As seen in the upcoming Point Break 2: Break Harder.
“Wait, am I George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush?”
Stranger
Primarily buzzwords used by people who don’t really know what it is, either, IME.
My heritage is primarily Scandinavian with some Native American mixed in; no doubt somebody would accuse me of “cultural appropriation” if I’m seen celebrating the NA part.
In an era where you can just type the word into Google and pull up the Wikipedia article, this level of willful ignorance annoys me.
These concepts aren’t even all that hard. It just seems people want to be dismissive of legitimate academic concepts. Why? Isn’t this supposed to be an intellectual board by people who want to fight ignorance?
In your case: do you actually retain any of your Native American culture? Do you have cultural practices that were passed down from your ancestry? If not, would you actually bother to find out what is and isn’t acceptable to those who do still have that culture?
I mean, if you’re celebrating a culture, then you’re obviously going to want to do things that culture approves of, right? You’re not going to want to do things they find offensive: that would be the opposite of celebrating them.
Honestly, once I learned the concept existed, the whole thing seemed common sense. Once I knew that there were Native Americans offended by certain things, of course I wouldn’t want to do them. It’s the same as not doing something my friend hates in order to celebrate his birthday.
In fact, it seems that most of these “liberal” concepts that people freak out about make perfect (common) sense if you think about them for a bit, and ignore those who want to ridicule the concept. Sure, sometimes the application is wrong, but the concepts are obvious in hindsight.
This is just…beautiful.
You sir, are a poet.
The reason they are canning her (though probably paying out her contract) is ratings. Hers haven’t been good. And the ‘Today family’ is always at each other’s throats behind the scenes from everything I’ve ever read, so the fact that they are turning on her publicly is also a complete non-surprise. It’s ‘colleagues’ who already hate her, whether because she’s such a bad person, or they got bumped to make room for her (Al Roker), or she ‘does’t belong’. Again it’s not as if these people don’t routinely turn on each other, lots of big ego’s and big resentments go with success like that. Anyway everyone besides Lack (the boss) has been against or now turned against her, her ratings are not good, he’s dumping her. Plus, he can try to wash some of the stink of the Lauer etc problems off of NBC, even though those cases were unrelated.
And obviously Megyn Kelly is not a victim in the same relative sense as somebody who gets kicked out of a job they really need to pay the bills, with no tens of millions. And she works in the entertainment business (basically, it’s not really ‘journalism’ even among the NBC personalities people here might be more likely to watch). If the public doesn’t like you that much, you get fired. That’s one reason the contract is probably written so NBC can’t dress up her comments as violating some behavior clause, otherwise they could get out of any contract with any remotely controversial on air personality whose ratings didn’t pan out. So they’ll have to pay. But, they can slot much cheaper people back in and probably get higher ratings in that hour.
IOW there is no need to establish some (pseudo) moral failing on Kelly’s part by making those remarks. They don’t have to be ‘wrong’ (in either traditional morality or some newer progressive morality). She didn’t have the ratings. She’s gone.
But if it was a situation where you really had to establish that what she said was morally wrong, that would be a way tougher argument to reasonably make IMO. She thinks people should discard the past and take a laid back attitude toward Halloween revelers painting their faces to be the color of the supposed character if that’s all they are doing and there’s no malice or disrespect. Others say no, the history is too heavy a weight and it (the appearance of whites dressing up as black including face paint) just can’t be accepted no matter what the intention or context. Seems to me like a disagreement people should not be demonized over.
Anyway nobody has a right to a $23mil/yr TV slot, even if they were producing good ratings (though if they were, NBC would have found a way to smooth it over I believe, and it would have also helped if she ‘belonged’ more at NBC too, like Joy Reid). But people are also going overboard in accusations against her character based on what she actually said, IMO. As is standard now in these kerfuffles.
I don’t but my sisters have. It does bother me that some idiots would play the “cultural appropriation” card on them simply for wearing traditional garb.
Nope. It’s fairly easy. She’s pushing for going back to a time when the concerns of black people were ignored. It is only white-centered thinking that leads to the idea that painting your skin black as a costume was not offensive in the 1980s, because fewer white people were aware of what black people thought.
In fact, as a general rule, an argument that we should go back to the past when racism was a bigger problem is a shitty thing to argue. Race relations can only improve going forward, not backward.
There’s also the issue of a white person lecturing black people on what they should find acceptable when it comes to race issues. She wasn’t arguing, as there was no one there to rebut her. She was full on lecturing. This wasn’t in the context of a debate where then someone on the other side would come in and give the arguments why this wasn’t acceptable.
If it were as you describe, then it might not have been as big a deal–though note that it’s her show, so the implication is always that the host is right. So the discussion would have needed to be with her staying neutral and having people argue both sides for it to really be just debate.
Now, if you want to argue it shouldn’t have been a full-on firing offense, just a situation where she apologized and learned, then I can agree with that–if this was the only case. That’s where the rest comes in.
And, yes, people are probably right that NBC would not have fired her if not for her viewing numbers. NBC is a business, and they were looking for a reason. But that doesn’t negate that what she said was wrong. It doesn’t make it not racist. It’s just that I have no reason to expect NBC to take a moral stand.
I was reminded of this case back when Disney fired Roseanne Bar and then James Gunn. They’ve also fired another guy at Marvel because people were harassing him online and he didn’t just keep quiet. It’s not about morality. It’s about what the company thinks will lose them the least amount of money (or even gain them money).
But this has nothing to do with whether or not what Megyn Kelly did was morally wrong. It definitely was. Don’t lecture black people about what is actually racist or tell society we need to go back to when we ignored the concerns of minorities.
It was offensive even in the 1980s, and known to be offensive nationally. The sitcom “Gimme A Break” had an episode where the character that (very young) Joey Lawrence played was to perform for Nell’s church and the youngest daughter played a trick on him and convinced him to perform the song in blackface. On an episode of “Designing Women” in 1989, the Sugarbaker bunch performs a Supremes song in a talent show, and Delta Burke’s Suzanne appears onstage in brown face makeup, which was played for laughs as the character being clueless enough not to realize how offensive it was.
Megyn Kelly has no excuse.
I have an inkling that Douche L’Orange will say, “Megan Kelly is now and forever my new campaign manager!”
Megyn Kelly is clearly living in the early 'Eighties, and I’m not entirely certain that she is not an ‘American’, if you know what I mean. She isn’t as blatant about it as Hope Hicks (who is almost certainly a KGB/GRU plant), but then, if she’s actually good at her job then you would doubt her.
Stranger
it is an academic concept. It is removed from reality and used as a trump (small t) card to win arguments. In real life people borrow from cultures all the time. Should no one be allowed to eat chocolate because it was once a sacred drink? If non-Japanese can’t dress as Geishas is it OK that Japanese people can dress like James Dean? Did rappers co-opt Timberland boots from white kids? Was it OK that Native Americans used horses? Can the Irish eat the New World potato? For that matter, is it OK that white Trustifarians get to bleat about shit that doesn’t affect them?
Surely there is some middle ground between being sensitive to other peoples’ feelings and the blunt obect of labeling things Cultural Appropriation.
I said that showing her to be morally in the wrong (by any coherent rules of morality) would be hard, and your failure just above proves the point I believe.
Except maybe the last part which is just confusing." It’s nothing to do with her with whether what Megyn Kelly did was morally wrong. It definitely was". Is there supposed to be a ‘but’ after that? Why do you go on and on with the usual over-moralizing of differences in opinion about racial issues, but then stick in ‘it has nothing do with that’? That’s just puzzling.
The rest is mainly just projecting stuff on what she actually said (‘wants to go back a more racist time’ by what proof is today’s society less racist than 1980’s? or more relevantly that she thinks so or everyone has to think so, it’s arguable that race relations haven’t advanced that dramatically since then, AFAIK some of the left claim race relations haven’t advanced at all since long before that…or she’s ‘lecturing’, which is a common but meaningless bust on people expressing opinions, etc).
Again, no reason for NBC to keep her if she has bad ratings. But if this kind of attack was used to ruin the career of an ordinary person who said stuff like what she did that would be morally wrong IMO.
Hey, feel free to ruin my career by handing me 69 million dollars with no strings attached and I no longer have to show up to work every day.
Might have to settle for Lrrrgzzzzltttsi the drow…
As it happens, Al Roker appeared on TV yesterday as Doc Brown, from Back To The Future. He wore a ridiculous wig and a costume but received criticism for the choice of costume. He explained, though, on Twitter that he didn’t lighten his skin and therefore it was OK. (And I agree with him.)
How the hell is this even a story? “20 people in a country with 350 million in it stupidly criticize a halloween costume”
Ridiculous.
He’s Doc Brown-Brown! 
Anyone else remember that sitcom character who dressed as Shirley Temple-Black?
Needs more random punctuation to be authentic. Lr’ř’rğžżźz’lttts’ï maybe?
Update:
NBC finalizes Megyn Kelly separation agreement: she will receive payment in full for the remaining 3 years in her contract, about $30 million. She will no longer be appearing on NBC. She can seek other television work. Pretty cushy deal, enough to support maybe 10 foreign bureaus.
Her ratings were middling at the end. Since she left, the audience for 3rd hour of the Today show rose 21%.
Some think that when Kelly said, “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 O.K., as long as you were dressing up as a character,” she wasn’t really being racist. Nor was it racist when she said, “For all of you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” according to this view. Following up with the historically inaccurate, “Jesus was a white man, too”? Definitely not the words of a bigot. We’re supposed to believe that these things just slip out at times.
Over at Fox News, Kelly did not practice racial demagoguery when she ran 45 separate segments on the New Black Panther Party, a hate group with a couple of thousand members that has no ties to the original Black Panther Party. She apparently wasn’t sure whether getting a job was valued “in the black communities, in the inner cities” and made broadsides against African American culture which she characterized as having a “Thug mentality”.
Kelly apologists need not worry: I don’t play the gotcha game. I just call balls and strikes.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/01/11/us/ap-us-nbc-megyn-kelly.html