Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry told ABC’s The View of her show’s cancellation and her exit from the network, “do I think it has racial implications? One hundred percent.”
The end of Harris-Perry’s show came after an internal email the host sent to her show team became public, in which she wrote of MSNBC, “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.”
Asked about that on The View, Harris-Perry said “did I think it was racialized? Not in the sense of like they’re coming after Melissa for being black. Do I think it has racial implications? One hundred percent.”
In the interview–her first television appearance since leaving MSNBC–Harris-Parry compared the pre-emptions of her weekend show for political coverage to a confusing breakup:
The easiest way to describe this is if you think about a relationship. Have you ever been dating somebody and presumably you guys are still dating but not really, like he hasn’t called. Y’all haven’t been out in months. And all the places where you used to go together, actually he’s out there with somebody else and you’re like, I am pretty sure we are not dating anymore. So that’s kind of what happened with the show. Like the show had basically been cancelled. All of our branding was gone. The thing that said Melissa Harris-Perry was gone. Then I was gone as a host. During the hours of 10:00 to noon, I wasn’t there anymore. Even though I was in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, I wasn’t asked to be on air during that time. Other people were.