Melissa forgot to wear her Aunt Jemima head scarf to make her point.
Via News Busters
As left-wing as weekday MSNBC hosts can be, weekend MSNBC anchors wander off into the land of bizarre, humorless scolds. Anchor Melissa Harris-Perry on Saturday chided two celebrity liberals for possible bigotry and for not being liberal enough. After relating a comedy bit Neil Patrick Harris performed at last Sunday’s Academy Awards, Harris-Perry lectured, “Not everyone appreciated the way that he did it.”
In the sketch, Harris jokingly asked African American actress Octavia Spencer to guard his Oscar picks. Somehow constructing potential racism, Perry connected, “Of course, he explained that the task required her diligence and undivided attention.” The cable host quoted the liberal professor/blogger Roxane Gay for the inevitable conclusion. Gay tweeted, “Typical. Octavia Spencer plays a maid, wins an Oscar and then is expected to work at the ceremony.”
Another offense came from liberal actress Patricia Arquette, who used her Oscar acceptance speech to argue for equal pay for women. This was “heartfelt,” according to the MSNBC host. But Arquette’s crime came in a later comment when she said that it’s time for “all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve fought for to fight for us now.”
Harris-Perry fumed:
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: [Arquette’s] post-show elaboration revealed showed a fundamental misunderstanding of a key feminist concept that marginal identities like gender, race, sexual orientation and class are not separate. They are fundamentally intersecting.
Of course, this is the same person who famously wore tampon earrings in 2013 to make a point about abortion rights.