Today in “Things That Megyn Kelly Really Believes”: stop getting so worked up over blackface!
This is how Kelly started her Tuesday show: “I have to give you fair warning, I’m a little fired up over Halloween costumes.”
OK, at least she warned us! “Truly, political correctness has gone amok,” she added. She then turned to a panel of luminaries—Melissa Rivers, NBC’s Jacob Soboroff (who, in some perverse twist, is apparently being punished for his months of strong reporting on Trump’s family separation policy by being forced to be on Megyn Kelly’s panel), and Jenna Bush Hager—and the conversation took an even worse turn.
After Soboroff said that maybe people shouldn’t be racist on Halloween (good point!) Kelly jumped in:
But what is racist? 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. And back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.
OOOOOOOK. Also, nobody cares if black people dress in whiteface—well, scratch that, probably people like Megyn Kelly do!
That was just a warmup for this, though:
There was a controversy on The Real Housewives of New York with Luann. She dressed as Diana Ross and she made her skin look darker than it really is. And people said that was racist. And I don’t know! Who doesn’t love Diana Ross? She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day? I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween.
As a reminder, this is what Luann looked like:
All good according to Megyn Kelly!
Again, kudos to NBC News for putting this kind of thing on our television screens every single weekday.
Update, 3:44 p.m. ET: LOL, and now we get...the official apology, in the form of an email Kelly wrote to her colleagues.
“I realize now that such behavior is indeed wrong,” Kelly wrote, no doubt leading some people to wonder why it had taken her until she was 47 years old to figure such a basic thing out.
“I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person—but I understand that we do need to be more sensitive in this day and age,” Kelly added, though she might as well have written, “I still think this is a pile of bullshit but I want to make this story go away so whatever.”
“I’m honored to work with all of you every day,” Kelly concluded, to which a great many of the people receiving the email must surely have thought, “I wish I could say the same about you.”