Megyn Kelly just couldn’t stay out of the renewed controversy surrounding blackface on television.
As shows like 30 Rock and Scrubs remove episodes from streaming services that feature characters in blackface—a practice that is objectively wrong despite being used for satirical purposes—and Jimmy Fallon apologizes for his two-decade old portrayal of Chris Rock on SNL, Kelly decided to weigh in on Twitter by once again defending her own blackface-related controversy from 2018.
“So it turns out that when Andy Lack said ‘there is no place on our air’ for my discussion of blackface, it was b/c NBC was already chalk-full of shows and major stars actually wearing blackface ... on the air ... at NBC,” Kelly tweeted, later correcting that tweet by adding, “Chock-full!”
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But the former Fox News host failed to mention the fact that the “discussion” of blackface that ultimately got her fired from NBC was an outright defense of racist Halloween costumes.
“But what is racist?” said the host on her morning show in October 2018. “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 white face.”
“That was OK when I was a kid, as long as you were dressing like a character,” she continued, using a white Real Housewife’s Diana Ross costume as an example. “I don’t see how that is racist on Halloween.”
The next morning, she opened her show by saying, “I want to begin with two words: ‘I’m sorry.’ Sometimes I talk and sometimes I listen, and yesterday I learned. I learned that given the history of blackface being used in awful ways by racists in this country, it is not OK for that to be part of any costume, Halloween or otherwise.” (She was unaware of the history of blackface the day prior?)
Kelly’s tweet on Thursday reveals that she certainly still holds a grudge against soon-to-be-former NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, who was responsible for canceling her short-lived show on that network. But perhaps more importantly, it shows that she still doesn’t think there was all that much wrong with her “discussion” about blackface.
