Dear White People: I Am Sick of “Educating” You

In the continuing fallout surrounding his recent admission that he wore blackface back in the 1980’s, Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, has promised (threatened?) to launch a listening tour in Virginia to discuss racial issues. In an interview with Gayle King of CBS, Northam admitted that he was unaware of the racially charged history of blackface in America.

Really?

I’ll be frank. I deeply resent the fact that black people and other people of color are expected to “educate” white people on racial issues. Or, even more accurately, I resent the fact that contemporary black people are expected to regularly sacrifice time and emotional energy in order to rehash debates that other black people already won over the previous two centuries.

As early as 1848, Frederick Douglass was denouncing white actors who performed in blackface calling them “ filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens…” Civil rights leaders attempted to have D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a film that depicted white actors in blackface, banned. Ralph Ellison denounced the practice in a 1958 essay.