Megyn Kelly in Blackface

Grab a tasty beverage and head to your “man caves” or your “she sheds”. Put on your MAGA hats or your ANTIFA masks. Get ready — because I’m about to piss you off.

Megyn Kelly was right.

Well… she wasn’t exactly right… but that’s more because of HOW she said what she said rather than WHAT she said. What she meant was correct. She just didn’t say it very well. Either way, I think it’s a discussion worth having… so dig in with a cozy blanket or man-spread out in a comfy leather chair. I’m about to do some man-splanin’ for her.

Everyone knows that black-face hasn’t been acceptable for a very long time. I’m 50 and it hasn’t been cool in my lifetime, so Megyn was probably a bit off when she said it had the green light during her childhood. But she wasn’t exactly talking about the Al Jolson kind of black-face that outraged Americans are picturing when they hear the term. She was talking about a 10 year old kid dressing up as Prince or Michael Jackson and using grease pencil to darken his exposed skin.

I can understand why she was called out for what she said. We live in the era when sound bites have displaced real true discussion. We like to put people in a box. He’s a liberal. She’s black. He’s gay. She drives an electric vehicle. If we put together enough of those things, we can build an entire profile for a person without even knowing them… and that, somehow, gives us comfort. “He’s a black, gay, liberal, who drives an electric car… so he must have voted for Hillary Clinton and he wants to give my money to some illegal Mexicans. I hate him”.

Except… none of those extrapolations have any basis in fact. It’s not like the people making these assumptions are doing so because they put together a scientific blind study and the plotted “S curve” shows a racism trap in the compiled data. That’d be hard… and “boxes” aren’t about hard. They’re about “easy”.

Tribalism is easy and assumptions are easy. Analyzing is not easy. Discerning intent is not easy. “Zero-tolerance” is an “easy button” that people can hit so that they don’t have to get their hands dirty with the whole discernment thing. That’s where we’re at when it comes down to even a kid’s Halloween costume these days.

When I was a kid, if we were lazy, we’d put on some of our parents’ old clothes, tie a handkerchief around a stick, throw some dirt on our faces and call ourselves “a hobo”. I don’t know if kids do that anymore. The lazy man’s costume seems to be a dark hoodie and a plastic mask these days… but I could see where the hobo concept might be demeaning to homeless folks. The glamour of “riding the rails” is probably long ago passed. Should we be upset if a straight kid dresses up as Olympic hero Adam Rippon, though? What if a little girl wants to be Batman…? Does that mean that we need legislation to keep Batman out of the bathroom of his choosing?

When she made her statement, Ms. Kelly forgot to go into depth. She forgot to say that “intent” matters (as does, to some extent, execution). If a white kid idolizes Prince because of his astronomical talent and she darkens her skin with grease pencil in order to complete the transformation (see what I did there?), I’m not sure that we should be attacking that any more than we should if a straight kid who idolizes Rippon were to dress in his infamous (and iconic?) Oscars red carpet black tie ensemble. We want to ENCOURAGE a world where those lines are non-existent… but a white kid dressed all in purple might get mistaken for the Bacchus Parade’s infamous “Captain Purple” celebrating Mardi Gras. Execution is important.

Now, if a kid were to put on Al Jolson style black-face and head out for candy saying that they were a slave with their buddy following them dressed as a slave master… that would be absolutely unacceptable. If a straight kid was to dress in a leather harness and say, with a flamboyant lisp, “Trick or treat… or something else” at each door, that would be hellaciously offensive. If a girl dresses as Christine Blasey Ford in order to recognize the Stanford professor’s courage, that’s great (whether we agree with her accusations or not) but if a different kid dresses as Justice Kavanaugh’s accuser and adds a pair of hands wrapped around her neck… that’s tasteless and wouldn’t get a KitKat from me. If an adult goes to a costume party wearing the same persona with a sign that says “I deserved to get beaten. Kavanaugh for President.”, well… that goes miles into the realm of negative intent and it is intolerable.

If the intent is to make fun of someone, hurt their feelings, or demean them in some way, then we need to stand strong against that with every ounce of our being. Intent matters.

If I take this deeper, it is an indication that we are abdicating our right to thought. Because it is too hard to discern intent, we fall back on zero tolerance and the mores of our tribe. If we self-identify with the Trumpians, we might say that this is another example of the liberals trying to take away our rights. If we self-identify with “The Woke”, we might immediately say that this is just more racist white appropriation of black culture. THAT is where our disconnect lives; in our desire to hit the easy button by leaning into our tribal allegiances. In reality, though, it’s all really just kids being kids in a different time… but teaching moments are lost without the Socratic “teaching” part.

A Facebook friend, far more learned than I, recently said that the middle majority keeps their mouths shut because we are the most vilified group in America. In an unstable world, people seek stability… and the way they increasingly do that is to “pick a side”. They do so even if the tribal vision goes against their individual interests at times. The certainty that they get from a black and white worldview is threatened by the uncertainty that we, the intellectuals, create with all of our crazy thinkin’ an’ analyzin’. Their very comfort is challenged by an alternative’s existence.

I think discussions are worth having, though.

That’s why this Megyn Kelly thing doesn’t quite pass the “smell test” with me. She’s a lawyer. She, better than anyone, should understand that intent matters… yet she didn’t say that. She didn’t really get particularly upscale with the discussion. She just let loose with a slightly tweaked version of “Make America Great Again’ and an allusion to those happy times when we all could dress in black-face.

If I were gonna over analyze, I might question whether this was a piece of performance art. Imagine the genius in making a statement about how we all abdicate our right to free thought by “tribing up”… through an action that makes people eschew the deeper discussion about intent and motivation in Trump’s America by handing free thought proxy to their tribes…? Wow! Perfect, crystalline, magnificent, a tour-de-force — but it wasn’t that. It was really no different than the kid at Shaw’s Market getting fired so that he can “collect” and play video games all afternoon. Her ratings sucked. She just re-upped her FOX bona fides.

I’m becoming increasingly cynical that we can ever bring this back from the brink. I have some remedies… but it’s gonna take hard work and I’m not sure that we’re ready for that. It’s gonna take us moving a couple steps back so that we can move forward. To quote Will McIvoy of “Newsroom” on why we USED TO BE great — “We aspired to intelligence. We didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didn’t scare so easily”.

“We didn’t scare so easily”…? It seems the scariest costume in town, now, is open dialogue… and that one threatens our tribes.

Boo!

Happy Halloween.

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