Beyond College Campuses and Public Scandals, a Racist Tradition Lingers

Nina Yeboah was a freshman at Georgia State University in 2004 when she heard about the pair of white fraternity brothers who had shown up at a “Straight Outta Compton” party in blackface.

Fifteen years later, she said, it still feels traumatic to talk about what would become a moment of embarrassment and pain on the Atlanta campus. As a student of color, said Ms. Yeboah, now a writer, “it kind of wakes you up to what racism is like in the community that you’re in.”

It has been a week of waking up.

What first appeared as a grotesque act of racist clowning on the part of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia turned out not to be an aberration at his medical school in the early 1980s. A confession from Mark Herring, the state’s attorney general, revealed that blackface was common at other Virginia schools at the time as well.