Megyn Kelly did not appear on her NBC show “Megyn Kelly Today” on Thursday, two days after angering many with remarks about blackface.Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated Press
Megyn Kelly, the vaunted and very expensive new addition to NBC’s morning, is gone — for now, and maybe for good — after saying that she didn’t see the big deal about white people wearing blackface.
Who could have seen this coming, except for anyone who knew anything about her career?
Kelly went on hiatus from “Megyn Kelly Today” on Thursday, after a Tuesday segment defending white people for wearing dark-pigmented makeup in Halloween costumes — a practice that has a demeaning history going back to the minstrel shows of the 19th century.
To Kelly, this history was just a bummer, ruining an innocent good time. “What is racist?” she asked. “When I was a kid, that was O.K. as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.” (Sidebar: I’m a few years older than Megyn Kelly, and it wasn’t. It’s also very much beside the point in 2018.)
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It was jaw-dropping. It was not, however, anything new for Kelly and race — or, for that matter, holidays. In a December 2013 segment of her old Fox News show about racial depictions of Santa Claus, she told “all you kids watching at home” that Santa was definitely white. (She said the same about Jesus, which at minimum is historically debatable.)
This was hardly a career-ender at Fox News, where the “war on Christmas” and grievance over “political correctness” are built into the brand. Kelly also minimized reports of racist emails sent within the Ferguson, Mo., police department and, with other colleagues at Fox, sensationalized coverage of the fringe New Black Panther Party.
That history was easy enough to find for anyone who was, say, considering signing a reported $17 million annual check for a new TV host.
Now Kelly, like Roseanne Barr, who was fired by ABC over a racist tweet, may be on her way out. Which is telling, considering how she and Barr made their way in.
What brought Kelly to NBC may have been in part what brought “Roseanne” back to ABC — that dazed post-2016 state when media outlets, stunned by the election result, scrambled to make nice with Trump country.
Kelly seemed to be a way to court that audience without seeming to outright pander. She had clashed as a debate moderator with then-candidate Donald J. Trump, who dismissed her questioning as “blood coming out of her wherever.” But she also had a history as one of the most lacerating talons of the Fox News eagle, and might bring over viewers who saw NBC as the liberal enemy.
Whatever got her hired — displacing “Today’s Take,” the 9 a.m. show hosted by the black anchors Tamron Hall and Al Roker — it sure wasn’t an ability to be relaxed and conversational on morning TV, which she never demonstrated before “Megyn Kelly Today,” nor during it.
And it was precisely one of these chatty morning-show segments that may have done her in.
That may not be accidental. Both Kelly’s Santa and blackface comments came in off-the-cuff remarks in what seemed planned as “light” segments about holidays and celebrations — the sort of things that aren’t considered weighty news.
But holidays are precisely the stuff of people’s deepest cultural identity and fondest memories of home and family. That’s why the annual freakout over Starbucks cups is a go-to for conservative media.
And maybe that’s why these discussions can be more inadvertently revealing than people’s practiced responses to partisan issues. (Kelly has been more assiduously evenhanded on politics at NBC, while taking tough stances on the #MeToo movement, including the abuse accusations against the former “Today” host Matt Lauer.)
Kelly’s panel on Tuesday was all white, which was a problem in itself. But it may also be why Kelly felt so comfortable making what — to her, apparently — was an entirely innocuous comment, much as she saw her Santa remarks.
It is a pattern, and not an unfamiliar one. It’s the kind of remark that comes from people who don’t see themselves as racist. They just see themselves as, you know, normal. Regular. The default.
They grew up in a world where these normal, regular, default things were — well, they were just the way things were. (“Santa just is white,” Kelly said in 2013, as if saying the sun rose in the east.) And they don’t get why people are so upset and sensitive now about what they see as harmless.
It is, at heart, the reaction of people who didn’t have to think much about sharing the world with people different from them. They were never asked to learn much about those other people, or consider how their actions and speech and “harmless” entertainment might exclude or hurt them. Now people like Kelly are being asked to learn. And they’re puzzled, or irritated, or downright angry about it.
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Sometimes this feeling manifests itself in an offhand remark about Halloween. Sometimes it’s “Why should I have to say, ‘Happy holidays?’ ” Sometimes it’s tiki torches and “You will not replace us.” The degree is different. But it all comes back to: My thing used to be the main thing, the automatic thing, and now it’s not, and I don’t like it.
That’s the animating force of much of Fox News’s programming, like Tucker Carlson’s prime-time culture war. But NBC has a broader audience and a different staff. In a striking public display Wednesday, Roker said that Kelly “owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country” and the anchor Craig Melvin said her words were “racist and ignorant.”
It’s also possible that Kelly simply did not have good enough ratings to get away with this. It would not be the first time a TV network had done the right thing for the wrong reason.
NBC knew Kelly’s Fox résumé, after all. It should have known that, in 2013, with the support of Fox and its audience, she dismissed her “Santa is white” critics for making a big deal about an “offhand jest” and proving that “Fox News and yours truly are big targets.”
On Wednesday, with her colleagues condemning her, she apologized, her voice catching in her throat. “I have never been a P.C. person,” she said, “but I do understand the value of being sensitive to our history, particularly on race and ethnicity.”
She followed that with a segment featuring the PBS host Amy Holmes and the journalist Roland Martin on the history of blackface and the white beauty standard, defined, as Martin put it, as “a white, blue-eyed, blonde woman.” It was a remarkable 13 minutes of Kelly — white, blue-eyed, blonde — sitting mostly silent, getting a public lesson from two black guests on her own racial obliviousness and that of many white Americans.
I don’t pretend to read minds or hearts. Maybe Kelly truly sees this time that she said something wrong — as opposed to just unwise — and that she genuinely wants to learn, grow and change.
People can do this. They should perhaps not be paid $17 million a year to do it. Maybe, when it comes to matters as basic as this, the learning part should come first.
Source : https://www.nytimes.com
