Megyn Kelly’s colleagues at NBC are sparing her no criticism after she made some ill-informed and damaging comments about blackface on her Megyn Kelly Today show.
“You do get in trouble if you’re a white person who puts on Blackface on Halloween or a Black person who puts on white face for Halloween,” she said during a conversation about dressing up for Halloween. “Back when I was a kid, that was OK as long as you were dressing up as a character.”
Of course the backlash was swift and immediate and Kelly immediately went into apology mode but it was too little too late and her colleagues at NBC weren’t impressed.
In fact, Al Roker had more than a little time on his hands to call Kelly out for her remarks, insisting that she “owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country.”
“While she apologized to the staff, she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country because this is a history going back to the 1830s. Minstrel shows to demean and denigrate a race wasn’t right,” Roker said.
Al Roker on Megyn Kelly’s blackface apology: “While she apologized to the staff, she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country because this is a history going back to the 1830s. Minstrel shows to demean and denigrate a race wasn’t right.” pic.twitter.com/nt7YhCRU18
Another colleague, Craig Melvin, pointed out that “Jim Crow,” the term used to describe the racist laws that kept the country segregated, came from a minstrel show in the 80s.
“The fact is a lot of folks don’t realize that Jim Crow, short hand for the racist laws that existed in this country for much of the last century, especially in the deep south, the term Jim Crow came from a minstrel show in the 1830s,” Melvin said. “It was an opportunity for us to learn more about blackface, but I think a lot of people knew about blackface before yesterday.”
And honestly, Kelly should have known way better. As such a prominent figure in news and on television, her statements were alarming at best and dangerous at worst. This isn’t the first Halloween where blackface as a costume has been widely discussed and criticized, and it won’t be the last one either apparently, since people like Megyn Kelly apparently think it’s still okay to voice that it is “okay” to mock black people…as long as you’re in costume.
