MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross TORCHES Michele Tafoya’s ‘Hot Trash’ Take on Race: ‘Obviously, Becky, Skin Color Matters’

MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross was highly critical of Michele Tafoya over remarks the former sports broadcaster made about race on shows like The View, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Megyn Kelly’s YouTube show, which Cross called “hot trash.”

On Saturday morning’s edition of The Cross Connection, Ms. Cross devoted her weekly essay segment to Tafoya, who stirred controversy with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.

Cross lambasted Tafoya — now a political operative — over her views on race, and offered a vehement rebuttal that lampooned Tafoya’s whiteness:

MS. CROSS: This recently retired NFL sideline reporter is ready to play for her home team, speaking almost exclusively with white people about her newly unveiled views on race. She found her tribe with a terrible Tucker Carlson, a sympathetic ear in the echo chamber. And then she went to the blackface expert, Megyn Kelly, who surprisingly didn’t parrot the Fox line stick to sports. But the ‘Both Jesus and Santa are White’ Lady should have given Michelle some advice because this hot take Tafoya dropped on The View was quite the hot trash.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG:  You know, you live in the United States, you know that color of skin has been mattering to people for years…

MS. TAFOYA:  Can’t we change it that it doesn’t?

WHOOPI GOLDBERG:  We need white people to step up and do that.

MS. TAFOYA: But I think that we… they’ve been doing that since the Civil War

MS. CROSS: Girl, flag on the play. No wonder Sideline Susan is so adamantly against critical race theory. Who needs actual knowledge when you can whitewash history with your own ignorant, ill-informed, fabricated narrative?

Now, apparently, it’s CRT that is causing her kids to think that skin color matters, not the Jim Crow era or the ongoing civil rights battle or the fake war on drugs, or the omnipresence, in numerous patterns, of Black bodies being harmed or Black lives being taken.

Now, I’m no Jemele Hill, but if I were, I might be compelled to remind Tafoya that for someone who doesn’t want her kids taught that skin color matters, she is blissfully ignorant to the fact that it seems to matter very much in her own industry.

Take, for instance, the obvious gap in Black journalists taking up space on sports platforms. It’s quite few and far between. Sure, they’ll take a former athlete who played the game to sit across from them because that’s how they’d like to see us; as entertainers who run, dunk and tackle. But an actual intellectual trained in the craft of journalism to call games, offer insight, and level the field? Nah.

Now, while Tafoya enjoys opportunities denied to so many, sports broadcasting has consistently eliminated men and women, Black men and women, from top jobs in the industry. Folks like Michael Smith and Michael Holley, Howard Bryant, Chris Broussard, and L.Z. Granderson, who so brilliantly points out in his LA Times opinion piece that Tafoya actually lives in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis that was founded and populated by Black people in the 1890s until they were systematically driven out by racial covenants embedded in property deeds.

These covenants stated that property could be sold only to White people. Such a shame that CRT isn’t currently being taught in any school anywhere, because Tafoya may have learned about the history in her own backyard, but is determined to remain blissfully ignorant. Tafoya Trump goes on to say things like this:

MS. TAFOYA: If he really, really wanted the one thing he wanted, Megyn, in this life was to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. He’d be one right now and, you know, given that he had the talent, but he made some business decisions.

MS. CROSS: No, babe. The NFL made business decisions to deny a skilled athlete fairness in favor of buying the Blackness of a billionaire. Obviously, Becky, skin color matters, as society has shown us again and again and again.

Now, if Kaepernick made a business decision, Tafoya is most certainly making a political one. She’s saying these nonsensical things while co-chairing the gubernatorial campaign of a right-wing Kumbaya Kendall Qualls who rejects the idea that America is racist.

So sure, Michelle, trade in your sideline gig for a front line opportunity to join the ranks of the few Republican women that the wealthy white men let sit at their table. But some advice for the sideline swindler. Your enemies will come after you. The second you misbehave. Just ask Liz Cheney.

And I’m not saying I spoke to Jemele Hill about these trivial Tafoya takes. But if I had, Jemele might have said that hundreds of equally, if not more qualified journalists of color never got the opportunity to stand on the sidelines and interview mostly Black players in a sport that is nearly 60 percent African-American and play in a league with zero Black owners. But perhaps it was a business decision on the part to never ask about that.

Watch above via MSNBC.