Reflections 5

Megyn Kelly, a host on an NBC morning programme, said on air, in a panel of exclusively white people, that she didn’t understand why children couldn’t wear blackface as part of their Halloween costumes. In other words, it is ok for a white person to paint their face black to pretend they are a black person. Her remark was interpreted as racist all over the States and widely criticised. She is likely to lose her job over this (albeit not without a multimillion-dollar compensation).

If you do not know the context, you could probably see nothing racist in painting your face to pretend you’re someone else. But it’s enough to look at the relevant Wikipedia page to see what connotations ‘blackface’ has in order to understand the outrage the comment triggered among black Americans. (“Blackface is a form of theatrical make-up used predominantly by non-black performers to represent a caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of racial stereotypes”)

On a few cable channels that covered this story, white hosts consistently turned to their black colleagues to ask for comment. As if white people don’t know if a remark is racist? And it turns out they were right. We don’t. As one of them explained – you don’t ask the attacker if what he did hurts the victim, you ask the victim. So you should ask a person of colour if a comment was racist, you should ask a gay person if someone’s words felt homophobic and you should ask a Jew whether a joke sounds antisemitic. Only the attacked have the right sensitivity to decide whether some words are harmless or offensive. It is not for Harvey Weinstein to decide if the women he invited to his hotel rooms under false pretences felt sexually abused. We have to ask the women!

We live in a relatively homogenic community of white Poles, just like Megyn Kelly probably lived in a white middle-class environment where casual racism goes undetected or seems innocent enough. What if, just like her, we lack the sensitivity necessary to see when we offend others? Especially others we are not very familiar with.