I Genuinely Feel Sorry For Meghan Kelly

Call me what you like, but I feel sorry for Megyn Kelly. I feel sorry for a lot of white people who are losing their positions, reputations, and livelihoods because they do not know in advance what is appropriate to say or not say, do or not do. People like Paula Deen and Roseanne Barr. People like John “Papa John“ Schnatter. People like the Starbucks barista who called the police on those two black guys earlier this year. People like the blonde woman who wouldn’t let the man into his own apartment building or the white lady who called the cops on the nine-year-old boy for brushing his book bag against her rump. They say things and do things that they think are reasonable or rational or benignly humorous, and then BOOM! – a ton of bricks falls on them and their whole world is decimated.

I also understand how so many white people feel that this is unfair, and in many ways I agree with them. If I would ask most of them what was unfair about it, they would probably talk about the mercilessness of “political correctness“, and people not being able to take a joke or thinking that everything is about race all the doggone time now. Personally, I think they would have a point; but they wouldn’t have the origin of the point.

If I were talking with them, I would very quietly try to turn their attention away from the point of their argument to the origin of how this all got to this point. Megyn Kelly had her life changed out of nowhere because, for about 250 years, somewhere between 12 to 15 million West Africans had their lives changed out of nowhere. They were asleep in their tents or in their huts or outside under the stars in when some people – some of them likely the forbears of Megyn Kelly – swept in and took them from their homeland by force, never to return. I’m going to resist going into the harrowing and emotional element of the beatings, the cruelties, the rapes, the denigrations and all that. I don’t wanna talk about it and you don’t wanna hear it. And that friends, is the problem.

By now, white folks eyeballs are rolling high up into the heads of the readers of this. “Oh no - he’s bringing up THIS sh— again?” (You were with me when I said I feel sorry for Megyn Kelly, so just hang in there with me a little longer...) Yes, I’m bringing up THIS sh— again. I am bringing it up because it keeps tripping us up. So many white folks don’t know what “the big deal is” because they don’t know what the deal is at all.

The deal is is that this nation has not come to a common, shared understanding of the American slave experience because we have never fully unpacked it and worked through it, and since we have not, we do not have a common understanding of how terrible it was and how much it still affects our nation in adverse ways even today. Megyn Kelly knew not to dress up as Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun, for Halloween because like everyone else, she knows how horrible that history was and how poignant and relevant it remains today. She knows this because it is a shared history that has been thoroughly unpacked in our schools and in our popular culture. Slavery and American racism have not and so white people keep tripping over their own lips and their own prejudices. Just like Megyn Kelly, black people also don’t know where big trouble begins. That black kid that got shot at with a shotgun by a white man after he ran his doorbell asking for directions didn’t know. Laquan McDonald didn’t know when he was crossing the street high on drugs and got shot 16 times. Trevon Martin didn’t know. The two black guys waiting to meet a man for meeting at Starbucks without buying coffee didn’t know. Nobody knows why things are happening now because no one fully knows what happened in the past.

You can blow this post off and just say it’s some more of that “woe-is-me-I’m-a-black-victim-mess” if you like, but that won’t stop the next white person from losing their job or their future over an errant word or Facebook post or a casually expressed opinion in front of the wrong people or camera phone. White folks will continue to lose millions of dollars for pretty much nothing and black people will continue to lose their lives for pretty much nothing.

After it is all said and done, America is going to have to sit down and sort through this ugly history of ours, painful though it may be, so that we can all know what that history was, all know how painful it was, and all know how devastating it was and continues to be for black people and how damning It continues to be for whites even now, so that we can see and know it for what it is, forgive and be forgiven, make the thing right, and all go on with our lives in peace and mutual respect for one another.

Then, we will all be able crack a joke and laugh, and we will all know what jokes not to crack. That will be the day that black people will stop being the victims of oppression and the day whites will stop being slaves to shame and fear. On that day, we will all truly be free. And what a day that will be.