Sorry, Megyn Kelly, free speech isn't quite that free

When will they ever learn? Megyn Kelly is by no means the first white person to get into trouble over blackface imitations of black people. But she's the first I can recall who may be punished not for doing it but just for talking about it.

NBC confirmed Friday morning that Kelly was negotiating her exit from the network. She went on hiatus from "Megyn Kelly Today" on Thursday after a Tuesday program in which she defended the practice of wearing burnt-cork or other dark makeup in Halloween costumes.

"Back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character," she said in that segment. She then defended Luann de Lesseps of "The Real Housewives of New York," who ignited a controversy by turning her skin darker for a tribute to Diana Ross.

"I thought, like, who doesn't love Diana Ross?" said Kelly. "She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day, and I don't know how that got racist on Halloween."

My free-speech side wants to see Kelly's point. In these hypersensitive times, I think we should avoid becoming too punitive about people who accidentally offend out of ignorance, not apparent malice. Ideally we should be able to use such social gaffes to learn what matters and what doesn't in our group interactions.

But I also believe that, whether we are the offender or the offended, we should be willing to learn from the experiences and attitudes of others and avoid committing such gaffes again. Kelly came to NBC from Fox News, where she already had a history of odd racial gaffes involving holidays, among other topics.

For example, in a December 2013 discussion on her old Fox News show about the appropriateness of nonwhites playing Santa Claus, she said, "by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white ... Santa is what he is."

Or isn't. Kelly later apologized for that and for stating just as questionably during the discussion that Jesus was white too.

Neither of those remarks was fatal to her career at a news channel that, by the way, has made "war on Christmas" and crusades about the incorrectness of "political correctness" part of its brand.

But NBC was a different story. Like another highly paid star, Roseanne Barr, who was fired by ABC over a racist tweet, Kelly found her colleagues at NBC, especially her prominent African-American colleagues, to be less tolerant of such gaffes. NBC staff members such as Al Roker and newsman Craig Melvin denounced Kelly's comments as indefensibly insensitive.

This is where I have a hard time. As an African-American parent, I feel as Roker does -- that blackface makeup intentionally or unintentionally revives the minstrel show, a relic of the segregated Jim Crow era in which white entertainers such as Al Jolson or black entertainers such as vaudeville star Bert Williams put on blackface to imitate black performers for white audiences.

Ignorance in this Megyn Kelly instance is not much of an excuse. A search through my own archives confirms that I, for one, have been commenting on blackface controversies since at least the late 1980s. That was when members of Zeta Beta Tau at the University of Wisconsin offended black students by holding a mock slave auction, in which some pledges wore blackface. The chapter was ordered to attend a race relations workshop and perform volunteer work in a black community.

In the years since I have seen blackface controversies break out over "cultural appropriation," among other labels, for students who dress up as stereotypical versions of ethnic or racial groups to which they do not belong. I am skeptical of some cultural appropriation complaints.

Where would popular music be, for example, without the borrowing, "sampling" and other innovations that blend this country's rich mulligan stew of cultural diversity into something greater?

What's important for the future is our ability to keep our melting pot from boiling over with confusion and resentments. As a first step, none of us should presume we know so much about our fellow Americans that we don't need to bother with asking them how they really feel.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)