There's no forgiveness in this 'guilty until proven guilty' era

Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny?

Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered: presumably that’s him in the photograph; no, on second thoughts, it couldn’t be. The photo quality is poor, and the two jaunty figures holding cans of beer are disguised — one in blackface, the other in Ku Klux Klan robes.

I’m more familiar with Virginia than many of the Americans nationwide clamouring for Northam to resign. My father’s from Norfolk, where throughout the 1980s my family was still visiting my elderly grandfather. Sure, the state then suffered residual racism (like every other state), as it still must. But my grandfather didn’t live in an antebellum mansion where the slaves were flayed for secreting a bar of soap.