo being used in a medical school yearbook. Ignore Doug Wilder and Barack Obama for a moment, and consider what that means. Consider what it means that the editor of the yearbook apparently had no problem with publishing the photo, and as far as we know there was never any kind of sanction for it. That’s a society, however small it might be in this particular example, that is comfortable with racist memes and just being downright racist.
Yeah, sure, “it’s a joke.” Except that it’s a joke that reinforces white supremacy because nobody – from the people taking the photo, to the people in the photo, to the publisher of the yearbook, and to the entire community – sees anything particularly wrong with it, or at least it’s not so wrong that it resulted in any immediate backlash with consequences. I find it hard to believe that only a handful of people at the medical school were aware of the photo, and I have a hard time believing that classmates and school officials at VMI weren’t aware of Northam’s nickname “Coon man.” People knew - they just didn’t care. And they didn’t care because in the 1980s, even 20 years after the Civil Rights laws were enacted, black people in Virginia still had a status that was comparatively quite low.