She added, “Today’s 51-year-old me of course understands and is crushed by this mistake.”
Ms. Carroll, who became the newspaper’s editor in February 2018 after nearly 20 years at its sister publication The Arizona Republic, said she had dedicated much of her journalism career to increasing diversity in newsrooms and covering diverse communities.
“As journalists, we must hold ourselves accountable as we do others, and it is important to call myself out for this poor judgment,” she wrote.
Arizona State University also apologized for photograph.
“The photo in this student publication is a sad reminder that this kind of insensitivity was all too common in past decades,” the university said in a statement on Thursday. “Things are changing for the better, for which we at A.S.U. are grateful, but that doesn’t take away the possibility that the picture caused or will cause pain. For that we are sorry.”
Blackface has endured in American popular culture for more than 185 years, emerging in the early 1830s at minstrel shows and blackface performances in perverse portrayals of slaves by white people. Blackface survived the Civil War, the emancipation, both world wars and through the civil rights era. Even in recent decades, as shown by Mr. Northam’s yearbook and the USA Today review, the shameful pastime persists in American life.
The pages of the 1988-89 Arizona State University yearbook underscored the continued struggle by people of color in the United States at the time to gain equal footing with their white peers. A local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had opened on campus only the summer before, the yearbook noted.
“The ideal situation would be not to need special clubs, opportunities and scholarships for minority students to get ahead,” a founding member of the student N.A.A.C.P. group was quoted as saying in an article on Page 240. “We will continue to fight until the day that (minorities) are judged by their mental ability and skill, rather than their race.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/us/nicole-carroll-usa-today-blackface.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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