Justin Fairfax doesn’t seem to get it.
The national media has, by and large, moved on from the story in Virginia, which included not just the allegations against Fairfax but admissions by two prominent white Democratic politicians — Gov. Ralph Northam and state Attorney General Mark Herring — that they had put on blackface in their younger years to impersonate Michael Jackson and Kurtis Blow, respectively.
All of which makes what Fairfax did on Sunday that much more odd.
As the state legislature was preparing to close its session, Fairfax took to the state Senate floor and delivered a speech in which he sought to cast the allegations against him as part of the state’s broader — and dark — history on race relations.
„If we go backwards, and we rush to judgment and we allow for political lynchings without any due process, any facts, any evidence being heard, then I think we do a disservice to this very body in which we all serve,“ Fairfax said. „And I want to stand in this moment, in the truth, not only which has tested my constitution personally, but is testing the constitution of the commonwealth of Virginia and of the United States of America.“
But there was more. Much more. Here’s the key bit:
„I’ve heard much about anti-lynching on the floor of this very Senate, where people were not given any due process whatsoever, and we rue that.
