Jillian Michaels addresses Abby Phillip show controversy, blames white hostility on ‘Black degeneracy’

While speaking at a conference in Florida, Michaels addressed her recent controversial comments on NewsNight with Abby Phillip, digging herself even further into hot water.

It might be time to put Amanda Seales and Jillian Michaels across the table from one another. After comments Michaels made last week on CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip about the breadth of slavery blew up across the Internet, she found herself in the middle of a culture war. Her comments were both condemned and praised, per usual, largely depending on what side of the ideological aisle you sit.

Michaels claims she was trying to expose how several exhibits in the Smithsonian up for review by the White House, are narratively and contextually inaccurate (which has not been proven), and in her view, intent on blaming white people.

Regardless of her intention, what most people heard was her claim that “only 2 percent of white people owned slaves” — a way of supposedly illustrating that all white people weren’t and aren’t bad—ya know, abolitionists and all.

Contextually, she also left out the part where half of the United States at the time of the Civil War seceded in hopes of preserving slavery. Regardless of the number of white people who physically owned Black people; a whole lot more white people definitely fought for the rights of owners…to own Black people. Duke Professor Sandy Darity has been quoted as saying that certain confederate states had populations where 20% of white people owned enslaved Black people, and in Mississippi and South Carolina, numbers hit up to 50 percent.

Well, in her first public comments, Michaels expounded on her comments on CNN and went a bit further in explaining, from her vantage point, both how we get to this cultural divide and how we might overcome it.

Michaels was a speaker at the 10X Ladies Conference in Aventura, Florida, on August 16, and sat down with the conference’s host for a conversation. A snippet of the conversation related to her comments on CNN were shared on Threads and, well, you know how that goes. Michaels managed to load up a new term in the white supremacy toolkit to go right along with the now infamous “super predator” remark made by Hillary Clinton back in 1996, referencing “gangs of kids” with allegedly no morals, empathy, etc. 

“Then Abby Phillips (sic) and Richie Torres, essentially, I guess made some sort of assumption that I was trying to defend slavery. I’m not quite sure where they got that impression. We constantly talk about white supremacy, but we look the other way with black degeneracy, it begets white hostility that then validates and begets white degeneracy. And it’s this impossible cycle,” said Michaels. 

Black degeneracy? Black degeneracy begets white hostility, which begets white degeneracy? Yikes on bikes. 

To double down further on her commentary and frustration at the “white people bad” narrative she quoted on CNN, Michaels elaborated for the audience who were perhaps more receptive to her complete, uninterrupted thoughts.

“It’s because not all white people are the enemy; that throughout history, there are two sides, there were horrors and atrocities and bad guys and disgusting things that happened at the hands of whites against Blacks during slavery, but there were also the white people—the abolitionists—that abolished it in their states, and that died to end it,” she continued. “And you know what else, guys? We stood shoulder to shoulder in the ’60s. We stood shoulder to shoulder with the George Floyd situation. Like, we have done this throughout history, we have bent the trajectory of history in the right direction.” 

Before she finished her mini-rant, she made sure to say that perhaps the white community needs to listen to Black people to understand why Black people are in pain (not sure if that’s what she meant by degeneracy?), but not before saying that Black people have to do the emotional labor available in books, films, art, online, lectures, etc.

“And white people, honestly, we really don’t understand. We don’t. And then Black people are like, ‘I don’t have to explain this to you.’ And it’s like, maybe you do. Maybe you do. And white people, even though you may not have been responsible for it and you don’t want to get another lecture, I think you need to sit there and listen long enough to understand why the pain is still there. You know?”