I get it when people apologize for things they said when they were teenagers. I don't necessarily agree, because if you think back to when you were a teenager, there's probably no end to the regrettable positions you took. Taking regrettable positions is part of that idealistic and hormone-driven period of our lives, because we don't know shit, but because we're exposed to a larger world, we think we do. Like, there was a time in my life where I thought that I was helping by suggesting that gay people settle for civil unions instead of pushing for marriage. Not because I didn't want to see gay people get married, because I did, but because a:) I didn't understand the depth of the problem, and b:) I thought that civil unions and marriage were kinda the same thing. I was so wrong, and luckily, no one read that blog. Shit, I thought I was solving problems here. And I was in my mid-20s when I did that.
So teenagers getting wild online, while hurtful and wrong, shouldn't be held against a person when they're in their 30s, and that's what y'all are out here doing. I don't think people should be losing their jobs over shit like that, especially when their lives after that moment tend to be a direct repudiation of the things they said as teenagers. People grow up, they leave home, they have new life experiences, and they develop a different outlook. The problem is, this generation has a permanent record of all of the wrong stuff they said, and it's called "Twitter."
None of that applies to Ellie Kemper (so far, although I'm sure you've all dug into her social media history by now). She didn't say or do anything racist, she just hung out with them, mostly because she grew up around a lot of racists. So now we're attacking people for their childhood proximity to racists? I'm from Biloxi, MS. You know how many people I grew up around turned out to be racist?
I guess it's newsworthy, in a "wow, that's fucked up," kind of way, but to attack her over it or to turn against her or to suggest that she needed to apologize in the way that she did is kind of ridiculous. She acknowledged white privilege and said she was sorry, and no one's lives were changed by this. No one was hurt by her being honored in a Klan pageant, either.
Was anybody out there rocked to their core by this stunning revelation? Does anybody look at her differently or feel a sudden surge of energy to organize a boycott of "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?" No, because that would be silly. This is something she grew up involved with, and she should be allowed some measure of grace as a result. She even said that ignorance isn't an excuse, but it kind of is. That's the kind of thing that's said for speeding tickets or capital offenses. You can't be expected to know the history of every organization you're dealing with when you're 19. We hear every day when people tell stories that they didn't know they were poor growing up, and we're like, "Yeah, I get it," even though it's plainly obvious to an adult. I'm not comparing poverty to racism, but I am making the point that your awareness of the environment around you isn't complete and total when you're a teenager, especially when she was 19. She was 19 in the days before everybody had internet. There was no Wikipedia entry for her to stumble across in 1999.
Point is, you have blind spots to the things that you think are normal. We see this all the time, especially with white people (sorry, white people, but I have to address the fact that you are physically white right now). It isn't that white people aren't aware of the existence of racism, it's that the actual racism happening around them doesn't match with what they were taught racism was. Which is why, unless they see actual Klan robes, or hear the n-word, they don't think it's racist. It's the same thing here.
Some stuff is pretty clear when you're 19. "Hey, my dad's an alcoholic." "Hey, my mom is verbally abusive." But even things like that aren't so obvious when it's part of the culture of your environment and you think everybody does it. I know people who think verbal abuse is normal, because it was normal where they came from. So in a society where some politicians want slavery removed from textbooks, or think that Confederate generals should be honored; in a society that routinely attempts to make Jim Crow politics seem as benevolent as possible, you think some 19 year old kid from Missouri or wherever the fuck, is going to be compelled to investigate the history of some group that holds a debutante ball? Why would she have thought there was anything wrong with that group? It's a group of people she grew up around that were asking her to put on a dress and parade around a ballroom. They weren't asking her to visit a compound in the woods to make napalm for the movement. Nothing about that would elicit suspicion from a teenager, unless that teenager is Encyclopedia Brown.
Look, I don't know Ellie Kemper, I don't watch her show, I remember her from the latter days of "The Office," when it wasn't as good, but the show was part of my routine and I was powerless to break it. This is not me caping up for her. This is me saying that the idea that she needed to apologize is ridiculous. We have a real problem with not understanding that people aren't permanently who they were when they were kids. We all have questionable things in our history. The question is, are you acting on those questionable things as an adult. If you're are, then you should have plenty of ammo in your present that can be used against you, and if you're not, then good job learning and growing. But holding the acts of a child against an adult is petty and counterproductive, because if you have no space to learn and grow from the most tumultuous stage of development in your life, then why even bother with learning and growing?
