But if white people's imagination is the most dangerous place for black people, it is also the most denigrating. Fresh but superfluous evidence of that arrived Friday in the form of a photo on the med school yearbook page of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The image, taken in 1984, the year Northam turned 25, depicts two young men, one wearing a KKK hood, the other painted in blackface.
Northam, a Democrat who attends a black church, has trotted out shifting explanations. First he apologized, though he failed to say which man in the picture was him. Then he said neither man in the picture was him.