There was no shortage of insensitivity on Tucker Carlson‘s Fox News show last week where he laughed it up with a guest who argued it was time Black Americans just “move on” from slavery.
Tucker Carlson (left) let out a chuckle when guest Mark Steyn argued Canadians were owed reparations too. (Twitter video screenshot / @atrupar)
During a Thursday appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” talk-radio host Mark Steyn railed against 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris and others who’ve voiced support for reparations to those affected by the ongoing legacy of slavery. Steyn ranted over the issue and suggested Black folks should just get over it.
“Slavery was abolished a century and a half ago,” he told Carlson. “Nobody alive today has a grandparent who was a slave. And in that sense I think you reach a point where you need to move on.”
Steyn continued: “The reparations thing, eventually as the centuries go by, becomes ridiculous.”
The political commentator didn’t stop there, and proceeded to liken the experience of African-Americans to Canadians like himself, whom he argued were owed reparations because “if [America] had not had the revolution, the whole continent would now be Canada”.
“And if you were going to try and steal our land from us … you could at least have divided the continent east-west so that us Canadians weren’t holed up in the cold bit,” Steyn quipped, drawing a hearty chuckle from Carlson.
Steyn then turned his attention back to Harris, who he claimed didn’t share the same lived experience as the descendants of African-American slaves and accused of playing “identity politics.”
Her “own experience is entirely apart from the African-American slave experience,” he argued, pointing out that Harris was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. “I don’t know whether it’s this whole identity politics obsession that means she has to feel she has to genuflect to this.”
Carlson agreed, calling Harris’ views “divisive.”
The on-air discussion drew plenty of reactions from social media critics, who expressed outrage over Steyn and Carlson’s commentary.
“Couldn’t Tucker just wear his hood on air? We wouldn’t have to see his ‘I’m listening face’ and it would keep hair and makeup from having to touch him,” one Twitter user wrote.
“These two smug geniuses,” another opined. “Yes slavery was long ago, but read a history book fellas: Jim Crow, voting rights, lynching, Emmett Till [are] all within recent memory. The arc of the moral universe is bending away from these two.”
Once user called the discussion “clear white privilege” because “if a black person ever told Jewish people to get over the Holocaust, do y’all think that black person would still have a job today?”
Watch more in the videos below.
Tucker Carlson agrees with his guest after he goes on a rant about how African Americans just need to get over slavery pic.twitter.com/8riQIlUr2I
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019
