Joy Behar is facing renewed scrutiny over a video clip of her showing off a “beautiful African woman” costume she wore to a Halloween party in the 1970s.
Discussion about Behar’s costume choice comes as two top Democratic officials in Virginia this week contend with calls to resign amid separate blackface controversies.
Behar, a longtime co-panelist on ABC daytime talk show “The View,” talked about putting on “makeup that was a little bit darker” than her own skin for the party when she was 29 during a segment on the program in 2016.
“I was so cute,” said Behar, now 76, referring to a photo of her donning the costume that was aired during the episode.
Joy Behar admitted during a taping of The View in 2016 to dressing as a “beautiful African women” at a Halloween party when she was 29 which involved makeup “that was a little bit darker than my skin”
The show even ran an image of the old photo pic.twitter.com/qKQqzDPxyn
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 6, 2019
An ABC spokesperson did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
The video, shared Wednesday by the Wrap media editor Jon Levine on Twitter, was widely circulated on social media. The reaction, however, was mixed. Some users defended Behar’s costume choice, arguing that it wasn’t tantamount to blackface, while others claimed support of her was hypocritical given past responses in similar situations.
The publication of a photo last week from Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page has sparked a national debate over how to handle past insensitivities toward race. The image was of a man in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb. Northam says he wasn’t in the photo but did admit to wearing blackface at a 1984 talent show for a Michael Jackson costume.
Virginia state Attorney General Mark Herring this week also admitted to dressing as a black person at a party in 1980 when he was a student at the University of Virginia.
This latest national conversation comes after former NBC personality Megyn Kelly was pushed out of the network in 2018 after she defended blackface Halloween costumes.
