I'LL MAKE A BET THAT YOU'RE GONNA GET JOHN WAYNE BEFORE HE DIES
One morning last week, I checked my Twitter feed only to discover that John Wayne’s 1971 Playboy Interview was trending. What the heck, I thought, William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Turns out that Wayne was feeling feisty that day, and offered some intemperate remarks about minorities and women. The interviewer baited him at times, but Wayne refused to equivocate. He said what was on his mind, a lot of which came from the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Before Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, people had to make do with whatever right-wing propaganda they could find.
Wayne said a lot of outrageous things, but these two lines drew most of the attention: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” Someone on Twitter must have quoted these lines, which quite naturally drew flak. Which is fair, because they weren’t taken out of context.
The second sentence, about not giving authority to irresponsible people, makes perfect sense. But if the second sentence is a no-brainer, the first sentence seems simply brainless. White supremacy is precisely the thing that prevents minorities from living life, exercising liberty, and pursuing happiness like white Americans. The inability to see that is prima facie evidence of white privilege.
In 1971, when Richard Nixon was president and so popular that his followers were talking about repealing the two-term presidential limit, Wayne’s views weren’t all that uncommon. He was more honest than most Republicans could afford to be in 1971, but he wasn’t running for office and felt free to say what was on his mind.
John Wayne was born in 1907, at about the time that Bert Williams, America’s first Black superstar, launched his recording career. That’s him on the left in the image that accompanies this post. W.C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew.” Born in the Bahamas, Williams grew up in America, and formed a partnership with George Walker (on the right, in the top hat).
Together, Williams and Walker took Broadway by storm in 1896, with Walker playing a city slicker and Williams playing a country rube in various comedies and musical productions. Williams recorded some of his comic routines, and they became best-sellers in the earliest days of the commercial recording industry. His recitation of “Nobody” was a number one hit in 1906 (YouTube link below), as was “He’s a Cousin Of Mine” in 1907.
Williams died in 1922, and is largely forgotten today, although his legacy surfaced in popular culture at irregular intervals. In 1940, Duke Ellington composed “A Portrait of Bert Williams.” During World War II, the U.S. Navy commissioned a ship called the USS Bert Williams. Bob Hope performed “Nobody” in the popular 1956 film “The Seven Little Foys.” Johnny Cash recorded it shortly before he died. Sam Cooke had a hit with “Cousin Of Mine” in 1964, the last single he released before his murder; and Jerry Reed resurrected Williams’ “Dark Town Poker Club” (as “Uptown Poker Club”) in 1973.
That’s interesting enough, but it gets better. Williams was light-skinned compared to his sidekick. On stage, he used burnt cork to blacken his face in order to appear as a more convincing Negro for white audiences. Williams may have been the first Black man to appear onstage in blackface, although blackface had been a tradition among white performers at least since 1828, when Thomas “Daddy” Rice introduced his stage persona, a character known as Jim Crow.
Nearly a century has passed since Bert Williams died, and nearly 50 years since John Wayne’s Playboy interview. And still white supremacy continues to dominate America’s civic discourse. I refer, of course, to the state (or commonwealth, if you prefer) of Virginia, and its Governor and Attorney General, both of whom have blackface issues in their past. Now we’re of the past as the 1980s, when you would hope that people – especially college educated people – would have known better. But apparently not.
Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring were in college in the 80s. College kids do some stupid things. That’s partly what college is for, to get some late adolescent stupidity out of your system. But blackface is a form of stupidity that feels particularly mean-spirited.
As best I can tell, neither Northam nor Herring have pursued racist agendas in their political careers, which would suggest that they’ve outgrown the casual racism of their younger days. If that’s the case – and people on the ground in Virginia are better positioned to make that call than I am – then I’d be inclined to forgive them and move forward.
Why? Two reasons, one moral and one practical.
If I may get all Biblical for a moment, let me point out that Jesus said (Matthew 7:1), “Judge not, that ye not be judged,” and (John 8:7), “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” St. Paul echoed that theme when he wrote (Romans 3:10 & 23), “There is none righteous, no, not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
I’m not an office holder and I’m not running for anything, so my tepid youthful indiscretions will probably never become public. But I’ll confess that, even though I never wore blackface or a Klan hood, I’m absolutely sure that as a kid, I said racist things. I remember, for instance, an elementary school music class in which we learned “Old Black Joe,” and the teacher kept trying to get us to sound blacker – “I’se comin’, I’se comin’” and so on. I sang it her way without a second thought.
And my youthful racism wasn’t directed solely at African-Americans, but at anyone with a different religion, race, nationality, or ethnic background. I grew up hearing derogatory names and ethnic jokes, and it stands to reason that I absorbed the terminology, if not the attitude behind it. That was a long time ago, but when the roll is called up yonder, I’ll have to hope for justice tempered with mercy. A whole lot of mercy. And it seems to me that as a matter of plain fairness, I ought to be willing to extend mercy to other sinners.
As a practical matter, I also believe that progressives need to learn to take “yes” for an answer. If someone wants to abandon the Dark Side, even gradually, we should encourage them rather than continue to browbeat them for their past mistakes. If there’s no forgiving past mistakes, what’s the incentive to change?
Jim Wright, on his Stonekettle Station blog, wrote this: “Every candidate reinvents themselves every new time that they run. I don’t care (mostly) who they were back in the day, or what they campaigned on previously. I want to know who they are now. Who they expect to be in the future. Where I do think the past matters is if they’ll admit their past mistakes, up front, without excuse, and tell us how they’ve changed and what they’ve learned.”
That seems reasonable to me. I wish Governor Northam had said something like, “Oh my God, that picture is terrible. I’d forgotten all about it, but I’m mortified. I will spend the rest of my political career making up for that awful lapse in judgment.” Instead, he spent days engaged in a public scramble for a cover story – any story – that would allow him to stay in office. It was a pretty weak performance, although as of this writing, he’s still governor. Mark Herring is still the Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax, who has his own (much more serious, in my view) issues to deal with, is still the Lieutenant Governor.
Are there any lessons that we non-Virginians can learn from the Northam/Herring incidents? Apart from the possibility that, in the Age of Trump, you can ride out any scandal? (Or at least you can if you’re white. Jussie Smollett’s career as a martyr didn’t last too long. Pro-tip of the day: don’t pay your co-conspirators with a personal check.)
The reason I care about this is because we can expect more political scandals to surface as the Russo-Republican disinformation machine turns its attention to the growing field of Democratic presidential candidates. They’ll happily start baseless rumors, but the odds are good that they’ll also find embarrassing information about some of the candidates, and the question for me is, what should I do then?
First, I have a responsibility to verify information before forming an opinion about it, much less writing about it. Social media encourages us to respond in real time to events that aren’t even finished. The nature of the medium encourages us to jump to conclusions. Sometimes we jump and a net appears – i.e. we guessed right, things were as they appeared to be, and our hot take holds up. Other times, despite our best intentions, we’re like Wile E. Coyote after he’s taken two or three steps off the edge of the cliff and then looks down. Uh-oh, no net. Better to delay forming an opinion until all the facts are in.
Second, I acknowledge that there are legitimate philosophical questions around the statute of limitations for various offenses. How old do you have to be before you don’t get to use youth as a mitigating factor? Are some things unforgiveable? Which ones? How do you rehabilitate your reputation? How can you express contrition convincingly? How much time has to pass before people will believe that you’ve had a genuine change of heart? But until we have those discussions – and also agree on who gets to rule on each case – I’ll have to do the best I can on my own.
I can tell you now that I’m going to err on the side of forgiving the trespasses of Democrats. Why? Because all the personal and political sins of the top ten Democratic presidential candidates PUT TOGETHER pale in comparison to those of Donald Trump. Remember that when the media begins to harp on some flaw in the Democratic front runner. The choice isn’t between a flawed Democrat and some platonic ideal of a presidential candidate. The only real-world alternative to the flawed Democrat is Donald Trump.
I intend to pay close attention to all the Democratic candidates, and when Arizona’s Democratic primary rolls around on March 17, 2020, I’ll vote for my personal favorite. But if my personal favorite doesn’t win the nomination, I’m not going to sulk. The eventual Democratic nominee is going to have faults. He or she may hold positions I disagree with, or drive me to distraction with their campaign priorities. I’ll still support them. Whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be, whether it’s Bernie Sanders or Amy Klobuchar or someone in between, I will support them. Whatever disagreements I have with them will pale in comparison to the garbage fire that is Donald Trump’s presidency.