I ran into an article by The Wall Street Journal over NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly was the anchor for her own show on Fox News before leaving the network over sexual harassment allegations toward the top brass and various anchors on the station. She was lured to NBC with a big contract and her own show. On Tuesday during her show she made the statement that a costume involving “black-face” was not inherently wrong. One her statements was, “Back when I was a kid that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character”. She received immediate back lash from viewers and fellow coworkers.
The article I read never stated why this was such a controversial subject. The author of the article was assuming that the audience would readily understand the issue at hand. To me this appears to be an enthymeme and even more convincingly an ideograph. The term “black-face” is never stated in the article to have negative denotation or connotation. It is never explained. The author purely assumes that those reading it already have an idea and can relate it some experience in their life. “Black-face” refers to late 19th and early 20th century white actors who in movies and plays would paint their faces black and pretend to play the part of a black person. The historically negative connotation of this comes from the point of the plays. When people would dawn the black paint and portray these characters, it was always in order to make fun of blacks by portraying them in extremely racist and stereotypical fashions. The most famous character in one of these traveling plays was Jim Crow, who the laws of segregation throughout the South were named after.
If someone from anywhere other than the United States were to read about Megyn Kelly making a comment about “black-face” not being inherently bad when she was younger would not have the cultural and historical knowledge/experience to feel the way the author of the article intended. Her exact statement was, “But what is racist?” Kelly asked on her show. “Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween”. A person would have had to live in or learn about the cultural context the article was written in in order to understand the backlash that ensued. When the author or speaker of a piece of media explicitly leaves out information or descriptors or specifics and leaves it up to the audience to fill in, it is an enthymeme. The other theory in effect in the article is encoding and decoding. Someone who had never heard of “black-face” would decode it in a way that was unintended by the encoder. The message would be miscommunicated.
This example is of course a much exaggerated one as it was a word/trigger-word that is used that stirs up controversy. It is ideographic in the definition that it stands for a whole era and system of belief. When a person speaks of Jim Crow and black-face, it erects thoughts of Southern segregation, racism, and slavery. The one word carries with it the entire idea of the Civil Rights Movement and inequality.
