Jemele Hill Drags Megyn Kelly for Demanding Apology Over NASCAR Noose Incident

Tommy ChristopherJun 24th, 2020, 3:46 pm
 

Jemele Hill clapped back hard at Megyn Kelly for demanding an apology over the NASCAR noose incident involving Bubba Wallace, as did a slew of verified Twitter users.

Like many Hoth-white conservative media personalities, Kelly jumped on the FBI’s finding of no criminality in the incident, and went a step further by demanding an apology for comments Hill made during an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

“As someone who has attended several NASCAR races, it’s hard for people of color to feel comfortable in these environments when you see the Confederate flag everywhere, when you just get this sense that you’re at something that you’re not welcome at,” Hill, a writer for The Atlantic, said Monday. “As much as NASCAR may try to distance itself from that, it is a living, breathing part of their sport.”

Hill called the incident a “stunning, shocking, appalling, disgusting reminder of who, again, this sport is for.”

After the FBI report concluded that the noose, which was actually hung in a NASCAR stall, had been there since last September, Kelly seized on the news to attack Hill, writing “Now that we know the #BubbaWallace ‘noose’ was not a racist attack at all, will ⁦@jemelehill⁩ apologize to the NASCAR fans she unfairly besmirched?”

Hill was among many who responded to Kelly, writing “I’m old enough to remember NASCAR banning the Confederate flag from races a couple weeks ago.”

Ms. Hill also wrote “Let me go pray to white Jesus for Megyn Kelly.”

In fact, one of Bubba’s less-successful fellow drivers announced he was quitting after NASCAR announced it was banning the Confederate flag from its events. And as Mr. Wallace pointed out in a CNN interview, the noose was really a noose, and is in fact a racist symbol.

Other users pointed out these facts, along with Kelly’s status as an imperfect messenger, to put it politely.

Kelly had her share of defenders, part of a wider subset of verified blue-check white people intent on mischaracterizing about this incident and smearing Bubba Wallace by calling it a “hoax,” and Wallace a hoaxter.

But as Ms. Hill pointed out on her Twitter feed, the facts are not with those smearing Wallace. Of the driver’s role in the incident, Hill wrote “I swear I’m not going to spend this day explaining to people that a NASCAR official was the one who found the noose, reported it and then NASCAR released a public statement. It wasn’t the media or Bubba Wallace.”

And she repeated one essential fact to an OAN personality who really needed to hear it, writing “It. Was. A. Noose.”

This is where the “opinion” part of this comes in — because people get all sensitive when you say someone is being racist — but everyone calling this a “hoax” and/or doing some other kind of victory dance over the FBI report is being racist AF, as the kids say.

Jemele Hill and Bubba Wallace are 100 percent correct, and “The noose was already there!” is not the dunk these eggshell-souled individuals think it is.

And if you’re one of those people who are trying to Miracle Max this and say “Well, it was only mostly a noose” or credulously wondering to yourself what other mechanism for controlling a garage door that doesn’t symbolize lynching could possibly exist, then you’re enabling racism at best.

Here’s hoping the ugliness from the Megyn Kellys of the world doesn’t erase the beautiful baby-step that was the NASCAR drivers’ show of solidarity for Bubba Wallace, and that they don’t take his smile away either.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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