Who Went to Med School with Northam? How Inertia in the Face of Racism Continues to Hold Medicine Back

In 1984, on Ralph Northam’s yearbook page at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), appeared two men dressed respectively in Blackface and in a Ku Klux Klan hood. It is unclear whether these were Halloween costumes or a real life insight into what parody “Black Culture Parties” might have been like, as also depicted in the comedy “ Dear White People.” On Twitter, many asked the governor: “Are you in Blackface, or the Klansman?” Others asked “Is this really you?”, “Where did they get such a believable KKK hood as medical students?” and, perhaps most importantly, “Who let this fly by?”

This yearbook, a student-led publication, was eventually banned in 2014 because four medical students had posed in Confederate garb, a sign agreed upon by most of society as a symbol of racism. In order for this publication to have survived 29 years after the Blackface-KKK juxtaposition appeared in it, several classes of medical students must have turned a blind eye to this abhorrent depiction of racism: a sort of silent majority. They may have been disappointed by, unhappy or uncomfortable with the publication of that photo in their yearbook, but they certainly didn’t raise hell about it. This kind of inertia, whether or not Northam’s then classmates stood against racism personally…