To me, the main problem with Ralph Northam’s apology wasn’t what it contained but what it lacked. I actually thought he did a good job of taking responsibility for his actions, acknowledging that he caused harm in the present as well as in the past, and making a credible pledge to do everything he can to regain trust.
What he really needed to do in addition to all of that is explain exactly how and why he wound up in either blackface or a KKK costume and then thought it would be a good idea to put that in his yearbook. He needed to explain how and when he changed and what helped him make the transformation. And then he needed to more forcefully repudiate his past actions and the culture that led to them.
There are a lot of people who were raised the wrong way, or who came up in a really intolerant culture. Not all of them grow out of it by the time they are 25 years old. We don’t need to condemn every one of these people for the rest of their lives. But they do need to convince us that they underwent a process and that they learned from it.
The better we understand that process, the easier it us to relate it and to be forgiving or even trusting again. Northam probably has a story along these lines that he could have told. It most likely wouldn’t have been mere self-serving bullshit either. He should have told it.
Since he did not, he isn’t getting much benefit of the doubt. He appears to have been unusually racist at one point in time, and we have no idea really why we should believe he’s truly changed.
He can point to his record in recent decades, and that’s an important part of the story. But it’s not enough.
