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.
Nope, sorry, there was no chance in sidestepping this and roughing out the rest of his term. Even if he had a pitch perfect response, he’s gotta go. Fact is, this has been the absolute opposite of pitch perfect; it’s been disaster every step of the way. Virginia has elections in the fall. He’s a drag and an anchor on the ticket.
He could have worked for forgiveness and made himself a better man by resigning and doing that work outside office. It was never possible to do it while holding power. That he can’t see this shows he’s not fit for office, period. You want to show you’ve learned? Resign and allow Virginia to have Justin Fairfax as governor.
His political career is done, he must see that. He can’t run for re election as Governor, and higher office, or high appointment to an administration is now out of the question. Resignation is the only choice.
.
Anyone who has grown up in the bowels of a culturally and politically conservative area, and ended up being a Democrat has a story to tell. Hell, when I was running for State Central Committee here in Ohio, I had a woman e-mail me and wanted to know who I was and why she should vote for me. She was a recent transplant who had spent her entire life in the San Francisco area. So you can imagine the culture shock she had moving to Southwest Ohio. It was her first election since moving, and she admitted she felt like she had moved to a completely different planet, and she was really wondering what kind of Democrats there were here. I explained in great detail my whole evolution and history, and the experiences I had that influenced my political journey. It was really kind of a personal exercise for me, too, as I had never really given significant thought to how I came to be such a liberal Democrat, when I had spent virtually my entire life in one of the most reliably Republican areas in the country. By the time we had finished exchanging several e-mails, she had a pretty clear picture that she didn’t need to leave her liberal politics behind in San Francisco, and that I came by my politics in a very deliberative and thoughtful fashion, with a plethora personal experiences which formed me. Her reply was, simply, “What a story”!
What Northram is doing is a death by a thousand cuts. He is done, he just hasn’t come to terms with it. Sadly, it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. He just wasn’t willing to do the difficult work of, first, being honest with himself, and second, being honest with those who trusted him with their vote.
Having grown up in eastern and northern India, I have no natural experience of this aspect of our political life – the natural animosity towards certain ethnic and racial groups.
However, when I look deep inside, the ethnicity I belonged to – Bengalis – have some elements of pejorative views of other ethnicities in India. There were names by which whole regions of people were called which would be insulting to them.
But what prevented this from becoming so ingrained was a large inter-mixing of ethnicities in most large and small cities and towns. In elementary school in a small town that primarily arose because of steel plants, there were class mates of all ethnicities and religions from all over India. In college, it was even more the case that we lived and breathed like we were a nation of 29 distinct groups, but with the same purpose!
Any residual “pejoration” would have been self detrimental.
When I came to US in 1980 (Princeton U), I did see a lack of knowledge about the wider world outside US and Canada. But our class mates were eager to learn. Never did I see any animus expressed.
So all of this – including MikeInOhio’s story about growing up in a conservative part of the country and evolving into something different politically – is fascinating.
It seems to me that Northam will eventually resign, but not before a death by 100 cuts.
At the same time, I find it deeply disturbing that DJT, with his proven history of racist bias, McConnell, Scalise, King, and so many Republicans not only survive, but get TV facetime to denounce Northam (and anyone on the D side)!
Your last sentence.
Seriously….
I’m not convinced he could have gotten out of this successfully, but what he has done has been totally inadequate and now it seems he’s denying it’s him in the picture. Too late.
this is bad for Virginia and bad for the Democratic party, and the longer it goes on the worse it is.
At this point, anything Ralph Northam has to say other than “I resign” is irrelevant — including observations about his personal history with racism. He has been on both sides of the facts about the picture itself, and that picture was an unexploded munition under his entire public life. If it had emerged during the 2017 general=election campaign, it would have blown up his candidacy — and Ed Gillespie might well have ended up as governor despite his own involvement with racist campaigning. Among other things, that outcome would have ensured that 400,000 Virginians did not get medical care through the Medicaid expansion.
Northam has been repudiated by every relevant group of Virginia Democrats, by Tom Perez at the DNC, and by every nationally-prominent Democrat who has weighed in on the matter. He cannot reverse that judgment, and he cannot govern Virginia from a bunker in the executive mansion. His present behavior is an appalling exercise in selfishness — nothing more. Northam must go. And it is appropriate that he would be succeeded by a descendant of slaves — who, as a bonus, would not be term-limited and could run re-election in 2021.
Well he use to be a republican and voted for Bush
and the comment about
Yea I only blackened my face a little bit because everybody knows shoe polish is hard to get off your face….is a dead giveaway that he had done it before
Yea I only blackened my face a little bit because everybody knows shoe polish is hard to get off your face….
Most people have idea how hard it is to get shoe polish off your face or that you use shoe polish to blacken your face
Or even cares what shoe polish is.
.
“shoe polish is hard to get off your face”
Good God, did he actually say that?!
Call for a pause in this conversation. At his presser he said that it was not him in either of the two costumes. He did say he had ‘darkened his face’ in a different time when he was at a dance contest and was doing a Michael Jackson imitation. He also said that the college was looking into their records and yearbooks to see if there are other instances because he said the yearbook itself had several other similar pictures on other peoples’ pages.
This is a bizarre twist and I’m not saying it erases this episode and he did admit that he’s reached out to the community and been told in no uncertain terms just how offensive this is, which lends credence to the observation that he didn’t recognize what was obvious even in 1984. He’s got to deal with that.
So, best case defense for him was that it wasn’t him in the pictures, that someone on the yearbook staff had the picture in hand and thought it funny to post on his page. That the Daily Caller’s pals at Big League Politics aka Judge Moore’s rag, dug this up is a whole other story.
With all due respect, Martin, Northam voted for Bush in `04. Where was the line crossed that he decided he should be A Dem, or was just political expediency?
In any event, I completely disagree that he could’ve explained his way out of the black face/kkk outfit considering that a plurality (if not majority) of his constituency is black Virginians. I’m actually puzzled by your post.
The visual of Northam and his wife at the presser…took me right back. Vitter and his wife. McGreevey and his wife. Oh so creepy. It was like he put on another costume to explain what he did over 30 years ago.
Really.. why do they pull their wives into it? That alone is another ground for his immediate resignation in my book
I’ll ever forget poor Eliot Spitzer’s wife standing next to him after the sordid revelations about him.
Never forget
“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.”
This. If he had said, “I grew up in a place and time when racist shit was tolerated, and even at 25 I hadn’t quite left it behind. But my record shows I’m not that guy now, and haven’t been for 30 years. I am deeply embarrassed and sorry I was such a dope back then,” I’d be a lot more forgiving.
But he says he doesn’t recall, legalistic bullshit wiggle room language. Fuck this slippery weasel.
. . . in that photo. But I did lightly put on blackface for a Michael Jackson impersonation.” [paraphrased]
So, yeah, square this:
SLIPPERY EEL-WEASEL
Lemme see, Booman…
I was born into a culture that was incredibly racist…both sides of my family, the original Protestant 1630s-ish settlers of NYC and the 1840s-ish Irish immigrants…were without any doubt white supremacists, as were the suburban NYC/Long Island societies in which I came of age. But as a child of the generation before Northram, in a totally white suburban NYC culture, by the time I gotten to about 14 years of age I and all of my friends had figured out what bullshit that white supremacist position really was.
Pose for photos in KKK/blackface!!!!???
Never fucking happen!!!
Bet on it.
However, about 20 years later this fuck didn’t have a clue!!!
If he was a RatPublican?
You’d be all over him!!!
But he’s a DemRat.
So…???
So you’re tap dancing around his racism.
I’m sorry, man.
It doesn’t work that way.
This partisan bullshit has got to stop!!!
Rotten DemRats as well as rotten RatPubs need to be called out, and called out hard!!!
On every level!!!
Please!!!
Thank you and good night…
AG
AG’s right here. The people who are defending Northam, a Republican until 2007 (now?), are complete hypocrites. If it was a Republican, they’d be calling for his execution. For f***s sake the FL (yes, FL) Secretary of State (a Republican) resigned just a week ago over a blackface photo. At least he saw the writing on the wall.
It’s generous to infer that AG believes that Governor Northam should resign. Perhaps he does. But read his own writing in his post above. He never lays down that demand. Instead, he is lodging an attack here against BooMan and Democratic Party partisans who he asks us to infer are defending Northam.
In doing so, AG attempts to evade the fact that the Chair of the DNC Tom Perez, the preceding Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, both Democratic Party senators representing Virginia and many, many, many other prominent Democratic Party leaders have called on the Governor to resign. The list of Democrats who meet your “hypocrites” claim here appears very short.
But let’s make a more specific set of observations of the person whose judgment you applaud in this instance.
AG campaigned for Donald Trump here from August to November 2016 by concentrating his participation in this community by lodging nonstop attacks on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
During that same general election campaign, he wrote diaries here which documented his travels in conservative areas of New York and Pennsylvania. He not only conceded then that he did not try to talk conservative voters out of voting for Trump as he tried to talk progressives out of voting for Clinton, he angrily defends that behavior to this day.
AG campaigned against Democratic Party candidates here from August to November 2018, and in doing so sought to give the most racist President in our lifetimes maximum power and minimum oversight for another two years. He took particular interest in lodging extremely harsh attacks against Nancy Pelosi, attacks which largely dispensed with policy discussions and concentrated on personal attacks. We should linger on the fact that AG was lodging those attacks against Pelosi and other Democrats at a time when evidence was gathering that the Democratic House caucus had a solid chance to take majority control in the 2018 election.
AG’s attacks here on Barack Obama and his Presidency were constant and frequently way over the top for most of Obama’s eight years in the office. He spent far, far more time here criticizing the first African-American President than he has spent criticizing our incredibly racist current President.
AG is an evangelist for Ron Paul’s racist policy agenda, and he has defended Ron against his record of racism over and over and over again.
AG supports voter ID laws and does not believe a broad set of Federal civil rights laws should be enforced.
AG believes that unemployment insurance is bad policy, and that “”Welfare” and other giveaways rather than jobs, honest work and adequate pay hurt whoever they touch in the long run.”
AG has made the case for his belief that African-Americans were better off under Jim Crow laws. He has also engaged a counterfactual where the Civil War was never fought. Get a load of this:
“What if we had not fought that war? I don’t know for sure myself, but I believe that as the world moved on into the 20th century and industrialization, the south would have become a failed state. Hell, it might have even become a black state in time, or itself suffered insurrection and secession by majority black states. Wouldn’t that have been interesting!!!”
So, in AG’s view, an additional half-century or more of literal chattel slavery for millions of African-Americans in the United States of America would have been a worthwhile Grand Experiment.
I don’t think that AG has “…figured out what bullshit that white supremacist position really was” to this day. His behavior reflect someone who remains in the thrall of that position. His behavior also reflects someone who is in thorough and bitter denial of the clear implications of his social and policy views.
Yeah. I was just focused on the claim that Dems who defend Northam would be doing the opposite if it was a Republican. It is a short list, indeed.
I was not a Clinton fan but was at her HQ on Election Day calling voters to get out the vote. Endorsing Trump under any circumstances (even torture) is really unforgivable.
Please do not be fooled by this entity’s attacks. My non-lockstep position below (from my post above) sums up the essential source of all of the trolling done against me on this site.
Here are a few other red herrings that this entity throws out on a regular basis about my positions:
No. I did not “campaign for Donald Trump.” I opposed HRC because she and her neoliberal/neocentrist (and crooked as hell) DNC satraps backstabbed Bernie Sanders in the primaries in every way that they knew how to do it. I still to this day maintain that Sanders would have beaten Trump if given a fair shot in he primaries, and even if he had failed at that he would have moved the Dem battle lines way left and way sooner.
Truly…in the simple interests of sheer self-survival…I did not try to talk rural white working class strangers in Dunkin’ Donuts, local restaurants and other places out of their political stances.
I have roots in the Maine equivalents of those places and I know better than to mess with the beliefs of strangers of that sort. Things can get ugly in a hurry, so I kept my peace and simply listened/observed. I was in automobile transit for more than a week at that time. Had I gotten to know them and gained their trust to some degree, I most certainly would have tried to reason with them. I have had many discussions with people much like them who know and trust my family in Maine, and not only got somewhere with them but began to understand why they support people like Trump.
Long story short?
Sure.
Can’t argue with that. Not really. It’s not true, in the long run…he’s only in it for himself and his political/economic allies…but the same could be said of many people who support most mainstream Dems today. The Dems have fucked up 6 ways to Sunday…Trump’s election was just the capper…since Clinton I’s nifty little NAFTA move, and the whole country has paid for it. Talk people out of supporting them??? An almost Sisyphean task, as the give and take on this blog has so readily illustrated over the past several years. The Dems think that they’re better than the Republicans; the Republicans think that they’re better than the Dems, and the truth of the matter is that both parties are currently full of shit at their highest levels. The only truly good news as far as I can see it lies in the new Dems like AOC and Beto O’Rourke.
There are plenty of people…here and elsewhere…doing a thorough job of criticizing Trump, but not so many people understand that Obama’s reign…and the DNC/DNC-controlled media that supported and publicized him… were con jobs. Why pile on one side and ignore the faults of the others? The Dem’s problems are what brought us Trump.
Obama?
The “Peace President?”
No.
Obama theWar president.
The Universal surveillance president.
The Wall Street president.
The globalist corporate-owned and operated president.
Bet on it.
A cursory reading of some truly progressive sites should be enough to establish that truth. Try back issues of Counterpunch for starters.
I could go on puncturing centristfielddj’s red herring balloons, but I have to go to work now. That entity and its allies are not going to stop with the false attacks here…they hold to mainstream, neocentrist/neoliberal Dem positions and as I said above, the sum total results of those positions since Clinton I is a downward curve for this country any way you look at it. That applies to the RatPublicans, too. They both suck!!! You are relatively new here, I believe, and I hate to see new people poisoned by this kind of bullshit.
Think on it.
Later…
AG
Got it. I disagree with your “both parties are the same” mantra, AG. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with you on other things, though…. you’re angry, but it’s righteous anger… obviously, that attracts a lot of derision here in that you don’t `tow the line,’ so to say. I’ve had to deal with this as well. I’ll disagree with you (strongly) at times, but other times I’ll agree with you. In any event, I won’t let others direct me as to how AG “should be treated” on this outpost (except for Martin, cuz, ya know). Best!
Note that AG offers no response to my summary of his various domestic policy positions which I summarized here.
It’s difficult for someone to be a credible critic of unnamed Democrats on the Northam issue when they slam away in opposition to Federal civil rights laws, claim that Cliven Bundy was right in the many declarations he made when he was in the news, and demagogue against social welfare programs.
Given AG’s far right domestic policy positions, his claim that he has wanted or wants to push “…the Dem battle lines way left and way sooner” is laughable on its face.
It’s worthwhile to employ some logic here. Arthur can see that there is a legitimate debate and battle taking place between Democrats on this blog and elsewhere who advocate for various gradients of leftist policy positions. Arthur prefers far right policy positions. Therefore, he wants the Democratic Party and its candidates to have no power at all. Centrists Democrats are far, far to the left of AG. His behavior here shows that he believes that the best way to achieve his far right policy preferences is to hammer away at wedges which do exist on the political Left.
As far as that story he gave you that he was engaging in “…sheer self-survival…” when he declined to attempt to talk a single Trump fan out of their support for our despicably racist President and his despicably racist political Party, I think the sheer garish clownishness of the claim suggests that he doesn’t respect us at all. What, was he under constant threat from gun-toting Trumpsters at the donut shops? Again, let’s use our logic: he didn’t critique those people as he critiques nearly every Democrat and the vast majority of community members here because he’s a conservative who shares most of Trump’s policy and social views.
AG has gone on here in recent weeks broadcasting his claim that he admires Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke. Their policy positions, while significantly different, are thoroughly incompatable with Arthur’s extreme anti-Federal government positions. So what is AG doing here with those gushing fanboy diary posts?
He’s setting himself up to be the Trump campaigner he was in 2016 and 2018. O’Rourke is unlikely to be the Party’s POTUS nominee, and the House leadership and Committee chairs will not be establishing positions as far to the left as AOC will. So AG will cry his crocodile tears and attack Democrats in 2019 and 2020, because taking a generic far left rhetorical side while unsuccessfully hiding his supremely hard right policy views is the way he’s decided to roll here.
. . . At least as far as you, ag, or anyone else making the claim has deigned to demonstrate with factual evidence so far!
RE:
Haven’t, for example, heard a single prominent Dem do that.
Have, though, heard a unanimous chorus of prominent Dems (up to and including Hillary) calling for him to resign.
Yet again, your divorce from Reality that doesn’t conform to your bias and narrative seems near-total.
I’m talking about commenters and bloggers. I didn’t say any Dems are defending him. Get the chip off your shoulder, geez.
Prominent Dems.
Then, when challenged to name names . . .
Looks like marduk has you figured out quite well: at least when it comes to getting caught with your pants down and feeling a need to save face . . . you lie (including by “moving the goalposts”, i.e., pretending, as you did here, that you said something other than what you said).
Which he was! As even “NJersey” knows!
Unsurprising you’re the only one around who appears not to.
Let me stipulate the following: 1) If Northam was part of any of the photos or other situations as they’ve been reported, I condemn his actions. 2) He’s handled this poorly, to say the least. 3) As a practical matter, his political career is over.
Having lived in Virginia up until six months ago, I agree that the sooner he’s gone, the better for the Virginia Democratic party. If the Democrats in Virginia can stay united; and stay on message regarding health care, education, and the environment, it seems realistic to expect Virginia to become a consistently blue state. A previous commenter gave me chills with the remark (and I’m paraphrasing) that it’s a blessing that Ed Gillespie didn’t have such good oppo research in the last election – this could have sunk the gubernatorial race in VA for the Dems.
Now, let me walk deeper into the minefield. Two things bother me about this:
I’m not comfortable with how either party has handled these events. The Republican party has become so radicalized that it forgives almost any sin as long as one mouths the proper party line. The candidacies of Donald Trump, Roy Moore, and many others demonstrate that the Republicans ceded the moral high ground (if they ever held it) and sold their souls for power.
However, I’m disturbed by some Democrats’ zeal to enforce a purity of behavior on members of its team. I was not a huge fan of Al Franken, but it seemed to me that he represented the people of his state well. The rush to remove him from the Senate seemed disproportionate to his offenses. Now Governor Northam has been given no chance for atonement or forgiveness.
In an age where privacy is disappearing, the stupid and offensive things young people do will all be recorded for posterity. The only folks who will prosper in politics will be those who stage-manage their lives, beginning in pre-school.
I like my politicians with scars, and skeletons in the closet. I respect men and women who’ve passed through dark nights of the soul and emerged as better people. We need more people in elected office who have lived difficult and conflicted lives.
My religious tradition commands me to forgive others as part of seeking forgiveness for myself. Contrary to the assertions of TV politicians and TV preachers, that process is not accomplished in one emotional moment of connection. It is a lifelong struggle.
If democracy is rule by our peers, than most of us have no right to demand a saint as our elected representative.
I agree with your thoughts on Franken. Northam is no Franken. He voted for Bush.Twice! And he was a virulent racist when he was in Med School. Med School!
The voting for Bush twice is bad enough. He never should’ve been the Dem nominee, but the racism…. racist picture in a yearbook for posterity, when he was studying to be doctor!?! Completely unforgivable.. He should be gone Friday
I don’t disagree with you at all, mostly, but the questions I have in the wake of the press conference are these: Does Northam still have the trust of ALL the people who voted for him? And can he govern effectively, with a Democratic majority that is now at least somewhat ambivalent about him? And even if he can, will he govern more effectively for the future of Virginia than his lieutenant governor would? To me the answer to all these questions is either “No” or “almost certainly not.” I believe that in this particular instance, the Democratic Party in VA needs to clear the decks of people with questionable racial baggage (this point may need to be litigated at some future date, depending on the circumstances, but I don’t believe these are them). In fact, with a black, progressive lieutenant governor waiting in the wings (god willing he’ll prove to be competent as governor), I think the good of the state depends on Northam bowing out, sooner the better.
I will just add that I’ve always thought the Russians must have somehow tainted leading Democrats with their funding largesse, through otherwise innocuous PACs or cut-outs who will show their true colors (racist, Russia-tainted, etc.) at the worst possible time (e.g. the week before the next big election). I could be wrong of course, and would welcome correction on this, but I fear Democrats may get more experience than we would ever want, in terms of calibrating degree of harm caused versus maintaining the trust of the electorate.
He didn’t really deny the act, nor did he really own his responsibility, he’s not genuinely contrite, and he’s delusional enough to think he can brazen this out.
Dipshit BINGO!
. . . “den[ied] the act.” Not that the denial’s very credible, nor that it changes that he obviously must go. (Obvious to — almost literally — everyone but himself, that is.)
looks like america’s favorite scamps are at it again …
The problem is that he originally said (a) Yes, I’m in that picture and (b) I’m not sure which one is me.
That implies that he’s done both.
Now that his argument is that he isn’t in the picture, it implies that lots of his fellow students were dressing like that, on multiple occasions.
That’s a bit more damning than “Once I dressed as Michael Jackson.”
Can he? I’ll admit, I don’t know much about his record. If he has a history of reaching out and supporting minority communities, this would be a good time to point that out.
Quick question.
I went to college in Texas and made extra money taking pictures at fraternity parties. These guys weren’t exactly uninhibited and tended to the Kavanaugh end of the political spectrum.
Still, I’ve never seen anyone dressed in blackface or in Klan robes, not even at Halloween parties.
I realize that’s just anecdotal, but I’m baffled by the number of “blackface” scandals coming out now. Is this common in some places? Has anyone commenting here ever experienced it?
It was common nearly everywhere before 50-60 years ago. Then it became pretty much unacceptable. VA has come a long way in a short time, perhaps it lingered there.
Blackface was very popular in the south
Prior to entering politics, Northam voted for Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, a fact that opponents raised in later Democratic primaries.[21][22] Northam says that he was apolitical at the time and regretted those votes,[22] saying: “Politically, there was no question, I was underinformed.”
Black Democrat omitted from some Democratic campaign fliers in Virginia
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Ralph Northam omitted any mention of Justin Fairfax, the party’s African American candidate for lieutenant governor, from about a thousand pieces of campaign literature, which Fairfax called a “mistake.” The incident has stoked tensions within the Democratic ticket, threatening to alienate African American voters three weeks before Election Day.
Statement from pastor of Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church; Union Hill farmer, veteran, Union Grove deacon, and freedman family descendant in Union Hill; etc. on Ralph Northam
For us who live or work in Union Hill, Buckingham, Virginia, the revelations that Gov. Ralph Northam engaged in racist behavior in medical school over thirty years ago are less troubling than his most recent actions, inactions, and silence about environmental racism related to the massive fracked gas compressor station to be built in Union Hill.
When Gov. Northam removed two of the 5 Air Pollution Control Boards in the middle of a decision about that compressor station air permit after they raised questions of environmental [in]justice for that siting — his actions spoke loudly about his unwillingness to make donor sacrifices for his PAC required to make racial justice a reality in Virginia.
It was popular everywhere. Big studio cartoons were full of it (I wonder where all those cartoons went, anyway?). It pretty much vanished at least in the north in the 1960’s. But like I said the old cartoons & other tv of that time still had plenty of it.
I don’t know to what extent its decline came from enhanced civil rights awareness or was just considered passe and tedious.
. . . Fairfax from campaign literature????? (But . . . got link?)
Thinks he can somehow stave off resigning . . . why, exactly?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/reeks-of-subtle-racism-tensions-after-black-c
andidate-left-off-fliers-in-virginia/2017/10/18/de74c47a-b425-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_
term=.0872acc0b6cf
. . . can’t confirm works.