This Romney Joke Didn't Go Over Too Well

Fresh off of the Martin Bashir debacle, another MSNBC host is in hot water after saying something offensive about a Republican politician. On Monday, Melissa Harris-Perry presented guests on her show with a picture of Mitt Romney and his grandchildren. While most of the family is white, Romney has one adopted black grandson, Keiran, and because that’s just inherently hilarious, Harris-Perry asked her guests to construct an amusing caption for the picture.

“One of these things is not the same,” one of the guests sang. Another commented that the picture “really sums up the diversity of the Republican Party,” while Harris-Perry herself remarked that she hopes Keiran gets married to North West, so that Kanye and Mitt would end up being in-laws.

While none of the jokes themselves were particularly horrendous, the whole thing was based around the premise that a multiracial family is somehow aberrant, bizarre, or worthy of mockery. But MSNBC is generally pretty progressive on things like this, so we’re betting Harris-Perry, herself a black woman in a large white Mormon family, felt okay making the joke because the subject was Romney, a Republican. (They could have made the same joke about Bill de Blasio’s family, but they didn’t.)

Conservatives, many of whom were staunchly defending Phil Robertson’s flagrant racism days earlier, suddenly became champions of political correctness and attacked Harris-Parry for being insensitive. She quickly issued an apology via Twitter, and unlike other faux-pologists — we’re looking at you, Ani DiFranco — she offered it without qualification or defense.