Kelly apologizes for blackface comments
Megyn Kelly has been fearless in using her daily NBC morning program to call out her employer over its handling of sexual harassment allegations of fired “Today” co-anchor Matt Lauer.
But on Wednesday, it was Kelly who was getting a grilling from her own colleagues the day after major social media backlash over her Tuesday comments on “Megyn Kelly Today,” in which she questioned why the use of blackface on Halloween was inappropriate.
Kelly issued an email apology to colleagues later on Tuesday, saying she was wrong about the issue, adding that it was “a time for more understanding and love.”
NBC covered the flap on “NBC Nightly News” on Tuesday and again Wednesday on “Today” in a segment that was followed up with some harsh condemnation from two of the program’s African American co-hosts. Both of the taped segments contained clips of past racially insensitive remarks Kelly made when she was at Fox News, such as her insistence that Jesus Christ and Santa Claus are white.
But her comments on blackface, in which she said she failed to see what was racist about using it for a Halloween costume, has drawn the fiercest criticism yet. (”Back when I was a kid, that was OK as long as you were dressing up as like a character,” she said).
“The fact is while she apologized to the staff she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country,” longtime “Today” personality Al Roker said on the program. “This is a history, going back to the 1830s, minstrel shows to demean and denigrate a race, wasn’t right. I’m old enough to have lived through ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ where you had white people in blackface playing two black characters and it would just (be) magnifying the worst stereotypes about black people and that’s what the big problem is.”