Melissa Harris-Perry: My Departure from MSNBC Has ‘Racial Implications’

Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry stated that while she doesn’t think MSNBC came after her for her race, her departure from the network “has racial implications” on Monday’s broadcast of “The View.”

Harris-Perry said of the email she wrote where she wrote that she wasn’t “a token mammy or little brown bobble head.” “I didn’t have any intention, or have any expectation that that would ever be public. And so part of it is me writing shorthand to my team. I’m an African-American politics scholar. So, when I say mammy, I mean something very particular, and it’s basically, the history of mammy is that mammy is the black woman who cares more about the master’s family than about her own. And so, what I’m saying is I don’t care more about MSNBC’s reputation than I do about the Nerdland family, about the thing that we built, about our viewing audience, and about our team. And so I didn’t want to be used as kind of cover. Did I think it was racialized? Not in the sense of like, they’re coming after Melissa for being black. Do I think it has racial implications? 100%. And here’s how I know it. Our show had the most diverse guests on cable news, period. It just is an empirical reality. Taking this show off the air, even if you put me individually back on as a host, meant that the folks who sat at our table, whether they were transgender women of color, whether they were Latino Republicans, they just weren’t going to be there anymore, because we were the folks who put them on air each and every week.”

(h/t Mediaite)

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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