The former underperforming host complains that when she had one of those “necessary convos” about blackface, NBC said "F.U.! Cancelled!
www.gq.com
Megyn Kelly Is Mad That Robert Downey Jr. Has a Career Post-Blackface
The former underperforming daytime host complains that when she had one of those “necessary convos” about blackface, NBC said "F.U.! Cancelled!
BY
LUKE DARBY
January 23, 2020
Bruce Glikas
A year and a half ago,
Megyn Kelly lost her NBC morning segment,
Megyn Kelly Today. She got the boot after a segment with an all-white panel on racist Halloween costumes, when she opined that blackface used to be fine. "You do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was okay, as long as you were dressing up as a character," she said.
She went on, referring to Luann de Lesseps of
The Real Housewives of New Yorkwho put on blackface for a Diana Ross costume: "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. I thought, like, 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."
The segment had been dropping in the ratings since Kelly took over—
18 percentlower than when Al Roker was in the same time slot. She also struggled to connect with either viewers or the in-studio audience, as one particularly
cringe-inducing dance session with Hoda Kotb illustrated. Declaring that opposition to blackface was a new phenomenon might have been the right cover for the network to switch-up the lineup of the underperforming hour. After NBC cancelled its three-year contract with Kelly and she departed the show, ratings for the time slot
jumped 10 percent. She left with her full $69 million salary, despite departing halfway through it.
For her part, and despite keeping the full paycheck, Kelly still seems to think she was treated unfairly. Late Wednesday night, she tweeted out a link to an interview with
Robert Downey Jr., during which the actor told podcast host Joe Rogan that he doesn't regret wearing blackface in the 2008 movie
Tropic Thunder.
On one level, perhaps, it makes sense for Kelly to be frustrated about her ouster from NBC. Last year, political leaders like Canadian prime minister
Justin Trudeau and Virginia governor
Ralph Northam have both been exposed for dressing in blackface in the past, and neither of them were forced out. And Kelly said worse things while working for Fox News and never suffered professional repercussions for it, including getting hired at NBC. In 2015, when a Texas police officer slammed a black teenager in a swimsuit to the ground, Kelly said the girl
"was no saint." In response to an essay about Santa Claus, she wrongly declared, "Jesus was a white man, too. It's like we have, he's a historical figure that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa, I just want kids to know that." When former first lady Michelle Obama talked about dealing with everyday racism in a Tuskeegee University commencement speech, Kelly lamented that it was part of a
"culture of victimization" and that we were living in "Cupcake Nation." Which might be another way of describing a daytime host complaining about being let go from an underperforming show and still pulling in $69 million.
In the interview with Joe Rogan, Downey did say that he thought his role sparked a necessary conversation, though he qualified the claim: "I think that it’s never an excuse to do something that’s out of place and out of its time, but to me it blasted the cap on [the issue]." He added, "I think having a moral psychology is job one. Sometimes, you just gotta go, 'Yeah I effed up.' In my defense,
Tropic Thunder is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception." Downey said that he was originally very reluctant to take the role of an Australian method actor who was pretending to be black for a role. Though even his mother was "horrified," Downey said he ultimately accepted the part since it highlighted the "insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists."
This will probably not be the last we hear on the issue from Kelly. She's scheduled to appear on
Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday.
