Ellie Kemper

Wednesday

June 2, 2021

Ellie Kemper and Twitter’s Two Minutes Hate

If you've spent any time in the land of online controversies this week, you may have heard that Ellie Kemper, the effervescent star of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is in some scandalous trouble. ‘Oh great, Ellie Kemper is yet another rich white celebrity with a racist past,’ reads a headline at the AV Club, while Page Six crows, ‘Ellie Kemper once crowned queen at ball allegedly linked to white supremacy.’ The outrage stemmed from photos of the 41-year-old actress as a teenage debutante in 1999, when she participated in a debutante ball in her hometown of St Louis, Missouri — an event rendered automatically suspect to a certain subset of internet users given its location in a city below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Cockburn

Why is Ellie Kemper being targeted?

Comedienne Ellie Kemper is in trouble! What for? Well, it’s a bit hard to understand. Let Cockburn go and take a couple of hours to figure it out. … … ... OK, Cockburn is back — and more confused than ever. Apparently, Kemper, 41, is in trouble because she won a local St Louis beauty pageant 22 years ago, when she was 19. Why is that bad? The pageant was the Veiled Prophet Ball, put on by the Veiled Prophet Organization of St Louis. OK — and why is that bad? Well, the Veiled Prophet Organization was founded by white people, and didn’t admit black members until the 1970s. Also, sometimes its members dress in goofy outfits befitting organizations founded in the 1800s. And that’s it!