Yearbook photos can become embarrassments

The college yearbooks that got Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in hot water could snare thousands of other men (and, perhaps, women). Looking back at these 30-year-old or older yearbooks shows attitudes and culture have changed. What once was just silly fun is now viewed as reprehensible and unpardonable.

Northam's medical school yearbook included a page dedicated to him that shows someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan-style white hood and another man wearing blackface makeup and tattered clothing. In 1984, when the yearbook was published, people must have just laughed it off. Northam is not laughing now; he is under intense pressure to resign as governor.

I could not recall seeing any yearbook pictures from my college years (more than a decade earlier than Northam's) that were so obviously racist. Perhaps slave/master costumes became fashionable sometime later. I did look through a couple of my old college yearbooks to see what shenanigans the fraternities were up to nearly 50 years ago. 

The 1968 and 1970 Yackety Yack yearbooks of UNC-Chapel Hill exhibited no shameful racial attitudes in their posed fraternity photos but did show plenty of lack of poor taste.

Beta Theta Pi had its members pose all over a railroad trestle wearing a variety of costumes. Three carried rifles or shotguns. Some wore military clothes or caps. One man wore bib overalls and held a gun to his head. Like racist attitudes, joking about suicide is no longer excusable.

Chi Phi posed its brothers as a chain gang in 1968. Most of them wore work clothes (or less) and stood in a roadside ditch that was under construction. Two brothers were dressed as prison guards and brandished a rifle and a shotgun.

Kappa Zeta won the humor prize (maybe) with the suit-and-tie frat boys lined up in single file behind one brother seated on a toilet in the middle of a field while two others stood beside the seated brother holding his coat and toilet paper. The last guy in line is bending over, one hand over his eyes to see how long the line is.

Lambda Chi Alpha held a mock burial with most members in formal wear while one brother lay in front of them, covered by a Confederate battle flag and holding a flower. No one was in blackface or Klan outfits.

Phi Delta Theta got a jump on colleges' worries about binge drinking. The Phi Delts posed outside an ABC store brandishing large boxes of booze, one rifle, a bow-and-arrow and other silly things. 

Pi Delta Phi's photo portrays a lynching, but it's not a racial lynching. The photo shows one brother on a horse with a noose around his neck while several in the crowd brandish rifles and three brothers are high in the tree holding the rope. A woman off to the side appears to be pregnant, so I guess this is supposed to represent a shotgun wedding. Offensive but not reprehensible, I guess.

Delta Delta Delta, a sorority, displayed the only Confederate symbols other than Lambda Chi's burial pall. The Tri-Delt members posed at the edge of a small pond and carried a variety of gear — fishing nets, a teddy bear, a dart board and a fishing pole. Two of the sisters held small Confederate battle flags. If there was a commentary or message to this, I can't discern it.

The 1970 Yackety Yack showed two fraternities posing as they hold a number in front of each brother. I didn't get it at first but then realized that draft numbers were assigned in 1969. They were all showing their draft numbers. Beta Theta Pi displayed their numbers without commentary, but Tau Epsilon Phi made the message clearer. The TEPs were all lined up with their numbers, waiting to get their heads chopped off by the executioner at the end of the line.

Northam has tried to wriggle out of the embarrassing spot he put himself in 35 years ago, but he may be forced out of politics by a foolish judgment from long ago. Most people are outraged or at least cringe at pictures like the ones from Northam's yearbook, but blackface has not always been so unacceptable. "Holiday Inn," one of the most memorable and beloved of Christmas movies (1942), includes a scene where Bing Crosby daubs on blackface makeup to do a Lincoln's birthday tribute in which blackfaced actors sing the praises of "Abraham." I still watch this movie, which is much better than the follow-up, "White Christmas," but I can no longer watch the blackface scene. I skip that cringe-worthy scene each time.

Whether you want to go into politics or not, it would be wise to think carefully about what a future generation will think of your humor and not just what the current audience thinks.