This is an opinion column.

Don’t act surprised. Gov. Kay Ivey told you who she was, even if you weren’t paying attention.

In her first campaign ad in 2018, a strident, gray-haired accidental governor boasted of the closest thing she then had to a signature achievement — signing into law a bill to protect Confederate monuments in Alabama from “politically correct nonsense.”

"We can't change or erase our history, but here in Alabama, we know something Washington doesn't. To get where we're going means understanding where we've been."

No truer words may have been spoken in that whole campaign, even if they didn’t turn out the way the governor intended.

By the time you read this, Ivey’s latest revelation will have spread all over the world. The woman we elected governor once donned blackface in a skit for the Baptist Student Union at Auburn University.

Ivey had previously said she didn’t remember participating in any such thing. But a recording of a radio interview, uncovered this week, revealed otherwise.

Ivey’s chief of staff called black lawmakers to share her apologies and to promise that she’s a better person than she was 50 something years ago. In a video posted online, she expressed her remorse to the state.

OK, governor, but what about that law?

In Alabama, there are majority African American cities with parks featuring monuments to an insurrection against the United States — statues, plaques, busts and obelisks honoring the enslavement, torture and murder of those citizens' ancestors. Some of those cities, Birmingham chief among them, have said they don’t want to honor such a thing.

And the political correctness Ivey spoke about in her ad, that wasn’t the ACLU or other litigious DC do-gooders she was talking about.

It was black people. In Birmingham. In Alabama.

Montgomery has not given up its plantation mentality. White Republican lawmakers — over black Democrats’ objections — passed the monuments bill, and that lady who insists she’s different now put her ink on the paper.

That was two years ago.

This year, when Alabama lawmakers passed a virtual abortion ban in Alabama, Republican lawmakers included in its preamble a list of historical atrocities they consider similar or equal to abortion, including the Holocaust. State Sen. Rodger Smitherman begged his Republican colleagues, if they had to pass the bill, to at least add the transatlantic slave trade to those crimes against humanity.

They wouldn’t do it. Ivey put her signature on that bill, too.

We’ve all made mistakes and the longer we live the more we will incur. It matters less what any of us have done and more what we’ve learned. In Gov. Ivey’s case, it’s not her actions 50 years ago that damn her but what she’s done in the last two years.

Kay Ivey says that the woman who took the stage at Auburn isn’t who she is today, and that’s true.

Who she is today might be worse.

A student at Auburn, wearing blackface and overalls, yucking it up while picking up cigar butts on a stage, might not know any better, and arguably she couldn’t hurt anything but feelings.

But a woman who has witnessed Alabama’s history and had a lifetime to reflect upon it, and who, nonetheless, made preserving the lie of the Lost Cause a bragging right of her administration — she has real power.

Power over who benefits from government in Alabama and who doesn’t.

Power, when Alabama stubbornly refuses to expand Medicaid, over who lives.

Power, when a death warrant comes due at Holeman Prison, over who dies.

Power, in places like Birmingham, over whose story gets told — truth or lie — and whose is erased.

"We can't change or erase our history, ” Ivey said.

No, we can’t, governor. But you tried.

“To get where we're going means understanding where we've been,” she said last year.

Alabama’s greatest lesson is that ethical compromise for the sake of political expediency is a pretty path to certain ruin, and we are condemned to repeat that lesson until we learn it for good.

Now you say you can’t remember, governor, but somehow you took us to the same place we always end up.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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