That wearying American political ritual repeated itself once again during a circuslike week in Virginia that was thick with accusations and apologies. The governor and the attorney general admitted to wearing blackface in the 1980s; the lieutenant governor has been accused of sexual assault by two separate women; and the majority leader was revealed to be a top editor of a 1968 college yearbook whose pages included racial slurs and pictures of students in blackface.
But the chaos in Virginia spilled over the borders of the commonwealth, plunging Americans into an uncomfortable bout of national soul-searching on matters of wrongs and redemption. They flipped through tattered yearbooks. They thought about how Jesus might respond. They considered questions that went beyond one state’s gut-wrenching political scandal: When is it right to forgive, and when is an act unforgivable?
The now-infamous photograph on Gov. Ralph Northam’s page of his medical school yearbook — in which one man wore blackface and the other a Ku Klux Klan robe — has prompted plenty of reactions. There has been shock at seeing the national sin of racism on such stark display. There has been talk of youthful indiscretions and paying for behavior so egregious it cannot be swept away.
Some Americans have wondered about lesser failings of their own, particularly acts as a younger person that were stupid or cruel. Others recalled incidents they had witnessed — an ill-advised costume, an alcohol-impaired decision, a failure of judgment — but not necessarily condemned at the time. Many came to the conclusion they had nothing in their closets even close to slathering shoe polish on their faces or wearing a costume of the Klan and smiling into the camera.
The yearbook image being scrutinized in Virginia prompted Wayne Lomax, a minister who pastors a nondenominational church in Miami Gardens, Florida, to ponder the concept of forgiveness.
“I think all of our views on forgiveness change over time, particularly as we recognize our own mortality and moral failures,” said Lomax, who added that forgiving the governor does not mean believing that he should stay in office.
Joseph Werns, a computer programmer in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, said that after watching the events in Virginia, particularly Northam’s apology, he thought about his own family.
Up until five years ago, Werns would casually use homophobic slurs. “What are you, gay?” he recalled saying.
His older son, who is transgender, explained to him why those words were offensive, and Werns stopped.
“When my son came out, he sought to educate me, and that’s when I learned,” Werns said, adding that sometimes he slips up and uses the wrong pronouns, but corrects himself. “I might have thought I was being funny, but I wasn’t. I would hate to be judged on that person I was.”
Should change count for something, Americans wondered aloud, or does an earlier failing itself make any evolution of thinking and behavior moot? The answer was by no means agreed upon, particularly as people pondered a range of failings too disparate and different to be weighed one against the other.
For elected officials, though, a different truth held: They chose to place themselves on display, knowing that their pasts would be scoured and that their errors could be fodder for public discussion. The disappointment feels greater when it comes to those (rightly or wrongly) held up as leaders or role models; forgiveness seems harder to grant.
Stuart Clark, a 66-year-old retired teacher from Virginia Beach, Virginia, said he took into consideration the person’s position. Politicians, for instance, should be held to a higher standard than celebrities, he said. (Actor Liam Neeson said Tuesday he was “not a racist” after an interview in which he revealed that in the past he had hoped to kill a “black bastard” after a friend told him she had been raped by a black man.)
And timing matters, but it’s a sliding, shifting scale: There is no agreed-upon statute of limitations for a long-ago failing and people measure errors through their own benchmarks of time and memory. Someone who is a high school student might be given more leeway than someone earning an advanced degree or well into adulthood.
Shouldn’t Northam, many people asked, have been mature enough in medical school to know better than to allow the offensive photograph to be posted beside his name and image?
“He thought that was OK to put that photograph out to the public,” Clark said. “He was a grown man who made a conscious decision about something.”
Northam initially acknowledged that he was in the photograph and apologized, then reversed course and said he was sure it was not him, though he simultaneously acknowledged using shoe polish to darken his face for a Michael Jackson costume.
Sylvainia Preston, 60, a retired teacher living in Virginia Beach, said that the explosive week had resurfaced memories of her own, when she was in college and had taunted women who were trying to join her sorority.
“I regret that in my life,” she said, adding that the experience influences how she views others when they make mistakes. “What do you have to stand on when you know that you haven’t always been a saint all your life?”
The nation’s mood on forgiveness is by no means static. The tumult in Virginia brought up memories of other politicians’ scandals. MacRae O’Brien, 40, a school social worker in Alexandria, Virginia, who voted for Northam but believed he should resign, thought of the 1990s and President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, O’Brien believed Clinton deserved to stay in office.
The #MeToo movement has made her think differently about which politicians are deserving of redemption.
“I feel bad that I maybe assumed, like most people, that she was the one to be blamed,” she said. “And over the years I’ve placed more of my disappointment and blame on Bill Clinton.”
One distinction is clear: Forgiving politicians is not the same as trusting them.
“You can be forgiven, but you might not be qualified to be a leader,” said Nikki Louie, a 33-year-old homemaker living in Virginia Beach. “Forgiveness doesn’t equal trust.”
For her, physical transgressions like sexual assault or violence are more difficult to forgive than verbal ones. And for anyone to earn forgiveness, she said, they have to seek it and show that they deserve it with their behavior.
“If someone makes an off-color joke once,” she said, “OK, like everyone says stupid stuff. I can forgive what people say a little bit more. When it becomes a pattern of their reputation, then it’s a little harder.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.