Fox News host Tucker Carlson used a segment of his Wednesday night show to rattle off examples of what he thought racism looked like, taking aim at the likes of Buzzfeed News, affirmative action policies and calls for reparations.
“So the consensus is that racism is on the right, only conservatives can be racist,” Tucker began on the Jan. 16 airing of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “So that raises a few questions. What exactly is racism? What does it look like? How do you know if you are racist?”
Host Tucker Carlson slammed affirmative action policies and decries efforts for slavery reparations as “racist.” (Fox News screenshot )
As the conservative news host ranted, several headlines appeared on the screen, including a New York Times report detailing allegations laid out in a lawsuit accusing the prestigious Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants. Tucker used the bit to take a swipe at what he called “racist” policies.
“A racist would support treating people differently based purely on their skin color, he said. “They’d hand out jobs, contracts and college admissions letters based on your DNA, rather than anything that you had done.”
What else does racism look like? Tucker argued that “ridiculing people on the basis of their skin color” is also racist. He wasn’t referring to Black folks, however. The host later flashed a Buzzfeed headline that read “#37 Things White People Need to Stop Ruining in 2018.”
Next came a Seattle Times article arguing that “America Must Atone with Reparations for Our Legacy of Slavery.” Tucker disagreed, however, and argued against the idea of “people of one race paying the price today for actions, decades or centuries ago, by people they may not have any relationship to at all other than a similar appearance.”
“Well, that would be the definition of racism, right?” he added.
Carlson is currently facing his own accusations of racism following a December segment where he remarked that immigration is making America “dirtier.” The comment cost his show several key sponsors, including insurance company Pacific Life, who withdrew their advertisements from Carlson’s show.
Car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover and pancake house IHOP were also among the 20 advertisers who cut ties, according to Newsweek.
“We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided,” he said at the time. “Immigration is a form of atonement.
Watch more in the clip below.
