Hi clo,
I take no pleasure in a man's life being ruined by this sort of public lynching.
I didn't say it was funny to me. To me it is a trivial thing done by a young man before blackface was any kind of issue. It's like excoriating Mark Twain for using what folks now call the n word, even though, for his time, he was strikingly non-racist.
You cannot possibly say that what he was wearing indicated a racist philosophy. He appears to be dressed for a party.
What party was this now-governor attending? I went to parties with themes like saints and sinners. We dressed to order. It meant nothing about what we believed. We weren't making political statements. We were being young and exuberant and relaxed. It was permissible to dress up as more-or-less anything. No one cared. No one was curious if, 30 or 40 years later, we might have been wearing a politically correct outfit.
For myself, I believe people are frequently offended because it gives them pleasure to be. The whole me-victim politics is the snowflake thing Republicans despise, and for the right reasons. People glory in self-pity. The tradition of American muscularity is an admirable one. Identity politics is the precise opposite.
As regards US history, it's always much more complicated than a quick conversation allows. But it seems unjust to me to direct anger about the treatment of black people in the eighteenth century through the choices of a young man at a party perhaps three decades ago.
| 