“Painting oneself hearkened back to traditional popular celebrations and to paint oneself as a Black person, given American realities at the time, was to throw reason to the winds,” the historian David Roediger wrote in his 1991 book, “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.” He notes later that blackface was a form that “implicitly rested on the idea that Black culture and Black people existed only insofar as they were edifying for whites and that claims to ‘authentic’ blackness could be put on and washed off at will.”

In other words, blackface is so thoroughly associated with the worst of American racism that we should expect immediate condemnation of politicians and public figures who have any association with it, even if it’s a decades-old offense.

But this high bar for sanction — essentially a “pics or it didn’t happen” standard for racism — is also a problem. It treats expressions of racist contempt or mockery as the most egregious forms of racism, when that distinction should belong to the promotion of racist policies and ideas. King should have been punished as far back as 2006 when, at a rally in Las Vegas, he smeared undocumented immigrants as killers responsible for a “slow-motion holocaust” of American lives. Likewise, there should have been broad, bipartisan outrage over revelations that a voter identification law passed by North Carolina Republicans in 2013 targeted the state’s black voters with “surgical precision” in order to suppress the vote. Jeff Sessions’s tenure as attorney general — during which, among other abdications of his duty to protect Americans’ civil rights, he directed the Department of Justice to curb its investigations of abusive and racially discriminatory police departments — should have been a national scandal.

If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.

American society is still structured by color. Your health, your wealth — your ability to live and act freely — still turns to a large degree on whether you were born white. Like Ertel, Northam should resign. Virginia’s history with racism is too fraught to allow this association with blackface (to say nothing of the Ku Klux Klan imagery) to stand unaddressed. But any collective reckoning with racism that comes out of this moment must go beyond the personal and offensive to the unequal depths. We should care about racist imagery, but we should care even more about our still-segregated society.