Joy Behar is in hot water. During a 2016 episode of The View, Behar revealed a photo of herself on Halloween when she was 29 years old. “I went as a beautiful African woman,” she revealed during the clip, which resurfaced on Twitter on Thursday, February 7.
Her cohost at the time Raven-Symoné perked up upon seeing the photo. “Joy, are you black? Are you my auntie, Joy?” the former Disney star asked. “Do you have tanning lotion on?”
“I had makeup that was a little bit darker than my skin – that’s my actual hair though,” Behar, now 76, answered.
After The Wrap media editor Jon Levine reposted the clip on Twitter, many fans started to compare her statements to those made by Megyn Kelly in October 2018 – comments Kelly lost her job over.
“Megyn Kelly was fired from her show for asking a hypothetical question about blackface. Joy Behar actually wore blackface, and admitted it, and showed a picture of it on TV, yet she still has her job,” one Twitter user wrote.
“Just a reminder that Megyn Kelly was fired for saying that blackface was acceptable when she was a kid (and not actually *participating* in blackface like all of these people.)” another said.
Kelly, 48, was fired from her job at NBC for asking about blackface on Halloween during a panel discussion on her show last fall. ”What is racist? Because 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,” she said during an episode of Megyn Kelly Today. “Back when I was a kid that was OK, as long as you were dressing like a character.”
She later apologized in a statement on air. However, not everyone felt that was enough. Today meteorologist Al Roker spoke about her comments, stating that “she owes a bigger apology to folks of color around the country.”
“This is a history going back to the 1830s — minstrel shows, to demean and denigrate a race wasn’t right,” he said on Today at the time. “I’m old enough to have lived through Amos ’n’ Andy, where you had white people in blackface playing two black characters and just magnifying the worst stereotypes about black people. And that’s what the big problem is.”
