Slate's Aisha Harris, the writer behind the Santa article that elicited Megyn Kelly's white Santa comments, spoke out on Sunday about Kelly's infamous remarks and the Fox News host's defense of them.
Kelly was widely mocked after she insisted on her Wednesday show that "Santa just is white." Kelly had been responding to a piece by Harris, who argued that Santa should no longer be portrayed as a white man.
On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," Harris criticized Kelly's response to the backlash, where the Fox News host claimed that her white Santa comments were meant to be humorous and accused her critics of "race-baiting."
"I felt like they were kind of playing the victim there, and the fact that they tried to deflect it and say they were also making a joke out of it, it just didn't -- it didn't ring true to me," Harris told CNN's Brian Stelter. "She said it very emphatically on the program, on Wednesday, and to me, there was nothing joke-like about that."
Harris said that Kelly's reaction proved exactly why her article needed to be written. "There are a lot of people out there who automatically assume that Santa must be white and there's no way -- it's laughable that he could be anything else," she said.