It wasn’t that anybody had told young Ralph Northam about the glorious Virginia Minstrels, the four men whose blackface act caused a foundational sensation in the 1840s; or how the Virginia Minstrels were but one of an endless parade of acts that delighted white audiences — with songs, dances, skits and more — on both sides of the Atlantic for most of a century. The governor wasn’t arguing that his young self came to see that blackface was wrong because he had learned how minstrelsy wasn’t some cultural niche but was once America’s popular culture and how that popularity helped cement the nation’s perception of black people as hideous and stupid and freakish and dumb and lusty and unworthy of more than torture, exploitation, derision, oppression, neglect and extermination.

The governor didn’t say that he’s ashamed now for having partaken in a 19th-century American blackface tradition that’s extended into the 21st — for Halloween, at frat parties, in the nostalgic costuming philosophy defended by a former morning-show host.

Nope. That’s not how Mr. Northam knows it just couldn’t have been him grinning alongside the person in the K.K.K. outfit. He knows — having taken a day to reflect on this — because to go full blackface, like in that picture? Oh man. Do you know how hard it is to get that stuff off? This is why he put only some shoe polish on his face. (Most blackface minstrels used the purer burned cork — and sometimes a greasy base.)

For now, any proof of that Michael Jackson costume resides only in the governor’s memory, as it might in other people’s memories that he was any kind of dancer at all. We might never see how much shoe polish is “a little bit” of shoe polish.

And yet the introduction of process into this defense of his struck me as, I don’t know, strange. The process here matters. Mr. Northam seems to have applied the polish with a prior awareness of what a pain it is to remove, not with any pre-emptive care. It was as if he was speaking from experience. The nightmare wasn’t blackface’s uncomfortable, immoral connection of him to an American ancestry. It was the tedious expunging of the blackness.

Nearly everything Mr. Northam said on Saturday seemed sincere. We’re at a point where a politician’s acknowledging even an unwitting participation in racism seems radically honest. So does welcoming his residents basically to ask him anything about the photo as part of some conversation about racism. And yet it all made sense only as farce — of race, of memory (just the day before he appeared in a rueful statement acknowledging it was him). The idea that a Michael Jackson costume would need shoe polish to read as “Michael Jackson” seems simultaneously to misread the racial tragedy of Michael Jackson and to practice upon him some very classic blackface-minstrel critique that puts him in his racial place — as a puppet for some white dude.