The controversy over wearing blackface that has prompted calls for Virginia’s governor to resign is now roiling ABC’s daytime show “The View.”
Critics are calling for co-host Joy Behar to be fired because of a 2016 clip from the show circulating on social media.
She recounted dressing up as a “beautiful African woman” for Halloween and wearing makeup that was “a little bit darker than my skin,” the news site Atlanta Black Star reported.
Behar showed a photo of herself at a Halloween party at age 29 while the panel discussed a New York Times op-ed on the resurgence of naturally curly hair.
“I was so cute,” she said, adding that the curly tresses were hers.
Co-host Raven-Symoné jokingly asked: “Joy, are you Black? Joy … are you my auntie?!”
Atlanta Black Star noted it “wasn’t a big deal then, but it certainly is now as the video comes amid bitter scrutiny against Virginia Democrats.”
Gov. Ralph Northam apologized after a photo featuring a man in blackface and another dressed in KKK robes from his medical school yearbook page emerged last week.
Northam later insisted he wasn’t in the photo. But he confessed that on a separate occasion, he dressed as singer Michael Jackson.
The man who would succeed him if he resigns, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, is embroiled in a sex scandal. And the No. 3 in line for the governorship, Attorney General Mark Herring, also has admitted he dressed in blackface at a college party.
