‘What is racist? You truly do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as like a character.’
That’s NBC host Megyn Kelly suggesting during her show on Tuesday perhaps we’ve become too sensitive when it comes to race.
Kelly, who emerged as a major force in the “Santa is white” movement, pondered the loaded ‘what is racist?’ topic with her all-white panel of Melissa Rivers, Jenna Bush Hager and Jacob Soboroff.
The trio didn’t exactly offer much pushback, but, to their credit, they were hesitant to agree with Kelly when she brought up how a member of “The Real Housewives of New York” cast used dark makeup to dress as Diana Ross and later had to apologize for it.
“People said that was racist and I don’t know, I felt like, who doesn’t love Diana Ross?” Kelly said. “She wanted to look like Diana Ross for one day. I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween.”
Soboroff of NBC News, responded with, “it sounds a little racist to me,” while Bush Hager, agreed that, yes, that impersonation did seem inappropriate.
Rivers, for her part, tried to tiptoe around the topic, saying “If you think it’s offensive, it probably is. Whatever happened to manners and polite society?”
Kelly, who says she was just “being normal people,” knew she’d be getting hammered. “I can’t keep up with the number of people that we’re offending.”
Watch the clip here:
Megyn Kelly wonders what the big deal is about blackface pic.twitter.com/07yvYDuAYe
— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) October 23, 2018
Kelly was right about one thing, yes, people were, indeed, offended. Her name quickly rose to the top of Twitter’s trending list as the hits piled up:
I gotta say, Megyn Kelly looks pretty good for someone born in 1907 https://t.co/5843CjnOb8
— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) October 23, 2018
Breaking News: Megyn Kelly is still trash.#TuesdayThoughts pic.twitter.com/pUgM39WdvB
— Jackie 🌊🌊🌊 (@LiberalMmama) October 23, 2018
Because @megynkelly: minstrelsy is the basis for the coining of the term “Jim Crow” laws which served to humiliate & target Black Americans. Because caricaturing another race perpetuates the dehumanization of POC who are being killed & jailed at a disproportionate rate in the US https://t.co/xk2RAr2Kxq
— Padma Lakshmi (@PadmaLakshmi) October 23, 2018
For Kelly and those not quite getting why blackface is offensive, here’s David Leonard, chair of Washington State University’s department of critical culture, gender, and race studies, explaining it in an essay for the Huffington Post.
‘Blackface is part of a history of dehumanization, of denied citizenship, and of efforts to excuse and justify state violence. From lynchings to mass incarceration, whites have utilized blackface (and the resulting dehumanization) as part of its moral and legal justification for violence. It is time to stop with the dismissive arguments those that describe these offensive acts as pranks, ignorance and youthful indiscretions. Blackface is never a neutral form of entertainment, but an incredibly loaded site for the production of damaging stereotypes…the same stereotypes that undergird individual and state violence, American racism, and a centuries worth of injustice.’
Kelly later apologized.
“One of the wonderful things about my job is that I get the chance to express and hear a lot of opinions,” she wrote in a memo cited in the Hollywood Reporter. “Today is one of those days where listening carefully to other points of view, including from friends and colleagues, is leading me to rethink my own views.”
But just in case there’s still any confusion, here’s a flowchart that might come in handy when Kelly goes shopping for her next costume: