Let’s say you’re on your way to a dance contest in the early-to-mid 1980s in Texas, and you’re young, like

mid-20s young, and you know you’ve got what it takes to win. You know this because you’re basically
going to dance like Michael Jackson. You’ve seen “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller,” and like the rest
of the entire planet, you just kind of know.
Now it’s almost time to head out to this thing, and you’ve got a loose plan. You’re going to fling your leg
up like it’s a lit match to flick out, and make a tippy-toe statue of yourself, and do that move where you
pull your hip up and down and very gently hump the air, like Fred Astaire, only kind of dirty. You’re
going to try the triple axel of popular dance: You’re going to moonwalk.
But you’re just not sure about something. How are people going to know I’m him? You’re wearing the
single glove and probably a pair of pennyloafers. But, see, because you kind of forget somehow that
Michael Jackson wasn’t just some musician, he was an earthquake — to conjure a TV ad for an M.J. doll,
he’s Mi-chael. Mi-chael. And in, say, 1984, one thing that most made him Michael was a wedding of
grace and violence, a little bit ballet, a little bit Al Capone.
Anyway, you don’t trust whoever’s doing the judging to recognize this. So you dab your face with shoe
polish. Costume complete. Now it’s clear. You’re Mi-chael. Mi-chael. And you probably never thought
you’d have to tell the folks of the state that you’d eventually govern that you did this. But there on
Saturday was Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, telling the people of Virginia (and everybody else) about
the time he really did compete in a dance contest dressed, with his face blacked, in what he described as a
Michael Jackson costume.
And the reason Mr. Northam had to disclose this to anybody — in a news conference, on a weekend —
was because a different photo had come to light, from his personal page of the 1984 yearbook of Eastern
Virginia Medical School. It’s of two people. One’s in a parody of country-club casual (plaid pants, blazer,
shades, fedora, bow tie, beer can, megawatt grin). The other’s dressed for a Ku Klux Klan meeting —
mask, robe, pointy hat and everything. And: The country club guy has these unnatural, uncanny tar-black
face and hands.
Even though he says it was he who allowed the picture to adorn his yearbook page, Mr. Northam swears
neither of the people in it is him. But he does totally get how we’d conclude something else. And that’s
why he’s telling this Michael Jackson story — at a news conference on a Saturday.
According to him, back when such a photo would have been taken, he would have known what a problem
blackface is because of the time he tried to be Michael Jackson. It wasn’t that he knew because someone
more historically aware and actually black filled him in on the long, objectionable tradition of American
blackface minstrelsy — an art form in which, initially, white people dressed as black ones as
entertainment, on one hand, and as proslavery propaganda on the other (actually, both hands tended to be
clasped for that).
It wasn’t that anybody had told young Ralph Northam about the glorious Virginia Minstrels, the four men
whose blackface act caused a foundational sensation in the 1840s; or how the Virginia Minstrels were but
one of an endless parade of acts that delighted white audiences — with songs, dances, skits and more —
on both sides of the Atlantic for most of a century. The governor wasn’t arguing that his young self came
to see that blackface was wrong because he had learned how minstrelsy wasn’t some cultural niche but
was once America’s popular culture and how that popularity helped cement the nation’s perception of b