Megyn Kelly has refused to apologize for statements she made on her Fox News show last Wednesday declaring that Jesus and Santa were white, saying she was just trying to bring some Christmas cheer to the show.
Instead she accused critics of race baiting, "This would be funny if it were not so telling about our society, in particular, the knee-jerk instinct by so many to race-bait and to assume the worst in people, especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News Channel," she said.
Kelly's original comments were in response to a “Slate” piece by Aisha Harris that Santa shouldn't only be portrayed as white.
“In kicking off the lighthearted segment, I offered a tongue-in-cheek message for any kids watching, saying that Santa, who I joked is a real person ... is white,” she told her viewers Friday night. “That’s part of why we covered the story in the first place – humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that’s lost on the humorless.”
“By the way, I also said Jesus is white,” said Kelly, according to the NY Daily News. “As I’ve learned in the past two days, that is far from settled.”
Race, she continued is “still an incredibly volatile issue in this country.”
“Fox News and yours truly are big targets for many people,” she concluded.
The debate about whether Jesus was white has a long history.
Anti-immigrant writers like Madison Grant was concerned that the influx of Italian and Jewish immigrants would overrun America and were “polluting” the nation.
Making Jesus white was needed to distance him from Judaism. says scholar Edward Blum, the co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.
Grant referred to the “blond savior” and claimed that Jesus had “Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.” in his anti-immigrant best-seller "The Passing of the Great Race."
But famed evangelist Billy Graham preached in the 1950s, that, “Jesus was not a white man.”
In the modern day, controversial preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright’ who almost cost Obama the White House said “Jesus was a poor black boy.”
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