Megyn Kelly
Photo: Mashable

NBC‘s Megyn Kelly was annihilated on social media today after the ‘Today’ anchor displayed yet another instance of tone deafness. This came when Kelly wondered what the big deal was behind the taboo and racist connotations between white people using blackface to enhance a halloween costume? In fact she tried to frame her ignorance with nonsensical thought provoking question of ‘what is racist?’

Via USA Today:

“Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person that puts on whiteface for Halloween,” she said. “And back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

Kelly then mused about a recent blackface controversy to expand on her stance.

“There was a controversy on ‘The Real Housewives of New York’ with Luann (de Lesseps). She dressed as Diana Ross, and she made her skin look darker than it really is. And people said that that was racist. And I don’t know!” she explained. “I thought like, who doesn’t love Diana Ross? She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day, and I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween.”

Here’s some of that social media reaction:

https://twitter.com/maximusmom22/status/1054756957020540928

Naivety is something that probably resides in all of us to some extent or another, and that’s okay in a sense. What’s not okay is actually trying to defend some nonsense by asking some asinine question like ‘but what is racism?’ to defend a point that is readily available by simply opening a book or by doing a quick good search.

Not that you’ll even need that in some certain sense, I mean I’m sure we all know what a stereotype is.

Well that’s exactly what blackface is pushing. A racist stereotype birthed out of one of the most racist times in our our Country’s history.

Via Vox:

Blackface is much more than just dark makeup used to enhance a costume.

Its American origins can be traced to minstrel shows. In the mid to late nineteenth century, white actors would routinely use black grease paint on their faces when depicting plantation slaves and free blacks on stage.

To be clear, these weren’t flattering representations. At all. Taking place against the backdrop of a society that systematically mistreated and dehumanized black people, they were mocking portrayals that reinforced the idea that African-Americans were inferior in every way.

The blackface caricatures that were staples of Minstrelsy (think: Mammy, Uncle Tom, Buck, and Jezebel) took a firm hold in the American imagination, and carried over into other mediums of entertainment.

Blackface has also been seen in Vaudeville Shows and on Broadway. Yes, black actors sometimes wore blackface, too, because white audiences didn’t want to see them on the stage without it.

We have blackface performances to thank for some of the cartoonish, dehumanizing tropes that still manage to make their way into American culture.

Beyond that, blackface and systematic social and political repression are so inextricably linked that, according to C. Vann Woodward’s history The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the very term “Jim Crow” — usually used as shorthand for rigid anti-black segregation laws in force between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement — derives from an 1832 blackface minstrel number by Thomas D. Rice.

There’s no way around it: this particular costume choice has a terrible track record.

But I’m sure this still isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense to some people out there and I’m not saying Megyn Kelly is one of them. I’m not even saying Megyn Kelly is a racist or a big for that matter. What she is though is racially ignorant to the matter. And if your still reading this and wondering what the big deal is about blackface well than you’re probably a racist or a bigot yourself.

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