“But what is racist?,” NBC News host Megyn Kelly asked her co-hosts on Tuesday. “Back when I was a kid [blackface] was OK as long as you were dressing up as a character,” she added while discussing the “Halloween costume crackdown” at American universities. Oof. We’re not sure what is more inflammatory: the fact that Megyn Kelly, a national news anchor, can’t identify racism, or that she still doesn’t understand the problem with blackface.
Twitter was quick to check the 47-year-old former Fox News host:
That fact that four WHITE people are debating about how racist blackface is… pic.twitter.com/IxXVKCjaP6
— Sāvion (@SavionWright) October 23, 2018
Another wrote, “How can any adult not realize what’s offensive about black face and its origins? How can they not see that it was used to mock black people and make them seem less than human? With her education, she has to actively choose not to understand.”
But it didn’t end there. Later, a Buzzfeed reporter shared an email apology that Kelly sent out to her team at NBC following the on-air mishap. In the memo, she claims to have “never been a ‘pc’ kind of person” but that she now understands “the history of blackface in our culture is abhorrent.”
Read the full apology below:
https://twitter.com/remysmidt/status/1054823904521453568