On Mark Sanford, Charles Ramsey, and Race & Redemption

You can't run away from your past.

But what your past means to you, and for you, isn't the same for everyone. Two key figures in this past week's news stories make this abundantly clear: Mark Sanford and Charles Ramsey.

On Tuesday, Sanford (R) won a special election in South Carolina's First Congressional District and took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He had formerly served as governor of South Carolina until a ridiculous scandal (as in, his behavior was ridiculous, not as in the incident was trivial and should be overlooked) in 2009. Sanford went missing for a week in June -- nobody, not even his Lieutenant governor, knew where he was! -- and it was quickly revealed (indeed, he held a press conference about it) that he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina who he called his "soul mate." His wife later filed for divorce and he was forced to resign first from his post as Chairman of the Republican Governor's Association. He also eventually reimbursed the state for taxpayer money that was used during his time in Argentina on a trade tour in South America. A measure to impeach him as governor failed in the state legislature and he served out his term until 2011. So in sum, the man cheated on his wife, admittedly using taxpayer money to partially fund (and his position as a figure of political power to pave the way for) a meeting with his mistress in Argentina, and went missing from his job, relinquishing his responsibilities as a governor, for a week in order to satisfy his own personal desire to be with his mistress, and still got elected to Congress as a figure of successful redemption.

Then there's Ramsey. On Monday, he and neighbor Angel Cordero broke down the door of the home in which Amanda Berry and her daughter, as well as Georgina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight had been held captive by Ariel Castro. Ramsey has since been turned into an internet meme, so I probably don't need to direct you to the video of his first interview or recount everything he did since Goggle can tell you all you need to know and more. In fact, besides being a hero for helping rescue these women (along with his neighbor Cordero, the police, and Berry herself who vocally reached out and alerted others to her situation), Google can now tell you that Ramsey has a history of domestic violence charges reaching back into the late 90s and early 2000s. So now he finds himself as the hero who was revealed to have a not so heroic past.

The temporal arrangements of these two men's stories are interesting to me. In Sanford's case, his past was known beforehand and his newsworthy event redeemed him, apparently, from that past. In Ramsey's case, he was deemed a hero, and then after this news of his praiseworthy action folks made the point of making his past public, to reveal his domestic abuse from ten years ago. So for him, his actions become redemptive retrospectively.

I know that Ramsey's record was revealed legally and ethically via Freedom of Information Act request. I know that we ought to understand people in their full humanity and not put them up on pedestals for doing one good thing (even if it's really, really good). But what I can't help asking, is, what motivated the desire to know about Ramsey potentially having a criminal past? Why make that call to request that information? What kind of lesson are we supposed to learn here? And why does Ramsey's story become one of a man who was a hero but now is a man with a complicated past who managed to turn his life around, as if he learned some kind of lesson, while the story of Sanford is one of a down and out politician who overcame the odds and triumphantly returned to political power, redeemed and ready to govern? Why is Ramsey's story just a bit less linear and self-verifying than Sanford's? Why is his power relegated to the cultural capital of being an internet meme while Sanford's is transformed into state power?

I am suspicious that (the politics of) race and class have something to do with it. Just like that reporter in the video of Ramsey's first interview who absolutely had to end the interview after Ramsey very astutely made a not so inaccurate despite his joking tone observation about race in America, I am aware that this is the point in the conversation in which most folks will want to steer away from this comparison and say "No no no, race has nothing to do with these interesting juxtapositions. We don't want to talk about race." But what if we do?

What happens when we take seriously the thought that a public eye constructed (through generations of segregation and racism, both personal and structural -- which both still exist, by the way) as fairly whitewashed both (a) wants/needs to see a black hero figure as having a criminal and/or violent and/or morally reprehensible past and (b) wants/needs to see a fallen white political figure as a figure of redemption, rising triumphantly out of the ashes of his transgressions to oppose a black political leader ("For voters, his hawkish views on federal spending, his experience and his promise to fight President Obama outweighed any personal transgressions." -NYT)?

I have my thoughts on this. But I'll end this post here to simply suggest that conversation begins, conversation which takes these questions of race seriously as they consider the discourse around the trajectories of redemption in which Sanford and Ramsey find themselves. 

In the meantime, some recommended reading for consideration during this discussion: "An Open Letter to Charles Ramsey"